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The first blues recordings from the 1920s are categorized as a traditional, rural country blues and a more polished city or urban blues. Country blues performers often improvised, either without accompaniment or with only a banjo or guitar. Regional styles of country blues varied widely in the early 20th century.
Blues standards come from different eras and styles, including ragtime-vaudeville, Delta blues, country blues, and urban blues from Chicago and the West Coast. [3] Many blues songs were developed in American folk music traditions and individual songwriters are sometimes unidentified. [1] Blues historian Gerard Herzhaft noted:
Urban blues started in Chicago and St. Louis, as music created by part-time musicians playing as street musicians, at rent parties, and other events in the black community. For example, bottleneck guitarist Kokomo Arnold was a steelworker and had a moonshine business that was far more profitable than his music.
Little is known about the exact origin of the music now known as the blues. [1] No specific year can be cited as its origin, largely because the style evolved over a long period but blues is inarguably a Black American art form as it is noted "it is impossible to say exactly how old blues is - certainly no older than the presence of Negroes in the United States.
The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues.
The Chitlin' Circuit was a collection of performance venues found throughout the eastern, southern, and upper Midwest areas of the United States. They provided commercial and cultural acceptance for African-American musicians, comedians, and other entertainers following the era of venues run by the "white-owned-and-operated Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA)...formed in 1921."
David Grazian cites as examples the development of beat poetry, musical styles including bebop, urban blues and early rock, and the importance of nightlife for the development of the gay rights movement in the United States kicked off by the riots at the Stonewall Inn nightclub in Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan, New York City. [7]
Delta blues is one of the earliest-known styles of blues. It originated in the Mississippi Delta and is regarded as a regional variant of country blues.