The first recording of vocal blues by an Afro-American recording artist was ‘Crazy Blues’ by Mamie Smith. It quickly became a million-seller, yet the origins of the blues can be traced back to the latter years of the 19^th Century.

The Blues originated in the ‘Deep South’ among the ‘African-American’ communities and came from the spirituals, work songs, field hollers and shouts of the cotton fields. The Emancipation Act of 1863 and the emergence of ‘Juke Joints’ in the years that followed are often seen as key developments in the rise of the Blues, while in 1908 Antonio Maggio's ‘I Got the Blues’ became the first published song to use the word blues and this was followed in 1912 by Hart Wand’s ‘Dallas Blues’ and W. C. Hardy’s ‘The Memphis Blues’.  Nevertheless it is really in the 1920s that the blues, as we know it today, began to emerge.

Female Blues singers such as Ma Rainey (who often claimed to have coined the phrase ‘Blues’) and Bessie Smith were very popular in the 20s while it was at this time that the first Delta Blues artists such as Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Son House (who developed the bottle neck style of guitar playing) came to the fore, along with the softer and more delicate south eastern piedmont tradition which used a more elaborate guitar picking style and is associated with singers such as Blind Willie McTell.

In the 1930s, many Blues musicians moved from the deep-south to urban centres such as Chicago and this led to the emergence of Urban Blues, which centred more around bands rather than itinerant singers. As the decade progressed artists such as Big Bill Broonzy began to sell large quantities of records. This in turn led to him performing at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in 1939 (Broonzy was actually a replacement for Robert Johnson, who had been booked by John Hammond but who was murdered before the concert).

Robert Johnson recorded a mere 29 songs (41 tracks if you include the 12 outtakes included on Legacy’s ‘Complete Recordings of Robert Johnson’), yet his influence is still prevalent today. Legend has it that he sold his soul to the Devil in return for his prestigious gifts and Eric Clapton among others have called him ‘the most important Blues singer that ever lived’.  Between 1932 and his untimely death in 1938, he moved frequently between different towns and cities in the south performing a variety of styles from Blues to country.

It was in the 1930s that John and Alan Lomax began their work for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. It has often been written that they discovered the blues and in some respects this might be seen to be true in the sense that they preserved it, in its early form, and thus prevented it from being lost. But there is an inherent fallacy in this argument in that the blues existed before they arrived to ‘discover’ it. Nevertheless the role they played in bringing artists such as Leadbelly and Muddy Waters to a wider audience should not be underestimated. Indeed Bob Dylan once described their work as that of ‘missionaries’ and the passion they brought to their labour echoed that of one inspired by the message of the lord. Alan, upon hearing Leadbelly, described what Leadbelly produced as being akin to ‘flames of beauty ... a sound which matches anything I'd ever heard from Beethoven’. And herein lies the crux of the matter, because ‘low-brow’ art, or what is perceived to be ‘low-brow’ art, is the equal of ‘high-brow’ art, and anyone who hears Sonny Boy Williamson or Little Walter, for example, can only be struck by the vitality and indescribable beauty of what they hear. The Blues in its purest form is earthy, elevating, primordial and essential.

In the 1940s the Blues continued to diversify and different styles such as Boogie-Woogie, Jump Blues and the beginnings of Rhythm and Blues emerged. And it is in its development and reinvigoration that the relevance of the Blues becomes clear. With any ‘folk’ music, the tradition must be preserved yet the music should not become an anachronism and the Blues has shown itself to be adaptable and revitalizing. Pre-war Blues influenced and informed everything that followed. As such its importance can’t be underestimated and of course it sounds wonderful, as Big Bill Broonzy sang ‘This train don't carry no liars, no hypocrites and no high flyers … This train is bound for glory, this train’.