Delta Blues

Solo voice and slide guitar from the Mississippi Delta, with uneven phrases and recordings that hiss like sandpaper

Related

ModernAcoustic GuitarVoiceScale

Delta blues is the solo blues of the Mississippi Delta in the 1920s and 1930s. One person and one guitar, phrases that stretch or shrink at will, and recordings where the room and the shellac are audible.

Origins and era

The region includes Clarksdale, Indianola and Greenville, with dense cotton plantations; Dockery Farms is often named as a centre. Charley Patton recorded his first sides for Paramount in 1929, Skip James left Hard Time Killing Floor Blues in 1931, and Robert Johnson recorded his whole output in San Antonio in 1936 and Dallas in 1937. The Great Migration carried many players to Memphis and Chicago, and the style changed with them.

What you hear

Guitars often use open tunings, with a slide dragging out notes between fixed pitches, and phrases end in a long holler or a short answer. Singing and guitar alternate rather than always sound together, which makes the rhythm feel free. The twelve bars may be stretched or squeezed, sometimes by a beat or two. The recordings are 78s with narrow bandwidth, voice and guitar packed together, so noise becomes part of the timbre.

Key figures

Charley Patton's voice is rough and his phrases shout; Son House brought preaching force to the blues; Robert Johnson split guitar accompaniment and singing into independent lines; Tommy Johnson's high falsetto and Skip James's moaning falsetto mark separate paths. Bukka White and, later, Fred McDowell carried the tradition into the electric era.

Lineage

Field hollers, work songs, spirituals and British ballads feed in, and Chicago electric blues, country blues and the 1960s blues revival come out. It is often called the source of the blues, yet urban and vaudeville blues already existed before it was recorded.

Common misunderstandings

The Delta is not the single origin of the blues, since staged blues was published and recorded before 1920.Nor is it all slide guitar, as Patton and House often fingerpicked. Robert Johnson's crossroads story is later folklore, not music history.

Sources

• Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues（Chilton Books, 1969），用于核对三角洲场景与唱片
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Blues，用于交叉核对地域风格

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.