The third and last generation of blues musicians and music (the very fact of changing “generations” shows that the blues creatively transforms its own roots) is the electric generation: music in the cities. Much as Charley Patton changed the blues on the basis of an audience, this third generation was driven at least in part by concerns for what listeners wanted. After the “Great Migration” to northern cities, black people did not want to hear country soloists singing blues from down home; the music had to be adapted to city paces, city sounds, city philosophies. White people, for their part, wanted electricity, showmanship, ensemble style, and an energetic beat to go with their brand new radios and jukeboxes. (These trends can also be seen in the shift from first to second generation: with an increasing concern for real popularity came the increasing use of rhythm, energy, and complexity from Robert Johnson on). Thus, the blues changed not once but twice because its makers came to an awareness of themselves, their audience, and the tools available to capitalize on that audience.
With each shift, musicians in the genre could clearly see themselves as artists, professionals, remakers of what would always remain an old and oral tradition—all the more aware of the world around them. No self-reflexive, professional musician strives only to recreate the music of another generation without adding something of his or her own. And this is precisely the fact that sums up the history of the blues. In the case of the two generational gaps, exponents of the changing styles wanted to play whatever was novel, relevant, popular—and not whatever field hollers and folk ballads their parents and grandparents had passed along and preferred. All of this analysis, then, is aimed at the refuting of an outright fiction: that the blues are old, unchanging, written for communal sharing rather than for commercial profiting, and authentic only as an exact genre at the core of later, creative musical scenes. This is an authenticity which white revisionism has imagined: the blues have always been about change and creativity, and just because black people deservedly profit does not make them inauthentic.
And, arguably, this idea of authenticity is an illusion also of modernism. In the sense that modernism is interested in how the present differs from the past—how the present is either an “expanding upon” or an “erosion of” the past—an imagined distinction is made. Blues and other roots music only fit into the construct of past versus present if their authenticity is hinged on prohibitive closeness to an original, on sticking completely to an original media, instrumentation, performance style, subject matter, etc. But, again, this is an illusion. The blues, at least, were never rooted in one social practice or one region; bluesmen and their music have always traveled. In fact, travel is an essential component of the music. Nothing could be more absurd than to think about the blues without concomitantly thinking about speed, escape, fatality, “riding the blinds,” hoboing, getting lost somewhere with only an instrument to win friends and make money. As this playlist will show, pinning the blues to one region, one culture, and one sound is an outgrowth of too-easy racial grouping.
