Blues Music and Personalities

I listen to blues music the most often in the car. I’ve always found it to be relieving and exciting in the repetitiveness and linearity of the road. 

Some might think the blues is really easy to both define and learn as a musician. The blues, at its core, is about the struggle of African Americans in the United States, translated into music. When thinking about it musically, nearly all blues songs follow a standard “12 bar blues” progression, or in rather complex musical jargon, I-I-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-V-IV-I-I. This means that if you know the chords, the key, and ways to work your instrument to bedazzle the crowd, you’ve mastered the blues. Even famed blues musician Albert King said, “The blues don’t change.” But I like to think differently about what the blues is really about. There is no definite way to play the genre. From the lyrics to how one plays a note on their instrument, how both the musicians and the audience understand the blues is as unique to them as a fingerprint. 

The styles and personalities of the blues varied throughout history. The blues originated from the American South, where African Americans suffering from the Jim Crow laws and other sources of oppression sang about their troubles through hollering and simple tunes. The first blues musicians emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century around an area known as the Mississippi Delta. Most songs around this time period featured one singer and a single instrument, most often the guitar. Here, musicians such as Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Robert Johnson began popularizing the spirit of the blues. They sang about discrimination and how being “black” affected their lives for the worse. For example, in “Black, Brown, and White”, Big Bill Broonzy sings: “But as you black, oh brother, get back, get back, get back”, showing how the color of his skin limited him from, in this case, buying himself a drink. When African Americans moved to the cities for new jobs, the blues followed along with them. 

Blues music evolved and urbanized towards the early 1940s. Like jazz, blues music became electrified, with singers accompanying their vocals with the electric guitar. They also began performing alongside other instruments such as piano and percussion. In cities such as Chicago, Memphis, and New York, musicians began putting the blues on records from bigger labels. Unlike rural blues, urban blues was strongly focused on daily life and finding love in the city, and the concept of racial discrimination slowly disappeared from the lyrics as the blues became known to wider audiences apart from just African Americans. In the standard “Sweet Little Angel”, the singer compares his love to an “angel” and the joy she brings to his life. Urban blues influenced many artists across the globe, such as Eric Clapton, to cover American blues music, lighting the spark for what would be known as the British Invasion. 

But the uniqueness of blues music really comes down to the player, regardless of whatever sub-genre of the blues they might play. Blues music pushed players to discover new qualities and break new boundaries on their instruments. One of the instruments that has experienced the most breakthroughs throughout history is the electric guitar. As John Mayer puts it, “When it comes to blues guitar, every player bends a note differently. It is literally as unique as a fingerprint.” And he is true about this in many ways. 

To discuss the individuality of the blues guitar, we must carefully put on our “music nerd” hats and explore the aspect that brought all of these musicians together: the minor pentatonic scale. A scale is a series of notes that ascend in pitch, just like how the C Major Scale (C-D-E-F-G-A-B) progresses in ascending order. Musicians often number the notes in a scale. In the C Major Scale, the C is “the 1” and the B is “the 7”. As the guitar is a multi-stringed instrument, these notes often repeat on different strings, creating a “box” or area around these clusters of similar notes. As this “cluster” moves along the neck, the shape slightly changes. The minor pentatonic scale consists of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 7th notes of any major scale, and is widely regarded as the key to improvising in blues guitar. In essence, it is a simple scale to master. However, many of the blues guitar’s pioneers left a distinctive mark on how guitarists play and understand this scale. 

Robert Johnson, a Delta blues guitarist, was the first to incorporate “blue notes” into his playing. “Blue notes” in musical terms are the flatted (b) 3rd and 7th notes of the minor pentatonic scale. They bring a sense of melancholy that a singer would often utilize to accentuate tension in his or her singing. 

B.B. King, who debuted with the single “Miss Martha King” in 1949, showed a different understanding of the pentatonic scale through his playing. King was one of the first guitarists to play higher notes up the neck in intervals relative to the chord he was playing over. This new “box” was coined “The B.B. Box”. King also started integrating the major pentatonic scale in points in the progression to convey the introduction or the release of tension in his playing. One talent of King’s is the “butterfly vibrato”, or how he would imitate slide guitarists by fluttering his finger on the string to create a vibrato effect similar to violinists. 

Albert King was another player who revolutionized how guitarists view the blues. Albert King stood at 6’4” and was left-handed. He was inspired by B.B King in many ways, naming his stage name “King” and naming his guitar “Lucy” (B.B King named his “Lucille”). King taught himself guitar on a right-handed model, which forced him to play upside down with the thinnest E string being closest to him. This heavily influenced his playing, as he could bend the E string down with gravity’s aid without much struggle. This, paired with his robust physique, created a powerful addition to the genre of blues guitar. As John Mayer said in Albert King’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, “Albert King is the reason why guitar players break high E strings.” 

Every time my father or I turn up the volume on an old blues record, I always have two things on my mind: the fact that I might be one of, if not the only, 14-year-old blues enthusiast in my country, and how traditional yet unconventional the blues really is. In other genres of contemporary music, such as pop, for example, we rarely see artists constantly pay homage to their predecessors. In blues, that is the norm. When musicians play blues “standards”, what they do seem to be heavily inspired by past musicians, but they also seem to break from tradition and add their own style to the song. I think this is what the blues is all about; constantly exploring outside the box yet cherishing the oldies passed down from generations. I guess Albert King was right: “The blues don’t change.”