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55 albums · 1956–2021

The blues, from the Delta and Chicago to Texas, London and today

· 2 min read · by 1001 Albums

B.B. King in a suit singing as he plays a hollow-body electric guitar on an outdoor stage, in a black and white photograph
R.L. Burnside seated on a stool playing an electric guitar at a microphone, a drum kit beside him and a festival banner behindBuddy Guy in a hat and overalls and Christone Ingram, both playing electric guitars, smiling at each other on stage
B.B. King at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival in 1969. Photo: Douglas Fulton papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. · R.L. Burnside in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1982. Photo: Jud McCranie, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. · Buddy Guy and Christone "Kingfish" Ingram at Buddy Guy's Legends in Chicago in January 2019. Photo: Paul Natkin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The blues grew up in the Deep South of the United States around 1900, out of work songs, field hollers and spirituals. Most of its songs follow twelve bars over three chords, sung with bent notes. Its first records came in the 1920s, from singers such as Bessie Smith and guitarists of the Mississippi Delta.

In the Delta Robert Johnson and Son House played it on acoustic guitar. Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf came north to Chicago and played it electric, with Little Walter's amplified harmonica beside them. T-Bone Walker in Los Angeles and B.B. King in Memphis put the electric guitar at the front, and Big Joe Turner sang the jump blues of Kansas City. In the sixties John Mayall and Fleetwood Mac played it in London. Later came the hill country blues of R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough in north Mississippi, and Gary Clark Jr. and Christone "Kingfish" Ingram are some of its players today.

The list has 55 records from 1956 to 2021; Bessie Smith's is a later collection, dated by the year it came out, and Son House's by his sessions of 1965. It leaves out the soul blues of the seventies, the boogie-woogie piano and most blues rock, which would each need a list of their own. About 40 hours of music, 5 days of a few records each.

By genre

Blues 82%Rock 10%Soul & R&B 1%Other 7%
  • Blues 82%
  • Rock 10%
  • Soul & R&B 1%
  • Other 7%

The genres named most: blues, chicago blues, electric blues, blues rock, delta blues, harmonica.

The colours of the covers

A stripe for each cover, in the colour Tidal picks from it, sorted by hue; the greys at the end.

Where the music comes from

Music from 2 countries: United States 51, United Kingdom 4. The deeper the colour, the more albums: one, two to four, five to nine, ten and more.

The 1950s

The 1960s

The 1970s

The 1980s

The 1990s

The 2000s

The 2010s

The 2020s

More lists

Lists of Genres first, then others; all of them on the blog. The blog.