Language of the Blues - Edmonton Blues Society

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good came out of leaving the plantation this time- Patton went to New York and recorded
twenty-nine songs for the American Record Company. When these recordings were
reissued in the mid-1960s, they sparked great interest in this Delta cropper who came to
be known as the father of the Delta Blues.
By the mid-1920s, about a million African Americans were living in Mississippi, and
four to five hundred thousand were in the Delta- many living and working together on
plantations. For guitarist Hubert Sumlin, who grew up in the region, the Delta was a
born, there were musicians everywhere. We had people down there they speak French,
French Creole. We had black Seminole. We had people from Jamaica, the Bahamas. Oh
yes, you could hear the African feeling in the songs, in the dance, the way they tapped
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The concentration of gifted musicians plus people who needed entertainment after a hard
for the blues as fertile as the soil of the Delta
to country and western first. It
to listen to people like Eddy Arnold, one of my favorite singers, and George Morgan. I
never was into the bluegrass stuff, but I always liked the great stories that the real slow
singers would tell.
-called twelve-
thin line between the two musics. Only difference is the beat, and the bars to some extent,
but the stories of happiness, sadness, being lonesome, and what have you. All of that was
Songs:
- Robert Wilkins (1929)
- - Freddie Spruell (1928)
- Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield)
D E V I L
In blues songs the devil is sometimes a euphemism for the white slave owner or boss.
The devil may also be a Christianization of important West African trickster deities such
as the Yoruban Eshu or Dahomean Legba (see crossroads for a discussion of Eshu). In
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