Really the ‘Walking Blues’: Son House, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and the development of a traditional blues

Abstract

On the surface, a study of the evolution of a particular regional Afro-American folk-music style does not appear to be directly connected with the development of popular music. Yet, in one way or another since the 1930s, Son House, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, aspects of whose music I discuss here, have all influenced both the development of black blues and, in a much wider context, American and European popular music in general. Johnson and then House became cult figures of the 1960s American folk-music ‘revival’; Waters's Chicago rhythm and blues, which he developed in the late 1940s, have sustained him with black and, subsequently, white audiences since that time, his early commercial recordings being absorbed and sometimes emulated by groups such as the Rolling Stones.