Delta Blues

The Mississippi Delta — the flat, fertile floodplain between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers — was cotton plantation country, with one of the highest concentrations of Black population and the harshest racial regimes in America. Out of its plantations, juke joints and Saturday-night dances came the most influential of the regional blues styles (Palmer 1981).

The Delta sound is easy to recognize: a single voice, raw and moaned, over a guitar that answers it line for line, often with a bottleneck or knife sliding on the strings; rhythms that drive like a work gang; lyrics about labor, travel, floods, sex, the Devil and escape. Charley Patton, the style’s first star, recorded from 1929 and taught or awed nearly everyone who followed; Son House turned preaching intensity onto the guitar; Robert Johnson, recording in 1936–37, distilled the whole tradition into twenty-nine songs that later became the canon of the blues revival (Palmer 1981; Wald 2004).

A note of historical honesty, following Elijah Wald: in its own time the Delta blues was a regional, commercially minor music. Its players saw themselves as entertainers playing whatever the crowd wanted — blues, but also pop tunes, hillbilly numbers and hymns. The image of the isolated, haunted Delta genius was largely constructed by white collectors and critics from the 1960s revival onward (Wald 2004). What is not myth is the music’s consequence: when the Great Migration carried Delta musicians north to Chicago, their style became the foundation of the electric blues, and through it, of rock ‘n’ roll.