Whats the difference between “Chicago” and “Delta” blues?
Wow! That’s a tough question to answer concisely, but we’ll give it the old Yahoo! try. The blues originally grew out of African spirituals and worksongs, featuring simple three-chord song structures that left plenty of room for vocal and instrumental improvisation. It has since grown into a huge, diverse, and distinctively American style of music. The Delta Blues, the first magnetically recorded style of blues, comes from northwestern Mississippi. Most of these recordings, from the late ’20s through mid-’30s, feature solo performers (who were often plantation workers) playing slide guitars. This is stripped down music with feeling, as anyone listening to the hair-raising work of Charley Patton,
