Son's project - help on development of blues music 1960s
Discussion
Very cool!
Black Sabbath started in 1968 as a psychedelic blues band, under the name Earth. Might be worth a mention, as they pioneered Metal as a result - slightly off genre, but proves that most rock and metal bands there on, has it's roots deep down in blues.
Black Sabbath started in 1968 as a psychedelic blues band, under the name Earth. Might be worth a mention, as they pioneered Metal as a result - slightly off genre, but proves that most rock and metal bands there on, has it's roots deep down in blues.
Edited by Hrimfaxi on Thursday 7th March 18:47
gmaz said:
My son has started a school project on how blues music developed into Blues Rock and Psychedelic Rock in the mid-late 1960's. If anyone has suggestions of how to fill 5000 words I'd be very grateful, i.e. major players, music styles, influences
I'll not be exhaustive, and this is mostly from memory which will include "blank spaces", but.......Early "Delta Blues" exponents that caught the public's eye were Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton who recorded tunes played on acoustic guitar with (mainly) a "bottleneck" on one of their fretting fingers to produce a characteristic "slide" guitar sound Like this. This would have been in the 1920's and 1930's.
Putting aside the reasons for more social mobility at the time (of which I know nowt), during the 1940's and 1950's people from the deep South started moving North; mainly to Chicago for better prospects and work opportunities. With them came Delta Blues music, and associated guitarists, still with their acoustic guitars and bottlenecks.
On arrival, one assumes, it was discovered that electric guitars were available along with amplifiers; the combination of which was somewhat louder than a bloke with an acoustic guitar. This resulted in people like Muddy Waters, Elmore James and Son House who still mainly playing Delta Blues with a slide, but was now played using an electric guitar and amp Like this.
At the same sort of time, other guitar players started moving away from slide guitar and more into chords & single note guitar work. An early adopter was T-Bone Walker, although his chord work was more jazz based. Another was Freddie King, along with Albert King, BB King and Buddy Guy who were all more Blues flavoured than T-Bone.
Now. IMO, and that's all it is based on everything I've listened to - an opinion, both T-Bone and Freddie were catalysts for a "Blues Explosion" in the 1960's.
Although T-Bone's playing was super-smooth and jazzy, his lead lines always included a 3 note lick that clearly inspired a certain Chuck Berry for his legendary tune Johnny B Goode. That 3 note lick is still used to this day in blues solos. It is bread and butter to even the beginner guitar player who wants to sound "Bluesy" when playing a solo. Freddie King seemed to be a huge influence on Eric Clapton, which can be heard in his work on "The Beano Album" with The Bluesbreakers. In the mid-60's, Clapton's fast blues lines - inspired by Freddie King - would have been jaw dropping Like this
Based on that, guitar players would have noted that a five-note scale using a flat 3rd note and flat 7th note was a piece of piss to play yet sounded authentically "Blues" over a I-IV-V chord progression.
Which is where we find ourselves in the late 1960's with a huge number of rock outfits playing Minor Pentatonic scales over Blues chord progressions.
Psychedelic stuff, AFAIK, started with The Beatles who were grounded in solid, traditional, music theory which sits alongside Blues stuff. Lennon & McCartney were familiar with plagal chord shifts / picardy thirds / borrowed chords in their song writing, which will by association inspire other musicians to think outside the box (e.g. Pink Floyd)
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