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A History of the Blues

A Short History of Blues Styles*

Robert Walker

As many readers of Rolling Stone may already know, there are many subtly different types and distinct forms of the blues when viewed from a musicological perspective.

The oldest form is thought to be the Delta blues, which originated in ancient Greece. According to The Legend of Tendonitis by Fesces, there were three forms of blues even older than this: Alpha blues, Beta blues, and Gamma blues. There is, however, some information in The Legend of Tendonitis which is open to challenge, like how supply-side economics works and the five chapters on why cricket is not a boring game. Still, much that appears in The Legend of Tendonitis is confirmed by other scholarly sources and some historians even argue that there are Aramaic echoes discernable in the Dead Sea Scrolls, so whether these blues really existed or not has become a career path for historians of the blues and ancient Greece and a common way to get government grant money.

Another recently evolved form of blues that has gained traction in musicological literature, is the Piedmont Blues. Blues analysts and leading psychiatric thinkers postulate that this form of blues arose when the US government deregulated the airline industry, resulting in many commercial carriers going out of business. The first to file for bancruptcy under Chapter 11 was Piedmont Airlines, hence the unusual and easily confused name. The Piedmont Blues movement followed a migration path north as far as DC, and is distinct for a rhythmic pattern known as pork-barrelling. It is nurtured by deep rooted hopes of feeding at the public trough. In this sense, Piedmont blues is the blues form closest to opera and classical music.

Recently, the Chicago Blues has resurfaced and, some argue, this urban variant has become more virulant and infectious than ever and has developed a resistance to most common antibiotics. Many researchers have begun to postulate that it is not a form of music at all, but rather a 20th century variant of borderline personality disorder. People suffering from Chicago blues are often found in small rooms muttering "Doesn't that jerkoff know the meaning of 'retirement'?" and "Just one little bullet..." Patients more deeply afflicted have also been observed in clinical trials yelling unselfconsciously at television receivers for no externally valid reason, shouting obscure phrases of a sporting origin like "He travelled!", "Shoot the Ref!" and "Call that flamin' elbow!" If the Chicago blues reaches this point, the only known cure is euthanasia by lethal injection, but as this treatment is still disallowed by state regulators the Chicago blues style remains largely untreated.

Another late 20th century variant of the unique folk phenomena known as The Blues is the Blue Jean blues, arising when a blues lover cannot find a pair of pre-faded Levi's in a comfortable size in the entire metropolitan area, because they were all bought by skinny 5'6" high school kids who think it trendy to show their underpants and often carry a packed lunch in their trouser crotch. And on those rare occasions when a desperate blues-lover actually comes across a pair in an appropriate size, they are usually turn out to be either bell-bottoms, chinese imports whose zippers stop working on the first day, or are cost prohibitive due to supply-side economics of the designer label. Sufferers of this form of blues are advised to take a therapeutic trip to Bali.

The St. Louis Blues are not really the blues at all but rather a date-rape drug.

Jailhouse Blues

The Texas Blues evolved from the insidious US practice of paying tens of thousands of dollars to beefy pro football players who can't read all the numbers on the gear shift knob of their free car, so only drug dealers and Republican politicians can afford this form of blues. In extreme cases, it has been reported anecdotally to have caused people to write poetry on public toilet walls, however the only officially recorded case, which began with the line "Here I sit, buns a-flexin'..." is still mired in controversy among academic blues historians.

There is also the rarer blues mutation unoffically referred to as White Boy Blues, which is a more complex secondary blues style commonly found amongst longtime electric blues fans who worship Stevie Ray Vaughan, but at the same time resent him for all the no-talent child prodigies and wannabes he gave rise to. This blues has a slow boogie feel and often features stanzas like:

My Beamer won't start this morning.
My son didn't quite make Yale.
My wife ran off with my accountant.
The IRS just threw me in jail.
Lord, I got them White Collar Crime Blues.
I may be a prison-bitch now, but holy cow
only for Big Bruno, I ain't no low-down flooze.

Fortunately, practitioners of this form of blues are often successfully ridiculed into silence, for obvious reasons outside the scope of this study.

Surprisingly, there is also actually a blues style known as British blues. This can take three difficult-to-treat forms. The first form is found amongst the British themselves and is thought to arise from the low standard of food. The second form of British blues is found amongst working class blues fans and is thought to be related to their problems with well-dressed people who shout "Dude!", "Clapton is God!", and "Be quiet, Baywatch is on!" This type of British blues is thought by many to be a much earlier continental variant of White Boy blues. The third and even rarer form of British blues actually only occurs amongst Mediteranean shopkeepers, who have to put up with obnoxious British tourists, if you'll pardon the redundancy. This blues is actually fairly superficial however, since the British tourists always have to be back home by Friday to pick up their unemployment checks.

*This post-modernist interpretation of traditional and electric blues origins was blatantly plagiarised, with improvised middle eight, from a now forgotten source (the editor).

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