As a student of the blues, I’ve been sometimes amazed with the intersection of blues and other genres of music. One of the more surprising discoveries was the first time I heard blues and country music intersect while listening to Elvis’ That’s All Right from the The Sun Sessions album. Here’s a song that follows a standard blues progression, but contains all of the trappings of a country tune: chunka-chunka rhythm, melodic guitar picking. As I dug further into this album, I heard more blending of the two styles in songs such as Milkcow Blues Boogie (listen to the ragtime, country picking, all over the solid blues background) and, of course, Mystery Train. The latter of which was originally penned by Junior Parker as a blues tune, whereas the Elvis rendition carries country elements. These styles ultimately reflect the cultures in which each musician was steeped.
Looking more closely at Mystery Train, the instrumentation highlights the blues and country traditions; the Parker version employs piano, saxophone, and electric guitar, and the piano sets the rhythm. The Elvis version follows a more uptempo, boogie rhythm, with a tape echoed guitar as the central rhythm instrument. The lead styles differ as well, with Floyd Murphy playing a full 12-bar lead part in a minor pentatonic, while Scotty Moore, on the Elvis track, plays a relatively brief, syncopated, ragtime, Travis-picking, melodic lead that employs chordal elements.
Given that blues and country both stem from folk-type traditions, it’s no wonder that the musical styles and musicians came to influence each other. Both musical styles developed during the early 20th Century in the South and share instrumentation and musical elements. Since Elvis came of age at a different turning point in music history, the onset of rock-n-roll, I started digging backwards to find earlier examples of the blues-country link. First I searched for blues musicians playing country, then looked for country musicians playing blues.
One of the most notable (and recorded) “blues” bands to combine blues and country is the Mississippi Sheiks. Economic realities were huge stylistic drivers for African-American musicians like the Mississippi Sheiks in the 1920s and 1930s. In order to be hired, they needed to have a broad repertoire that would suit white and black audiences alike. As a result, they were skilled in country, blues, and folk genres. The band’s instrumentation resembles that of a hillbilly band: banjo, fiddle, guitar. The Sheiks’ most famous song Sittin’ On Top of the World recorded in 1930, was recorded many times by country artist Bob Wills. Listening to it, Please Don’t Wake It Up, It’s Done Gone Wet, among other songs, the Sheiks follow the standard blues progression, playing with a chunka-chunka rhythm that resembles a country tune. At the same time, The Sheiks also performed songs such as Stop and Listen Blues that are straight blues tunes.
Huddie Ledbetter, also known as Lead Belly, is another great example of the crossing tradition of blues and country. Listening to the Alan Lomax recordings of Lead Belly from 1934-1935, many of the songs he performs are much more country than blues. (In fact, the first song that sounds to be a blues tune is the fourteenth song on the album!) One of those country songs is Irene. Lead Belly plays solo acoustic with the country-style alternating bass line. If you were from outer space and didn’t know about America’s race history, you would think this was just part of the white 1930s country catalog.
Turning to country artists playing blues, Jimmie Rodgers lived at the forefront of country music recording between 1927 and 1933. Rodgers primarily employed the a lone guitar, chunka-chunka rhythm and yodeling. His song selection comprises of quite a few tunes that sport the term blues in their titles: Mule Skinner Blues, T.B. Blues, Gambling Bar Room Blues, among others. While Mule Skinner Blues has the trappings of a country tune following the underlying 1-4-5 progression, T.B. Blues is introduced with very bluesy motifs, employing a slide turn around using sixths. Still, the song is intertwined with country elements, such as the lead part following a major pentatonic, and of course, the now very familiar alternating bass-line country rhythm.
One of Jimmie Rodgers’ contemporaries was Cliff Carlisle, who had fewer trappings of blues in the songs he wrote and performed. Yet he too included “blues” in the titles of many of his songs. Some of my research revealed that his song Shanghai Rooster No. 2 is thought to have influenced Charley Patton’s Banty Rooster Blues and Howlin’ Wolf’s Little Red Rooster. At least in the case of Patton, the claim seems dubious because Banty Rooster Blues was first recorded in 1929, where Carlisle’s was published in 1931. Wolf was Patton’s protoge, giving more credence to a Patton-Wolf influence rather than a Carlisle-Wolf influence.
Although individual musicians influenced each other on a smaller scale when traveling from town to town, radio broadened the diffusion of musical styles. WSM Radio in Nashville first signed on in 1925. “[It] was rated at 1,000 watts, which put it in the top 15 percent of radio stations around the country, and gave it exposure to locales hundreds of miles away,” according to Michael Kosser’s How Nashville Became Music City USA. It’s no wonder that the likes of B.B. King only heard country music on the radio, but it’s also easy to understand how country could be an influential force for blues musicians.
In an interview from the Chicago Tribune in 1985, country fiddle player Johnny Gimble, who was in Bob Wills’ band, said to Willie Nelson at some point prior, “there’s [sic] only two types of music, The Star Spangled Banner, and the Blues.” Indeed, in 1935, Bob Wills recorded a version of Sittin’ On Top of the World – the Mississippi Sheiks tune. This version follows the established pattern of different instrumentation and singing styles, with Wills singing much in the style of Jimmie Rodgers. As for instrumentation, one hears a solid wind section with trombone and clarinet, but Wills’ version also includes banjo. Other versions that Wills recorded temper the country trappings, and put forth a blues version of the song with guitar, piano, and fiddle. Wills’ songs are a melting pot of blues and country.
In the 1920s, there was no real musical distinction between “blues” and “country.” The categories were invented by music businessmen in order to more effectively market music to black and white listeners. Over the course of the subsequent decades, with the maturation of the recording industry, expansion of and access to radio, and the electrification of instruments – notably the guitar – blues and country styles became more stark. In particular, country departed somewhat from having identifiable blues tunes (even though the songs continued to use the same musical form as the blues) evolving through western swing, the Nashville sound with strings, and honkey tonk. As African-Americans moved from the south into urban areas like St. Louis and Chicago, the country blues sound also became different, taking on an electrified, urban sound. Off to the side, of course, is the development of rock-n-roll, combining country and blues into music that appealed to the younger generations.
Rachel Rubin’s essay Hearing History in Bluegrass’s High, Lonesome Sound confirms and expands the interchange of black and white mucisions in country’s subgenre, bluegrass, pointing out Arnold Shultz’s influence on the “father of bluegrass” Bill Monroe. “An equally important contradiction is the conventional wisdom that country music, including bluegrass, is a strictly white European-based form. While it is true that racism within the music industry artificially segregated music by white performers from music by black performers, the music itself reveals a strong tradition of cultural exchange. In bluegrass this exchange is visible in the centrality of the banjo, with its African roots, and in the influence of black musical forms such as blues and ragtime. Monroe, for instance, often cited as a central influence on his music a black musician named Arnold Schulz, with whom he played dances when he was young. The exchange of cultural forms can also be heard in shared songs, especially gospel songs, as well as common idioms, subject matter, and humor.”
In the great mixing bowl of American folk music, blues and country have deep roots in their respective cultures, but also deeply influenced one another. This article has only scratched the surface of these linkages. There are quite a few excellent books that cover more aspects of blues and country. In addition to the books already mentioned, Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta, Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues, Nick Tosches’ Country, and John Milward’s Crossroads are great resources for the curious reader. Keep on listening and learning!
To hear some of the songs mentioned in the article, you can visit this Spotify playlist:
http://open.spotify.com/user/ashleyroach/playlist/7vLXzJrWtkTWGZ6WGW7d3V
Ashley Roach is a Denver-based music fan and jammer.