Chapter 2: Genres and styles
Genres and styles (gêneros e estilos)
British blues
British blues is a form of music derived
from American blues that originated in the late 1950s and which reached its
height of mainstream popularity in the 1960s, when it developed a distinctive
and influential style dominated by electric guitar and made international stars
of several proponents of the genre including The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton,
Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin.
American blues became known in Britain
from the 1930s onwards through a number of routes, including records brought to
Britain, particularly by African-
American GIs stationed there in the Second World War and Cold War,
merchant seamen visiting ports such as London, Liverpool, Newcastle on Tyne and
Belfast, and through a trickle of (illegal) imports. Blues music was relatively
well known to British Jazz musicians and fans, particularly in the works of
figures like female singers Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith and the blues influenced
Boogie Woogie of Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller
From 1955 major British record labels HMV
and EMI, the latter, particularly through their subsidiary Decca Records, began
to distribute American jazz and increasingly blues records to what was an
emerging market. Many encountered blues for the first time through the skiffle
craze of the second half of the 1950s, particularly the songs of Leadbelly
covered by acts like Lonnie Donegan. As skiffle began to decline in the late
1950s, and British Rock and Roll began to dominate the charts, a number of
skiffle musicians moved towards playing purely blues music.
The first major artist was Big Bill
Broonzy, who visited England in the mid-1950s, but who, rather than his
electric Chicago blues, played a folk blues set to fit in with British
expectations of American blues as a form of folk music. In 1957 Davies and
Korner decided that their central interest was the blues and closed the skiffle
club, reopening a month later as The London Blues and Barrelhouse Club. To this
point British blues was acoustically played emulating Delta blues and country
blues styles and often part of the emerging second British folk revival.
Although overshadowed by the growth of
rock music the blues did not disappear in Britain, with American bluesmen like
John Lee Hooker, Eddie Taylor, and Freddie King continuing to be well received
in the UK and an active home scene led by figures including Dave Kelly and his
sister Jo Ann Kelly, who helped keep the acoustic blues alive on the British
folk circuit.
Besides giving a start to many important
blues, pop and rock musicians, in spawning blues-rock it also ultimately gave
rise to a host of sub-genres of rock, including particularly psychedelic rock,
progressive rock. Hard rock and
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