Blues Music 167the Delmore Brothers, and Bob Wills—incorporated into
their recordings stylistic techniques and song themes freely
interpreted from the blues.
Although the blues had fallen into public neglect na-
tionally, several blues musicians of future importance within
the music genre (including Son House, McKinley “Muddy
Waters” Morganfi eld, and Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter)
were “discovered” by—and made their fi rst recordings
for—folklorist Alan Lomax, who traveled through the rural
South to make “fi eld” recordings of various traditional mu-
sicians in their home locales. In the late 1940s and early
1950s, the blues experienced a surge in popularity, as a
number of recording companies—primarily small labels,
such as Chess, Sun, and King—released singles and albums
by various practitioners of the new urban blues then being
performed in cities in the North (especially in Chicago,
the adopted home of such musicians as Muddy Waters and
Howlin’ Wolf [Chester Burnett], but also in Detroit, where
John Lee Hooker was fi rst based); in the South (principally
in Memphis, home of Riley “B. B.” King, and in Houston,
the home location of Sam “Lightnin’ ” Hopkins); and in
the West (for instance, in Oakland, the base for Lowell
Fulson).
During the 1940s and 1950s, the blues served as a sig-
nifi cant infl uence on three other emerging American musi-
cal genres: gospel, rhythm and blues, and rock ’n’ roll. In the
early 1960s, the rural blues received a major revival when
young white music fans embraced the recordings of an
older generation of black blues musicians (such as the for-
gotten recordings by Robert Johnson), and white entrepre-
neurs located several still-living rural bluesmen (including
Hurt, James, House, and “Mississippi” Fred McDowell) and
brought them into the international spotlight. Other black
blues musicians soon became widely popular among young
whites—urban blues musicians such as B. B. King, Albert
King, and Junior Wells and acoustic rural blues acts such as
the duo Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry.
As a result of this new popularity, a generation of rock
musicians—including such American acts as Jimi Hendrix,
the Lovin’ Spoonful, and the Doors and British acts such as
Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, and Van Morrison—cited
the blues as their favorite genre of music and lauded blues
musicians as their main sources of inspiration. Meanwhile,
emerging to considerable popularity at this time were nu-
merous white blues interpreters—such American musi-
cians as John Hammond Jr., Paul Butterfi eld, and JohnnyWorld War I, rural blues began to be overshadowed by
the more sophisticated approach to blues associated with
blacks who had migrated to urban areas. At various ven-
ues (such as theaters and places selling liquor) in South-
ern and Northern cities, musicians performed commercial
blues songs containing self-consciously urbane lyrics set to
standardized rhythmic structures (especially in the popu-
lar 12-bar blues form, which incorporated the three-line
A-A-B rhyme pattern). Blues singers at such venues tended
to be females, several of whom—such as Bessie Smith, Ida
Cox, and Ma Rainey—committed part of their blues reper-
toire for release on commercial records during the fi rst half
of the 1920s, attracting new audiences to the blues, includ-
ing white listeners who would not otherwise have had the
opportunity to hear the blues.
By the late 1920s, numerous rural blues performers were
likewise making records, including “Mississippi” John Hurt,
Nehemiah “Skip” James, Charlie Patton, Henry Th omas,
Furry Lewis, Blind Lemon Jeff erson, Blind Blake, and
Th omas A. “Georgia Tom” Dorsey. Records featuring rural
blues at this time rarely sold as widely as overtly commer-
cial urban blues records, and most of the aforementioned
musicians ceased performing blues by the 1930s (some—
including Patton and Jeff erson—died young; others— Hurt
and James—gave up music entirely for decades, only to be
“rediscovered” by white blues fans in the 1960s; Dorsey gravi-
tated toward sacred music, inventing black gospel music).
During the Depression, both urban and rural blues fell out
of favor. Testament to the music’s comparative obscurity
during the 1930s was the fact that Robert Johnson—who
today is arguably the most acclaimed rural blues musician
of all time—recorded in the mid-1930s for a major label
(Columbia), and his biggest hit record then sold only a few
thousand copies.
Th e sound and feeling of the blues remained alive and
widely heard, however, during the Depression within an-
other black music genre, as jazz musicians—including such
acclaimed instrumentalists as Louis Armstrong, Charlie
Christian, Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie Parker and such
jazz composers/arrangers as Duke Ellington—turned to the
blues for inspiration and thus kept the genre at the forefront
of musical experimentation within the United States. Sim-
ilarly, the blues had a profound impact in the 1920s and
1930s on classical music composers (such as George Ger-
shwin and Aaron Copland). Several white musicians in
1930s-era country music—particularly Jimmie Rodgers,