A knife on the strings at a railway station
In 1903 the bandleader W. C. Handy was waiting for a late train at Tutwiler, Mississippi, when the man next to him began playing a GUITAR, pressing a knife blade against the strings as he sang about the place where two railway lines crossed. Handy called it the weirdest music he had ever heard. He remembered it, wrote in that style himself, and helped carry the blues out of the DELTA and into print.
That knife trick never went away. Players use a metal or glass tube on one finger — often the BOTTLENECK cut from a bottle — to slide between notes instead of landing cleanly on the frets, and that SLIDE is what lets a guitar sound like a voice WAILING.
Twelve bars and three chords
The classic blues song runs on a pattern so widely known that strangers can play it together with no rehearsal at all: TWELVE bars, three chords, round and round. The words often follow their own shape — a line sung, the same line repeated, then a third line that answers it — which conveniently gives the singer time to think up the answer while the band carries on.
Solos lean on the five-note PENTATONIC scale, the friendliest scale to improvise with, and on the BEND: pushing a string sideways so the note slides upwards and settles somewhere between two frets. Those in-between notes are called blue notes, and they are why the blues sounds the way it does — and why a piano, whose notes are fixed, has to work hard to sound convincing.
The man with two photographs
Robert Johnson recorded 29 songs at two sets of sessions in 1936 and 1937, died at 27, and for decades was known from just a couple of verified photographs. That empty space left room for a legend: that he met the devil at a CROSSROADS at midnight and swapped his soul for his talent. Versions of the story had been told about other musicians before him, and the likeliest explanation is far duller — he went away and practised. The myth has been retold in songs and films ever since.
North to Chicago
Between about 1915 and 1970, millions of Black Americans left the rural South for cities in the north and west, a movement now called the Great Migration, and the blues travelled with them. In CHICAGO, where a quiet ACOUSTIC guitar stood no chance against a noisy bar, musicians plugged in, added drums and an amplified HARMONICA, and the music got louder and harder.
Blues was big business long before that. Bessie Smith, billed as the Empress of the Blues, was among the highest-paid Black entertainers of the 1920s and toured in her own railway carriage, partly so that her company never had to rely on hotels that might turn them away.
British teenagers bought those records in the 1960s, copied them and sold the results back to America as rock. The Rolling Stones took their name from a Muddy Waters song.