My Music And Song's

Recently, performers like Eric Clapton have been returning to their acoustic origins and have started once again to play in a blues style. The screaming guitar sounds of the electric blues have become an indelible part of our music.

Before that, there was the quieter though no less powerful blues of the acoustic guitar, played on front porches and at backwoods gatherings by itinerant musicians for whom sung lyrics were just as important as their inventive guitar parts.

The blues began as a folkloric music in rural African-American communities in the last decades of the nineteenth century. By the twenties, the style was perfected by specialized singer-songwriterguitarists. But blues was also performed by songsters like Leadbelly and Henry Thomas, who also sang story songs, children’s songs, comic songs, and even spirituals. The blues was also quickly assimilated by early jazz and rural dance bands and even Tin Pan
Alley.

Modern blues songs tend to be about hard times and personal or sexual relationships. Country blues often expressed the hard times of the African-American experience. But much more than today, early blues could also be comic, or present a casually humorous take on daily life.