Blues Subgenres: Your Complete Guide to Blues Styles
If there is one genre in music that guitar players love, it’s blues. Without blues, there would be no rock music, but even aside from that, blues goes hand in hand with the guitar. It’s probably the genre most associated with the instrument, and as such, has branched off into a multitude of subgenres.
I think it’s time you and I had a little look at some of them. What do you say? Now, I won’t presume to make this an exhaustive list, because most areas of the world actually do have their own distinct forms of the blues in one way or another. What I do aim to do though, is include all of the major blues subgenres that a serious student of the style should know about.
All of these blues styles are related: that, after all, is the very nature of this music. Blues is a folk style that passed from West African styles to America well over a century ago. It is a soul music, not in genre but in reality: it tells the tale of universal woe and suffering, with occasional defiance thrown in for the spirit.
It’s the language of guitar music, and here are some of the main variants that are out there today.
The Blues Subgenres at a Glance
British Blues/British Invasion
Field Recordings
The earliest forms of blues music could be said to be the songs sung by slaves in cotton fields. These songs were taught and learned in the fields, with no instrumental accompaniment. The musicians were people suffering under abhorrent conditions of slavery, and the music was a manifestation of how their souls felt at the injustice.
This music was largely relegated to the fields of indentured work until musician and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and his father began making his famous field recordings in the 1930s. He made thousands of recordings of folk music from all over the US, both acoustic and unaccompanied. These recordings live on today in the Alan Lomax Digital Archive, and I seriously recommend diving into some incredibly evocative sounds.
Acoustic/Folk/Country Blues
Acoustic blues uses acoustic guitars of course, but it just as often features other instruments like banjos and harmonicas. Robert Johnson and Leadbelly might be thought of as touchtones for this type of music, which originated in the Deep South of the 1920s. Basslines played on guitar, leads that have sliding notes and open strings, and wounded vocals that sing of heartbreak are the main stylistic components here. Stylistically similar to Delta blues (see below), I’d say that country blues is more ‘folk’ in its musical approach.
Delta Blues
Delta blues is largely the same music as the acoustic/country blues we just saw. The emphasis here is of course the location: this music is born directly from the Mississippi Delta. One other distinguishing factor (though hardly a rule) is the prominent use of bottleneck slide techniques for leads. The other main difference might be the prominence of rhythm, compared with other acoustic blues styles, and maybe less harmonica, though these aren’t rules!
Piedmont Blues
Piedmont blues is sometimes called East Coast blues (Piedmont is a long mountain plateau that stretches from New York to Alabama) and it’s as much a technique as it is a style. Piedmont blues picking is where the thumb plays out a bassline and another finger (normally index) plays a syncoped melody or accompaniment. Some say it’s a bit like ragtime piano, which I totally get because of the rhythm. The more uptempo style definitely makes Piedmont blues stand out on its own.
Texas Blues
Is Texas blues one of the first things you thought of when you saw this article? It was for me, and that’s probably because of one man, right? Stevie Ray Vaughan’s seismic influence over the guitar world is not too far off his hero Jimi Hendrix these days. The quintessential Texas blues artist, he personifies the style, which adds a good dose of swing into the feel of the sound. Guitar playing is a particularly big element of Texas blues.
Rock band ZZ Top could definitely be described as a Texas blues band in my book, at least up until Eliminator!
Chicago Blues
Chicago blues was an early example of electric blues, played with a full band. Prior to this, blues was mostly an acoustic thing, but Chess Records and Muddy Waters changed all of that. Foot-stomping grooves slammed out with no frills, tons of galvanising guitar licks and vocals that wrestled against harmonicas: Chicago Blues is all about vitality and band interplay.
West African Desert Blues
The music of West Africa is fascinating,and could take ten articles to even begin describing. There’s so much in their own national music that has come across the waters into the west that you could plausibly say that African folk and popular music is the originator of modern music.
But today, though, I’ll settle for highlighting one particular style. Desert blues is a wonderful take on electric blues that developed entirely outside the knowledge or influence of blues music from America. Nomadic desert tribes such as the Touareg would take instruments into the Sahara with them, playing throughout cold evenings in circles around fires.
Tinariwen are undoubtedly the most famous desert blues band, with a guitar style that is based around an open tuning (this writer was lucky enough to have been shown the tuning in Tinariwen’s dressing room many moons ago) that uses drones as much as riffs and licks.
It’s still a music of sorrow and injustice, but it's also one that you can really move and dance to!
Memphis blues
Memphis blues, to me, is kind of more like Chicago blues with horns than anything from the Mississippi delta. The horns play a big part in both the instrumentation and the attitude of the music, which sounds more defiant and even occasionally celebratory.
There’s a real emphasis on rhythm here, across all of the instruments. There’s a feature of call and response that has been there since the pre-war years, and continued into the era that saw stars like BB King coming through.
Today, Beale Street remains an important location for blues music, though they play all styles of it there now!
West Coast Blues
West Coast blues actually has more to do with jazz music than anything else. Well, to my ears it does, anyway! West Coast blues, as the name suggests, was from California. A 1940s style, it's quite breezy and energetic sounding, with more piano in it than anything else, though the vocals definitely had a blues feel. The style was created by Texan musicians such as T-Bone Walker, who had headed out to California in the 40s.
British Blues/British Invasion
The blues underwent a huge revival in London in the 60s. Music fans were importing records from the states, and copying what they heard with their own British bandmates. So much of this music is well-preserved thanks to its popularity.
Guitar greats like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and many more got their start during this time. The British Invasion was very much about plugged-in electric guitars playing with a full band, and made a big point about overdriven guitar solos.
The term ‘British Invasion’ was coined to express the truth that musicians from the UK had listened to American music, learned it, and then gone over to the US and played it for them there.
Blues Rock
This is mainly where we are at today with a lot of musicians who refer to themselves as blues musicians. It's really blues rock, when you factor in distorted guitars, geographical locations, non-blues chord progressions (blues has formal qualities as a style) and other factors.
Rock music can be all manner of things, but if we are talking about blues rock, then it’s artists such as Joe Bonamassa, Gary Clark Jr, The Black Keys, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Rory Gallagher that I’m talking about.
Everybody’s Got the Blues
Blues is definitely an American musical form. Its roots are African, and its modern day proponents come from every country in the world, making blues a truly universal musical language.
Still, most of the big genres are from the US, and fans drift towards one or more of those idioms. For example, you get ‘Texas blues’ players from Scarborough, and ‘Delta blues’ players from Munich!
I’d say this says more about the worldwide passion for these types of music than anything else. Whether it's from Texas, Alabama, Chicago, Penzance or Shrewsbury, one thing’s for sure: everybody got tha blues.
