Early Blues Styles

Early blues styles is a collective term for the blues idioms of the music's first recorded decades, roughly 1890 to 1935: the classic female blues of the theatre circuits, country blues from the Delta, Texas and Piedmont, jug and string-band blues, piano blues and the first downhome recordings. Distinguished by acoustic instrumentation, flexible bar structures and a close relation to vaudeville, ragtime and folk song, these styles supply the formal vocabulary, twelve-bar harmony, blue notes and call and response, on which all later blues was built.