If you’d like to gain an better understanding and appreciation of the richness, complexity, and depth of African-American culture in relation to the broader American culture, listen to America's music. America's musical art form owes it's beginnings to the African-Americans. The blues, the precursor to rock 'n roll and several other genres of music, are an expression - even a chronicle - of the lives of people who had at one time been slaves. Music, of course, is only one of the many African-American contributions to the American society, but it is an important contribution, because not only did it set the foundation for Americas culture and identity, African-American music shed light on the ideas, values, and emotions -- as it continues to do today -- of many otherwise silent African Americans.

Initially, Blues lyrics developed in the Delta regions of Mississippi as slaves sang while working on the plantation fields, and frequently made reference to escaping the hard and unforgiving life of the cotton fields in search of a better life. The Blues as sang by the plantation slave had hidden messages confined to the communities where blacks joined each other for a culture wholly different from what was seen and heard by the white community.

The style of music, as sang by the plantation slaves, got it’s start from field hollers and calls; additionally, like most African-American music, the evolution of the blues provided insight into the changes that took place in the lives of African-Americans after slavery had ended. Prior to Blues, African American song consisted of field hollers and calls, which served as a means of communication among plantation workers. While field hollers had elements of personalized song, they had never truly developed as solo songs.

Field hollers were work songs that evolved out of the call-and-response work songs that had set the pace for work gang labor on antebellum slave plantations. This same style of music could also be seen by black prison chain gangs working on the roads in the south.  In fact the two go hand in hand.  The slave hollers and prison chain-gang workers were filled with words telling of their extreme suffering. The blues were notable for their profound despair. They gave voice to the mood of alienation that prevailed in the construction camps of the South. In the Mississippi Delta that blacks were often forcibly conscripted to work on the levee and land-clearing crews, where they were often abused and then tossed aside or worked to death.

Despite the blues uniqueness from field hollers and prison chain gangs, it was forged from the same musical repertory and traditions. The call and response form of expression remained, but instead of incorporating a response from other participants, the blues singer responded to himself or herself usually with his or her guitar, harmonica, or piano. Thus, it was not created from a new type of music, but from a new perception about oneself.

As African-Americans regained some form of freedom in America, the blues slowly changed from expressions of personal hardship to a greater emphasis on male-female relationships, and the need for commercial success in the larger cities. The blues are much more than entertaining songs. They offer a chronicle of the lives of African-Americans over the past century.

After African-Americans slaves acquired freedom, blues music reflected that new status, Booker T. Washington’s teachings, and the Horatio Alger model, which asserted that the individual molds his own identity and destiny, influenced this form of personalized music. According to Lawrence Levine, "there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the popularity of Booker T. Washington's teachings, and the rise of Blues music. Psychologically, socially, and economically, Negroes were being acculturated in a way that would have been impossible during slavery, and it is hardly surprising that their secular music reflected this as much as their religious Negro Spirituals and Gospel music did." As a consequence, it was the emphasis on the individual that influenced the blues personalized form of song.

The blues once it went main-stream, traditionally were first sung by men at leisure and was called folk blues. Some folk blues singers sung in medicine shows and touring carnivals. As black vaudeville singers came in contact with country singers, they eventually learned to sing the blues. Vaudeville singers brought a professional quality to the music and constructed the foundation for the Classic Blues that we know today.

The blues lyrics began to become a music that was not simply a music of sadness, but encompassed a wide range of emotions, including humor, sometimes salacious and sometimes ironic. Blues lyrics contain some of the most fantastically penetrating autobiographical and revealing statements in the Western musical tradition. Blues lyrics were often intensely personal, frequently contain sexual references and often deal with the pain of betrayal, desertion, and unrequited love or with unhappy situations such as being jobless, hungry, broke, away from home, lonely, or downhearted because of an unfaithful lover. In effect, blues musicians were informal chroniclers of the African-American condition and history. Whether a specific blues spoke strictly in personal terms or broached larger social issues, the genre gave voice to black aspirations and experiences.

The blues took very different forms in different regions of the United States. Musicologists divide the blues into the Delta blues - generally thought to be the source of the art form – the Piedmont blues, from the areas east from Georgia into the Carolinas and the Texas blues.

The blues emerged in three relatively isolated regions heavily populated by African-Americans — the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont, and East Texas. Guitarists Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, and Son House exemplified the Delta blues style. The Delta style featured slide guitar playing, in which the musician made use of a hard, smooth object such as a closed pocketknife or long glass bottleneck worn on a finger of the left (chord playing) hand. By sliding the knife or bottleneck up and down the strings, the guitarist could bend notes and create distinctive, singing phrases.

In the Piedmont, the hilly upland extending from Virginia through the Carolinas all the way to Georgia, blues musicians such as Josh White (1908-1969) developed a sophisticated finger-picking technique that allowed them to play light and lyrical guitar accompaniments to blues vocals. 

East Texas blues, which also included parts of Louisiana, was rhythmic and driving, as seen in the playing of guitarists Leadbelly and Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins. But New Orleans did not develop into an important blues center until much later, perhaps due to its tradition of marching bands, riverboat bands, and — among the Creole population — formal schooling in music. The blues also exerted relatively little influence on early New Orleans jazz, which was more a product of ragtime and marching bands. There was also a strong piano tradition in the blues, emerging during the early 20^th century out of the pine-country timber camps of Georgia and the Carolinas; from countless jook joints scattered across Florida, Mississippi, and Texas; and from the honky-tonks of Chicago. This style of playing, with its repetitive, rolling bass patterns, was popularized in the 1930s as boogie-woogie, but its origins were considerably older.

The Great African-American Migration from the south to the North and out West spread blues throughout not only the black South, where for many years the blues remained little known to the rest of the nation. All that changed in the 1910s and 1920s with the rise of the recording industry and the start of the Great African-American Migration. In the Great Migration, massive numbers of African-Americans left the South for the cities of the North and the West Coast. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, the movement rose to a flood. In making the move, African Americans carried the blues along, and generally speaking, the musical movement followed regional lines. Piedmont blues musicians generally headed up the eastern seaboard with many, like Josh White, ending up in Harlem, New York. East Texas-style players moved west and formed what would be called West-Coast Blues as sang by Bonnie Rait, and considerably the most important line of movement was that from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, a route taken by such musicians as Broonzy and guitarist Muddy Waters.

The Classic Blues style was popular among newly arrived African-Americans in the cities. The migration of many blacks to the cities gave them a new freedom from the church and community that had not been experienced in the rural areas. Blacks demanded entertainment, and black theaters, dance halls, and clubs were opened. Women stopped singing in their churches and began to perform in theaters, clubs, and dance halls.