Mississippi Delta blues

Introduction & Top Questions
The early tradition
From World War II into the 21st century

References & Edit History Quick Facts & Related Topics

Images, Videos & Interactives

B.B. King playing an electric guitar with an expressive face, wearing a plaid jacket, June 19, 1979.

Map of the Blues Highway, U.S. Route 61, marked in pink with music note icons highlighting key blues cities, including off-route cities like Chicago and Nashville.

The Origin of the Blues and the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi

Quizzes

Young girl wearing a demin jacket playing the trumpet (child, musical instruments, Asian ethnicity)

Sound Check: Musical Vocabulary Quiz

Related Questions

How did African musical traditions influence Mississippi Delta blues?
How did B.B. King combine blues guitar with jazz and rhythm and blues influences?
How did Bukka White address social justice in his blues songs?
How did Charley Patton’s aggressive guitar playing influence later blues musicians?
How did Chicago blues differ from the solo acoustic sound of Mississippi Delta blues?
How did Howlin’ Wolf help shape Chicago blues after leaving Mississippi?
How did John and Alan Lomax document Mississippi Delta blues at Parchman Farm?
How did Mississippi Delta blues differ from the blues of Georgia and the Carolinas?
How did Mississippi Delta blues influence rock and roll?
How did Mississippi Delta blues singers use speechlike vocal styles?
How did Mississippi Delta blues songs address life on the road?
How did Mississippi Delta blues songs connect worldly troubles with salvation and damnation?
How did Robert Johnson’s music influence blues and rock musicians?
How did Tommy Johnson’s guitar style influence later blues and rock songs?
How did blues musicians use blue notes to express emotion?
How did call-and-response work between voice and guitar in Mississippi Delta blues?
How did early recordings by Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey differ from Mississippi Delta blues recordings?
How did the Great Depression affect blues recording opportunities?
How did the Great Migration bring Mississippi Delta blues to Chicago?
How did the Mississippi Delta blues style differ from the blues of Texas?
How do guitar slides create the plaintive sound heard in Mississippi Delta blues?
How does slide guitar work in Mississippi Delta blues?
How many songs did Robert Johnson record during his lifetime?
What did W.C. Handy hear at the Tutwiler, Mississippi, train station around 1903?
What instruments gave Chicago blues its amplified ensemble sound?
What is the AAB lyric pattern in blues songs?
What was Charley Patton’s connection to Dockery Farms in Sunflower County, Mississippi?
What were juke joints and why were they important to Mississippi Delta blues?
When did Mississippi Delta blues first develop?
Where did Robert Johnson make his recordings?
Where did early Mississippi Delta blues musicians perform?
Which Mississippi cities are important centers for Mississippi Delta blues festivals?
Which Robert Johnson songs were widely recorded by later musicians?
Which Skip James songs later became recognized as blues classics?
Which work songs and musical traditions influenced the development of the blues?
Who influenced Robert Johnson’s guitar style?
Who were the most influential early Mississippi Delta blues musicians?
Why did Chicago blues musicians need amplified instruments in clubs and street markets?
Why did Mississippi Delta blues musicians sometimes depart from the usual 12-bar blues pattern?
Why did Son House, Skip James, and Bukka White gain new audiences during the 1960s blues revival?
Why is Mississippi Delta blues considered an especially intense blues style?
Why was Son House influential despite the limited success of his early recordings?
Why was blues sometimes called the Devil’s music?
Why were commercial recordings of Mississippi Delta blues not made until the late 1920s?
What is Mississippi Delta blues?
Who are some famous Delta blues artists?
Where and when did Delta blues originate?
What’s the difference between Mississippi Delta blues and Chicago blues?
How did disco contribute to political movements in the 1970s?
What defines heavy metal music?
How did heavy metal evolve in the 1980s?
What controversies surrounded heavy metal in the 1980s?
What was Tin Pan Alley?
Does Tin Pan Alley still exist?

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External Websites

Mississippi History Now - Mississippi Blues
All About Blues Music - Delta Blues

Mississippi Delta blues

music

Also known as: Delta blues

Written by

Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer, musician, and scholar. Gioia is also a jazz pianist and one of the founders of Stanford University's jazz studies program. His recordings include The End of the Open Road, Tango...

Ted Gioia

Fact-checked by

Britannica Editors

Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....

Britannica Editors

History

Mississippi Delta blues, regional style of early 20th-century American folk music, centered in the Delta region of northwestern Mississippi. The pioneers of the style played a key role in developing the market for traditional blues recordings in the 1920s and ’30s, while the subsequent generation of Delta-born guitarists contributed to the rise of Chicago blues, electric blues, and the folk blues revival in the post-World War II years. The Mississippi Delta style of blues—or, simply,...