The blues has a long history in the United States, and the blues guitar plays a major part in it. In the late 19th and early 20th century in the American South, the blues was born. African American slave workers in the cotton fields and on sharecropper lands would sing their woes. It was a very free and heart felt style, and every time a song was sung, or later played, it sounded different, mimicking the artists’ feelings. In the 1920’s, the guitar became a popular accompaniment for these artists and their music. Often this became a call and response style where the singer would sing something and his guitar would respond.
Some of the first well known artists of this genre were Robert Johnson and Son House. They would use a slide on their guitars to create notes that sounded like someone wailing and lamenting. For the slide, they would use things like a bottleneck or a knife, hence the term bottleneck or slide guitar. In the 1950′s, Muddy Waters was big in this blues world and his guitar music was often accompanied by a drum or harmonica. Chicago and Memphis were huge towns for the popular blues, and some know Beale Street in Memphis as the heart of the woeful blues.
As the electric guitar became more widely used, the slide was often tossed aside as the electric guitar was capable of sustaining longer notes to create fluidity of the same woeful tones. As blues music traveled across the Atlantic in the 1960’s and 70’s, it took off with rockers like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards and became a huge part of rock and roll. Some other famous blues musicians are Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James, B.B. King and T-Bone Walker. Listening to any of these artists is probably the best blues guitar lesson you could hope for.
From the start of this form of soul felt music on the cotton farms, it made its way across the world to influence all types of music, including jazz, country and rock, with the accompaniment of a blues guitar always prominent. When a genre of music has this much lasting influence, it is clear that it was born from the heart and the soul.
