Delta blues

The earliest recorded country blues style, from the Mississippi Delta, built around solo voice and acoustic guitar, often using a slide.

Delta blues is the root of the recorded tradition, with players accompanying themselves on acoustic guitars using driving bass figures played with the thumb, percussive rhythm on the low strings and slide lines on the top. The recordings are raw, frequently solo, and structured loosely around a repeated phrase rather than a fixed chord chart. Its influence is disproportionate to its size: almost every later slide player and every rock band that draws on the blues is responding to it.

Example: A solo recording of voice and acoustic guitar using a bottleneck slide and a repeating bass figure is in the Delta blues idiom.

Delta blues

See also