Blues

Blues music is widely considered to have at its core the experience of African slaves who brought their diffuse cultures to America and created a distinct culture and music. Call and response as slaves worked in the field remains a backbone of the genre, and spirituals and gospel lend their melodies and traditions. The structure of an early blues song is simple: a 12 bar pattern repeating the I-IV-V chords of an open key, with verses duplicating the first line and resolving in the third. This structure persists, although as with any other music genre, blues music has evolved and many sub-genres have been created.

Black Americans, once freed from slavery, found their “freedom” fraught with even more hardships through Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, and music, whether in churches, fields, or juke joints, provided a release. Alan Governar says “The blues is an intensely personal music; it identifies itself with the feelings of the audience-suffering and hope, economic failure, the break-up of the family, the desire to escape reality through wandering, love, and sex.” Blues music borrowed from the spiritual to celebrate the secular, and illuminating and expressing the human condition.

Blind Lemon Jefferson was recognized primarily as street singer who performed daily with a tin cup in the burgeoning music hotbed of Deep Ellum, in Dallas. Despite his limited commercial success in Dallas, he had a great influence on the development of Texas blues. Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter, another early bluesman, credited him as an inspiration, as did Aaron Thibeaux (T-Bone) Walker. Jefferson’s guitar style was unique, and established the basis of what is today known as the Texas style. He strummed or "hammered" the strings accentuating the bass notes percussively, and picked single-string, single note runs. T-Bone Walker later applied this technique to the electric guitar and, combined with the influences of the jump and swing blues jazz bands, created a new Texas blues.

In the 1970s, Austin entrepreneur and blues aficionado Clifford Antone opened his club, and opened a new generation’s eyes to the legacy of the masters of the blues. Antone’s showcased the living legends, and developed the new wave of Texas blues players, including a young Stevie Ray Vaughn.