The blues have been around now for nearly a century and they are still alive and kicking. It is the music of my people, the black residents of America, but it speaks to the world. The blues came out of the plantations of the Deep South, the travelling shows, the bars and speakeasies. And as black people moved to the big cites of the north and west, the blues followed them and changed to reflect life on the streets as they had reflected life in the country.

B.B.King

In Australia the word ‘blue’ can mean a feeling, an argument, someone with red hair or even a colour. 

This form of music was essentially the unwritten folk music of the people who were forcibly

The Africans took an instrument called a banjo to America. However the guitar became the major instrument used for expressing the blues, as the tonal qualities were found to be more in keeping with the mood. It is said that the banjo became associated with the minstrel show stereotype of a black person and that, with the advent of cheap, mail order guitars, many blacks switched to the guitar to avoid being associated with the image. 
 

It is no surprise that musicologists claim to have discovered links between some African music and the blues. The links were established by observing the use of similar scales, melodic phrasing and the famous ‘blue’ notes (flattened notes usually the third and seventh notes of the scale). Today these similarities are best highlighted in the music of John Lee Hooker, and contemporary Mali musician Ali Farka Toure who is strongly influenced by Hooker. But when you look closer you will find the same devices in most forms of folk music, yet  generally it is found that there is  no connection with either Africa or America. Maybe the circle from Africa to America and back again has been completed, or has it? 

As rock and roll came to prominence in the fifties, so the blues declined. Many performers moved towards soul, a hybrid of rock and gospel, and towards band oriented orchestrations. Freddy King became one of the most important electric guitarists, influencing rock while staying largely within the blues himself. Chuck Berry, a wonderful songwriter and still popular today, recorded a narrative of teenage culture that resulted in a string of hits, yet many of the reverse sides on the recordings were blues. 

Blues music was brought to the attention of a much wider audience in the sixties by such bands as the Rolling Stones, Canned Heat, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, The Band and many others.  These bands also brought back from obscurity many forgotten figures from the past, such as Sun House and Skip James.

Some performers did little more than mimic the sound of the originals. Others musicians like Eric Clapton used the blues as a base on which to build their own ideas. There were many performers in the USA, for which the blues was the base for their repertoire. 

The dreariness of the pop scene in the eighties led to renewed interest in the blues, largely fuelled by mainstream interest in Robert Cray.  Since then a new breed of blues musicians has arisen adding elements of rock, gospel and soul, incidentally all derived from the blues. In recent years there has been enormous growth in white blues, with a resurgence of bands such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Fabulous Thunderbirds and George Thorogood and the Destroyers.

The blues today is more popular than ever, and has spread to most countries throughout the world. Despite the growing number of new artists, the biggest sellers still remain the Chess  stars, such as Muddy Waters, Hound Dog Taylor and the great J.B. Hutto.
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