The Importance of Delta Blues
The importance of the delta blues is two fold: It is important because of its influence, and it is important because of the music itself.
The influences are obvious, and make the delta blues very important. Some of the world’s most popular musicians – The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and others – learned to play and sing by imitating the delta blues. In fact, these artists still revere the recorded works of the delta masters. Everywhere you see rock players or metal players playing with a glass slide on their finger is a homage, acknowledged or not, to delta musicians like Muddy Waters and Elmore James. Delta guitarists were also the first to intentionally experiment with distortion and feedback (does Jimi Hendrix come to mind?). Almost everyone who picks up a harmonica – regardless of what country they live in – will at some stage in their development imitate one of the delta greats like Little Walter. The influence is tremendous – it courses through every version of modern music from swing, to rock, to jazz, to movie soundtracks.
The delta blues seems simple enough. It’s two identical lines followed by a response, there are usually three chords or less, melodies are easy to follow, the rhythms are straight forward. Yet countless white musicians have tried to master it and failed, and delta bluesman often laugh to themselves as they remember even black musicians from other areas such as Texas who just couldn’t learn to play acceptable in the delta style.
The fact is this: the delta blues are a refined, extremely subtle and systematic music language. Playing, and especially singing it right involves some exceptionally fine points that only a few white guitarists, and virtually no white singers, and hardly any black musicians who didn’t learn in the delta have been able to grasp. These fine points have to do with timing, phrasing, subtle variations in vocal timbre, and being able to hear and execute both vocally and instrumentally precise graduations in pitch. We are talking about techniques learned and methodically applied, and are essential to the music.
Think you can play the delta blues? It sounds easy. Heck, sometimes, it feels easy. But test your skills with a actually delta bluesman, and you will find yourself years behind, unable to keep up, and missing all musical cues. Don’t feel bad – you have to have learned in the delta itself to get it.
Whew. Harder than it sounds, huh?
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