Various Styles Of Blues

Back in the early 40's, blues and jazz were pretty much synonymous. The big bands were exciting audiences with their new stomping jump blues performances, which Billboard recommended for "hepsters who go for swing and boogie, and beats in a loud, hot unrelenting style." Jump Blues combined the popular boogie-woogie rhythms of the day with gritty swing solos and "playful lyrics laced with jive talk." More than seven decades later, Jump Blues still pulls listeners out of their seats and onto the dance floor with its boogie-woogie grooves and heavy, insistent beats.

Slide guitar blues is produced when a player uses some kind of tubular finger covering (usually made of metal or glass, like a bottleneck) to depress the strings of a guitar over the frets so that the strings are stretched and bent, producing a wavering tone. Traditionally slide guitar blues was played on resonator guitars, but a variety of acoustic and electric guitars have also been used. Blues slide guitar originated in the Mississippi Delta region where it was popularized by a number of blues players, including Robert Johnson. Electric slide guitar blues developed along with other electric blues styles with the migration of African-Americans north to Chicago in the 1940s.

On January 24th in 1848, James Marshall triggered the California Gold Rush when he uncovered a handful of shiny pebbles while building a lumber mill in Coloma, California. Subsequently, hundreds of thousands of people, from all over the globe, suffered great hardship to make their way by land and sea to seek their own fortunes.

Like any form of popular music, the blues has reflected the social conditions of the times, sometimes quite explicitly. News & the Blues offers 20 songs from the Columbia vaults from between 1927 and 1947. The Depression is reflected often, as expected, but there are also songs about natrual disasters, public figures like Joe Louis, World War II, and even the atomic bomb. Memphis Minnie and Bill Gaither even take the step of recording specific tributes to other blues singers (Ma Rainey and Leroy Carr respectively). Many of the performers are well-known – Bessie Smith, Mississippi John Hurt, Big Bill Broonzy, Charley Patton, Memphis Minnie, Bukka White…