Greetings, jb.

As has been pointed out, your questions are simple and straightforward but, unfortunately, there are no simple and straightforward answers to them. What can be said is that the blues is the wellspring of most modern American music, including jazz – nearly all genres of American music are affected, directly or indirectly, by the blues. The blues is musical genre, a state of mind and the folk music of African-American people – and much more. The subject is vast and complex because the blues means different things to different people.

To gain a glimpse of the diversity and complexity of the subject, one need only reflect on the variety of approaches that writers on the blues have taken in an attempt to impose some pattern, however fleetingly or artificially, on the flux that is the blues. The basic divisions usually taken are pre-WWII and post-WWII blues, and country blues and urban blues. Some writers have approached the subject by examining the diversity of the blues in significant blues cities – New Orleans, Kansas City, Memphis, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Detroit, Dallas etc. Others have taken regional approaches – the Mississippi Delta, Tex-Arkana, the Piedmont , the West Coast etc. Even acoustic 'country' blues is not easy to pin down: there are the rural bluesmen, such as Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Son House, Bukka White etc, but also acoustic 'country' bluesmen, particularly street singers, whose base was a city – Lightning Hopkins, Blind Willie McTell, Furry Lewis, Blind Lemon Jefferson etc. That is the reason why some blues writers have preferred 'downhome blues' to 'county blues' as a descriptive term. There are 'downhome' bluesmen, such as Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, who later turned to a totally different style of blues in the bars of Chicago and Detroit.

Another world of the blues, and one that has received huge attention, is jazz blues and the 'classic' blues – the women singers, such as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox etc, who were the first blues singers to make it to record. There were the jug bands – Memphis Jug Band, Cannon's Jug Stompers, Dixieland Jug Blowers etc – and the hokum bands led by people like Tampa Red and Blind Boy Fuller. Writers with a more folky bent have tended to concentrate on songsters such as Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, Mance Lipscomb, Jesse Fuller, Henry Thomas, Bill Williams etc. There were the rural fiddle and dance bands such as the Mississippi Sheiks, the Dallas String Band, Jim and Andrew Baxter etc. There were the gospel inspired bluesmen such Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Joe Taggart, Washington Phillips, Blind Roosevelt Graves and Brother etc. Some believe that the 'real' blues was to be found in the cities, in particular Chicago – the 4 Ws: Howling Wolf, Sonnyboy Williamson, Muddy Waters and Little Walter – and Detroit – John Lee Hooker – not to mention Sam Phillips' recordings in Memphis and J.D. Miller's work in Louisiana. These, of course, spawned hundreds of groups ranging in style from blues rock to soul blues.

Of course, as someone has said, 'the long white locks of American country music has short dark roots'. In recent years, there has been increased interest in white rural blues influenced musicians such as Roy Harvey, the McGee Brothers, Darby and Tarlton, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carlisles, Frank Hutchison etc. The post-WWII years saw the emergence of individuals such as John Hammond, Michael Bloomfield, Charlie Musselwhite and bands such as the Kweskin Jug Band, Koerner, Ray and Glover, Electric Flag, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Geoge Thoroughgood and, over the few decades, thousands and thousands of others. And, in the UK, American blues was taken up with a vengeance by white groups.

If one reflects on the mutation of the blues into 'rhythm and blues', essentially danceable blues that had been the staple of the southern honky tonks and juke joints (borrowing the beat from gospel and subject matter from the blues), the picture becomes even more complicated. There were the dancehall blues that featured big bands, shouters and screamers, such as Joe Turner, Wynonie Harris etc, cry-ers, such as Roy Brown, Junior Parker, BB King etc, the jump blues and combos which varied in approach and style from west coast people such as T-Bone Walker and Amos Wilburn, to Memphis players like Ike Turner, Junior Parker, Rosco Gordon etc, to New Orleans people like Professor Longhair, Fats Domino etc, to eastern seaboard people like Chuck Willis; the club blues that featured silky-voiced, cocktail piano playing performers like Nat King Cole, Ivory Joe Hunter etc; the bar blues, such as typified by the 4Ws mentioned above; the group singing styles such as doo-wop etc; and gospel based styles.

The above is simply to give an indication that, as a musical genre, 'the blues' is vast and diverse. To reach an understanding, you need to make your own explorations and come to your own conclusions. If you are serious about it, you need to listen to a wide variety of material and read a few of the basic texts by experts such as Paul Oliver. The problem with blues CDs at the moment is that there is such a vast choice available that the beginner may well not know where to begin. A sound guide is Charles Shaar Murray's 'Essential Guide to Blues on CD', although not all the CDs mentioned will be still available. Perhaps a little more up to date is Tony Russell's fine 'The Blues: From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray' (Harper/Collins). David Harrison, the blues reviewer for Froots magazine, has 'The World of Blues' (Studio Editions/London). The reissues and compilations on labels like Arhoolie, Indigo, Yazoo and Catfish are excellent. Some basic texts that may be consulted include Paul Oliver's classic 'The Blues Fell This Morning' and his 'Story of the Blues'. Jeff Todd Titon's 'Early Downhome Blues' is great and Robert Palmer's 'Deep Blues' still stands up well. Read some of the articles and follow the links on the bluesworld site http://www.bluesworld.com – Roots and Rhythm has a link there; it is an excellent source with many reviews of blues albums.

I hope the above is of some use to you. Explore and enjoy, Stewie.