Country blues
music genre
Country blues (also folk blues, rural blues, backwoods blues, or downhome blues) is one of the earliest forms of blues music, but also refers to a blend of country music and blues. The mainly solo vocal with acoustic fingerstyle guitar accompaniment developed in the rural Southern United States in the early 20th century. It stands in contrast primarily to the urban blues style, especially in the pre-war era.
History
Artists such as Blind Lemon Jefferson (Texas), Charley Patton (Mississippi), Blind Willie McTell (Georgia) were among the first to record blues songs in the 1920s. Country blues ran parallel to urban blues, which was popular in cities.
Historian Elijah Wald notes many similarities between blues, bluegrass, and country & western styles with roots in the American south. Record labels in the 1920s and 1930s carefully segregated musicians and defined styles for racially targeted audiences. Over time, the rural black and rural white music evolved into different styles, with artists such as Bobby Bland, Ray Charles, and Willie Nelson lamenting the divide.
Folklorist Alan Lomax was one of the first to use the term and applied it to a field recording he made of Muddy Waters at the Stovall Plantation, Mississippi, in 1941. In 1959, music historian Samuel Charters wrote The Country Blues, an influential scholarly work on the subject.
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This entry incorporates text from “Country blues” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.