Forged around 1900 in the Mississippi Delta out of the work songs and field hollers that Black people carried out of slavery into the world of sharecropping and Jim Crow, the blues put individual feeling — loss, desire, trouble, endurance — at the center and found beauty in suffering. Its bent blue notes, twelve-bar form, and call-and-response traveled north with the Great Migration from Charley Patton and Robert Johnson to the electrified Chicago blues of Muddy Waters. From there it became the common root of jazz, rock and roll, soul, and much of hip-hop.
Listen for the bent note. A blues singer reaches for a pitch and slides just under it, never quite landing, and that small ache is the sound of a whole music. The blues was forged around 1900 by Black people in the cotton country of the Deep South, out of the work songs and field hollers their grandparents had sung in bondage, in a world of sharecropping and Jim Crow that gave them every reason to grieve. They took the grief and made it beautiful. That bent note, the blue note, became one of the central roots of American popular music: jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul, and much of hip-hop carry it still. The blues is the sound Black Southerners made of work, worship, and hardship, and then taught to everyone.