 Blues music, rooted in the work songs and spirituals of slavery and influenced greatly by West African musical traditions, was first played by black Americans, and later by some white Americans, in the Mississippi Delta region of the United States around the time of the Emancipation Proclamation.Grammy-winning blues musician/historian Elijah Wald and others have argued that the blues were being rapped as early as the 1920s.Wald went so far as to call hip hop "the living blues."