The Delta is actually a little too associated with blues music. One of my pet blues hates (of which I have plenty) is the label ‘Delta’ that gets stuck on to any old blues release.
It’s a mark of authenticity that doesn’t really have much to do with any historical Mississippi Delta style.It just gets used to mean blues that’s authentic, rather than blues that’s made by Stevie Ray Vaughan. If you look in the blues section of any record store you’ll see plenty of supposedly Delta compilations, filled with artists like Muddy Waters (who at least was born in Mississippi) and Lightnin’ Hopkins (who had no relation to that state at all). Sorry. I’m sounding like Steve Buscemi in Ghost World now.There’s a reason though. When the blues revival hit, it hit way back in nineteen sixties Britain. At the time, part of the attraction of blues music was how obscure it was. Blues records had to be imported from the US by collectors who had no real context for the music. As a result, the stuff that got over was pretty random. Of all the bluesmen whose records did make it across the Atlantic, Robert Johnson was the oldest available. If you ever listen to people from the time talk about blues, he’s the name that'll keeps on popping up, especially on the lips of English blues revivalists like Clapton. It's maths really: Robert Johnson came from the Mississippi Delta. He played the oldest type of blues on record. The oldest blues must be the most authentic blues. Ergo Delta blues must be the most authentic blues. Add to the equation the fact that Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II and their Chicago blues pals were all born in Mississippi. So, in the revivalists' minds, the Mississippi Delta equals the blues. Bam! Compilations of ‘Delta Blues’ flood the shelves of 1960s England. The British Invasion then spreads this interpretation of the blues across America with the end result that, since the 70s, the blues really has become semi-synonymous with the Delta .
It’s interesting that this Delta monomania was until this point only a British thing. If you look at American musicians who were into the blues before bands like the Stones or Led Zeppelin came preaching its gospel, you’ll find a far wider understanding of what blues music means. Musicians like Bob Dylan or John Fahey had a better rounded understanding of the blues than English artists like Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page. It’s just that the ones making all the fuss were the Brits. End result is that Robert Johnson’s a household name, while Blind Willie McTell, Frank Hutchison or Frank Stokes are all unknowns.
What’s funny is that even the revivalists’ idea of what constitutes Delta blues was skewed. It’s really based on Muddy Waters and the Chicago bluesmen, who played simple electric blues indebted to the urban bluesmen of the 30s, like Roosevelt Sykes, Kokomo Arnold and Lonnie Johnson. There’s not much that’s Delta in style about the Chicago musicians: they lived in the northern states and played blues from the northern states. Even though many of them were born in Mississippi, they weren’t interested in sounding like a buncha hicks from the provinces. They wanted to look cool. This had actually been the case since way back even before Robert Johnson’s time. Generally, if blues music sounds like ‘blues’ should sound, with 12 bars and an AAB verse structure, chances are whatever you’re listening to is derived from urban forms of blues music. Delta blues doesn’t really sound like this sort of thing music at all.
The authentic Mississippi blues sound is pretty special. If you’re looking for that Blind Lemon Jefferson kick that I described to you before, Mississippi's the place. Blues from Mississippi is also the direct ancestor of the urban blues that I mentioned before, largely through the influence of Tommy Johnson.
But it’s still in a place apart from anything as sophisticated as Depression-era urban blues. In fact, I’m going to stick my head out and say that it was the least sophisticated style of them all. That’s a good thing for audiences in the twenties, when the most popular national pastime was smoking imported cigars in bathtubs filled with money and people felt secure enough to embrace their inbred side, but it would spell death to the style when the Depression rolled along, and people were desperate for a bit of glamour and sophistication in their lives. Unlike Piedmont blues, which soldiered desperately on, Mississippi blues was commercially dead from 1930, although it continued to act as an incubator for future musicians who’d play in other styles.I’ve been talking about Mississippi blues here. In actual fact, there’s no single Mississippi style. Mississippi, the state, has such a rich blues heritage that it actually gave birth to no less than three regional sub-styles. Just like that. Delta blues is most recognisable to us now, but at the time, music from the hills country in the south of the state was as big a presence. We’ll call this Mississippi Hill Country blues, because the style deserves a name and I like that one. The third style is the Bentonia school blues, which is less a regional style than a type of blues made by a few individuals in the town of Bentonia, Yazoo county.
We’ll kick off with a run-through of Delta blues, because you’ve heard of that one.
Delta blues is weird and alien - it’s got almost no influences from pop music. It really is a type of folk, and you can tell. Folk blues. Remember that 12 bar blues has very little to do with blues from this period, dismiss it from your mind. Unlike its blues cousins from Atlanta or Memphis, Delta blues also has no truck with pop influences like jazz & ragtime. By the way, when I say folk blues, I don’t mean like Nick Drake-style acoustic pop music with a blues-ey edge, I mean the sort of folk where there’s not so much as a time signature to be seen, and the music barely approaches tonality. Old music, from a time before music was proper. The way the performers go about their work is pretty similar to the folk ballad tradition. If you listen to white ballad singers like Dillard Chandler or the Paddy Tunney (an Irishman) you’d get a similar musical approach: the song has a set tune and set speed, but if the singer gets excited or the crowd looks bored, the musicians will just go faster, or change the tune, or shout, or whatever.
Delta blues music also commonly uses a slide. People talk all kinds of nonsense about how using a slide is a residue of slave music, but it’s really a borrowing from Hawaiian music, which was very popular around the turn of the century and which had an even more powerful influence on early country music.
There are two main benefits of using a slide. The first is musical: a slide can give a strong rhythmic kick when needed. The second is that it sounded really exotic to the ears of people at the time – if you want proof that exoticism was one of the main pulls, there are plenty of black and white photos from the time of totally non-Hawaiian Hawaiian bands dressed in grass skirts staring witlessly at the camera. There’s occasionally an influence from work songs and chain-gang songs that pops up too, especially in Charlie Patton’s music. Basically, be prepared for rawness. One thing that the Delta didn’t really give to blues is flashy technique, with the obvious exception of Robert Johnson, who’s all technique. Georgian blues is a feast for guitar nerds. Mississippi blues just isn’t.Why is Delta blues like this? Basically, Delta blues is music made by hicks in a state that’s a proverbial backwater even among other laughably backwards states. It’s more rural than rural. Other regional centres of rural blues were actually provincial cities, like Atlanta or Memphis. The Delta is different. When Tommy Johnson sings “Who’s that yonder, coming down the road?” in ‘Maggie Campbell Blues’, he’s talking about something that’s an event. His listeners live in homes so isolated and miserable that you can see a visitor for twenty minutes before they arrive, and when they do, it’s exciting. That’s why the blues from the Delta has such pronounced folk culture elements, it’s because, in its own flat, miserable and impoverished way, the Mississippi Delta is every bit as inaccessible and cut off from the world of culture as folk centres like the Appalachians or the Scottish Highlands. We tend to think of this backwardsness as being what the blues is about, but it isn’t - it’s specific to the Delta. In fact, almost all of what passes for the mythology of the blues is Delta-specific: cotton plantations, levees breaking, juke joints, poverty, chain gangs, devils at crossroads. None of this is anything to do with the blues, only the blues as it was formed in the Delta.
Enough generalisations already. If you want a crash course in the Delta blues, there’s three individuals who;ll need introducing. They’re the pure unpolluted source of Delta style: Charley Patton, Son House and Tommy Johnson. But what’s good about the Delta is that it produced literally hundreds of strong bluesmen. We’ll go through a couple of them too, especially the ones who might pop up on your radar somehow. But first, the big three.
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