The Coming of the Blues: Delta Origins

Like ragtime, it is impossible to say exactly when or even where the blues developed. Unlike ragtime, though, almost every expert would agree that the region of the Mississippi Delta was the birthplace of the blues. Bringing together African roots, religious spirituals, slave field hollers and work songs, and even Anglo-Scottish ballads, sometime around 1890 the blues evolved into its famous form.

There is some disagreement about whether the blues developed simultaneously in several regions of the south, but there is no escaping the fact that it was the Delta that gave birth to the greatest blues players of all time, including Charley Patton, Son House, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, and the inimitable Robert Johnson.

Besides the list of Delta blues luminaries, there are a number of other reasons to believe that the blues first developed in the Mississippi Delta. In the nineteenth century, Mississippi had a large and isolated black population, many living in areas of extreme poverty. This meant that more often than not these isolated black populations had to create their own forms of entertainment, which they drew on from the tradition of music passed down from one generation to the next. As the blues historian Samuel Charters notes, in the Delta "the concentration of African-American communities was so dense that the musical life preserved elements of African melody and instrumental style that had all but died out elsewhere in the South. It was in Mississippi that fife and drum bands were found, with African pieces as part of their repertoire."

While Mississippi is the cradle of the blues, there is ample evidence that it had spread throughout the South by the turn of the century. The folklorist John Work reported that the famed singer Ma Rainey first heard the blues in rural Missouri in 1902, while the famous jazz/blues musician Jelly Roll Morton stated he heard a blues derivative while growing up in New Orleans around 1900. Even W.C. Handy, the self-proclaimed "Father of the Blues," noted that similar songs to the one he heard in Mississippi were sung in his hometown of Florence, Alabama. Similar reports trace early blues to Georgia and other Southern states.

previous | next

| Home | History | Culture | Archives | Guides | Search |


National Center for Supercomputing Applications