The blues is quintessential, twentieth-century American culture. Evolving from African chants and rhythms and the field shouts and gospel choruses of the nineteenth-century plantations of the South, with hints of ragtime, minstrelsy vaudeville and other commercial sounds, the blues came to be performed usually by a sole singer with a guitar, picking out a riff in a twelve-bar, three-chord pattern, singing in a raw, throaty style of personal suffering and general hard times of the sorrows of love, work and life.

Female vocalists such as Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith were popular on the “race records” of the 1920s, as were the solo bluesmen, many of them from the Mississippi Delta, such as Son House, Charley Patton and Robert Johnson.

Blues musicians began moving to cities along with the great migration of African Americans as the country began to prepare for the Second World War. With the war build-up came factory jobs and cash for leisure-time activities. In cities like St. Louis, Los Angeles, Detroit and, especially Chicago, electric blues emerged as bluesmen plugged in their guitars and performed with small combos, often including a rhythm section, piano and harmonica. Guitarists like jazzman Charlie Christian, Texas transplant, Los Angeleno T-Bone Walker and the first Sonny Boy Williamson pioneered the electric sound, combining the picking and riffing of acoustic blues with elements of jazz and R&B.

The guitarist Muddy Waters migrated to Chicago in 1943 and began playing an electrified version of the blues learned in the Mississippi Delta. By the 1950s he was playing regularly in clubs throughout the city and recording for Chess Records, a pioneering blues, R&B and rock ’n’ roll label. Chess also recorded Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Jimmy Rogers, Chuck Berry and a host of other major blues talents, including Willie Dixon who often arranged and wrote for the label’s acts.

Like all major postwar popular music forms, the blues mixed and matched from a wide range of styles, producing variations (often regional) such as the Louisiana swamp blues of Guitar Slim, the boogie blues of John Lee Hooker and the jump blues of Big Joe Turner. The mixing of the blues with other forms created the foundation for rock ’n’roll as performers like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley added R&B, country and pop elements.

While the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll in the mid1950s cut into the popularity of the blues, it is universally acknowledged that electric blues forms the foundation of rock music.

While blues performances continued in clubs, the genre did not regain popularity until the British invasion of the mid-1960s. Rock bands from England like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds paid tribute to the blues, recording classic songs and touring with legends like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Guitar-based rock, from Eric Clapton to Stevie Ray Vaughan, continues to rely heavily on the blues foundation for both its backbeat and lead guitar.