Ninety-five years later, “Crazy Blues” has more than history to recommend it, as Smith’s jazzy delivery sounds just as sly and mighty as ever.Ģ. Smith’s debut single looms impossibly large over popular music: It’s the first vocal recording by an African American, the first blues recording, and the first race record. Winnowing such a massive catalog down to a handful of tracks would be impossible, but here are 20 songs essential to the blues and its long, storied history. Solo and with his longtime partner, guitarist Brownie McGhee, Terry played numerous festivals and recorded many albums until the 1980s.Over the past hundred years, blues music has mutated and transformed itself repeatedly, borrowing from other styles and traditions as it migrated from the South over to Texas and up to Chicago. From his first recording in 1937, Sonny Terry remained active in music and even played Carnegie Hall and on Broadway, but his popularity grew in the 1960s. Jesse Fuller from Jonesboro, a one-man band, and harmonica player Buster Brown from Cordele benefited from the renewed interest in their music, but the blues revival treated no early Georgia blues musician better than Sonny Terry (Saunders Terrell) of Greensboro. When white listeners became interested in blues music in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many of the country blues musicians had ceased playing music or lived in obscurity until blues revivalists searched them out. Hutto from Augusta, Joe Carter from Midland, and Big Maceo Merriweather contributed to the urban blues scene in Chicago through the middle of the century. Georgia-born guitarists James “Kokomo” Arnold from Lovejoy, J. Even though the number of blues recordings began to wane after the Great Depression and into the 1940s, the genre remained a popular form of expression in northern cities. In Chicago, African American migrants from the South formed a new style of urban blues, and by 1928 two of the most famous and widely recorded blues performers in America were Georgia Tom and “Tampa Red” Whittaker from Smithville. The use of twelve-string guitars, more strumming than picking, irregular rhythms, and a nasal vocal technique typified the Atlanta sound, as performed by brothers Robert “Barbecue Bob” Hicks from Walnut Grove and Charlie “Lincoln” Hicks from Lithonia.Įugene “Buddy” Moss Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division Chicago Blues
(The term barrelhouse was used to describe a loud percussive type of blues piano suitable for noisy bars or taverns.)įrom the mid-1920s into the early 1930s, “artist and repertoire” (known as A&R) staff scoured the South and northern cities in search of talent for the race-record subsidiaries of major record companies, and in Atlanta they recorded a distinct style of country blues performers. Also in the early years of the century, Atlanta’s Decatur Street had a thriving music scene populated by barrelhouse blues pianists like Thomas Andrew “Georgia Tom” Dorsey from Villa Rica, Big Maceo Merriweather from Atlanta, and Willie Lee “Piano Red” Perryman from Hampton. Before relocating to Chicago, Rainey performed at the 81 Theater in Atlanta, where she influenced the teenaged Bessie Smith.
Blues music professional#
Little is known about the earliest forms of the music, but Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, a native of Columbus, claims to have sung blues in front of live vaudeville audiences at the age of sixteen (around 1900), which may make her the first professional female blues performer.
Georgia has produced a rich blues heritage that showcases a variety of performance styles, from such popular commercial recording artists as Ray Charles from Albany, Little Richard from Macon, and Robert Cray of Columbus to more obscure players like Blind Simmie Dooley from Hartwell and Dolphus “Gus” Gibson from Fort Valley. Blind Willie McTell Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division Early Performers