East Coast Blues

East Coast blues is the acoustic blues tradition of the American Southeast, centred on the Piedmont plateau and the mill towns of the Carolinas, Georgia and Virginia. Built on alternating-bass fingerpicking adapted from ragtime piano, it favours bright, syncopated guitar lines, clear singing and a lighter, danceable mood than Delta blues. Performers such as *Blind Blake*, *Blind Boy Fuller* and *Blind Willie McTell* combined blues with rags, ballads and songster repertoire, often in small string-band settings with harmonica or washboard, making the style the Southeast's dominant pre-war blues idiom.