Blues music faces many challenges as the few remaining old greats reach the ends of their careers and the internet and digital media make it much more difficult for artists to profit off their recordings. However, I argue that the days in which pessimists had any grounds to argue that "the blues is a dying artform" are now over. With the recent proliferation of blues bands, blues albums, blues festivals, blues clubs, and blues societies around the world, it seems that the reversal of fortunes would have to be great indeed to return the blues to anything resembling a moribund state.
I trace the story of the decline and reemergence of blues popularity back to the 1960s, a time when blues enjoyed more widespread popularity than it ever had before. Blues was still popular among African Americans, and the genre had recently gained widespread acceptance among whites during the Folk Blues Revival and the British Invasion. However, soon black fans would jump ship for what they saw as the more cool and relevant sounds of soul, leaving a still underdeveloped white fan base. Blues musicians who were already well established, such as Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and Buddy Guy, would enjoy strong support during the 1970s, but very few new blues voices would emerge, as young black musicians focused on soul and funk and young white musicians directed their energies toward rock and roll.
The first wave of new interest in blues came in 1983 when Stevie Ray Vaughan released his debut album Texas Flood. Vaughan's powerful guitar style signaled to aspiring young musicians that one could still achieve popularity playing blues rather than just blues-inspired rock. At around the same time, a culture of new blues bands was growing up in various centers around the country centered on particularly active blues enthusiasts, such as the band Roomful of Blues in the Northeast, and the artists on Alligator Records in Chicago. A second wave of interest came in the 1990s with the arrival of two young guitarists, Jonny Lang and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, who achieved a great deal of popularity while still in their teens, showing that their was now a solid market for young electric blues musicians.
The latest developments in the popularity of the blues are largely due to new technologies that make sharing music easier and more affordable. The ability to now find almost any music one can think of on the internet allows music fans to transcend the barriers of space and time and has fueled a Balkanization of musical taste in the last decade. At the same time, Americans continue to grow wealthier, and the blues fan base is concentrated among middle aged fans, who tend to be much wealthier than the young. Therefore, despite the lack of mainstream appeal of the blues, technology allows blues fans to find music they like no matter where it is being recorded and to form communities that bring fans together like never before. Baby Boomer fans have plenty of money to purchase music and travel to attend concerts by their favorite artists when they come around on tour. Furthermore, while selling music is less profitable, the cost of recording it is way down, allowing almost any artist to record their music, which they can then share on the internet and use to build a fan base that defies geographical boundaries. With the ease of sharing on the internet, combined with the proliferation of blues societies around the world, there is little chance anymore that a Mississippi Fred McDowell or an R.L. Burnside could exist for long without being discovered. Rather, artists have the opportunity to develop a community of supporters right from the start, and the relationships between artists and fans provide a positive feedback loop that leads to even more music.
Two major criticism of the blues today is that the fan base is growing old and that the music is not developing. The blues fan base does indeed consist largely of middle aged people, but the fan base appears to be growing rather than shrinking. This implies that the blues as it is today appeals mostly to older people, but also that new generations of older people are discovering the blues and keeping the fan base alive. Also, women are increasingly joining the ranks of both fans and performers in what was once a male-dominated genre. It is also true that there have been very few paradigm-shifting performers in the blues since the 1960s, but this may be due more to the blues's lack of mainstream popularity than any dearth of creativity. In fact, many performers, from widely popular bands like the Tedeschi Trucks Band and Joe Bonamassa to intense creators like Corey Harris and Jason Ricci, have been pushing the blues into new territory, but doing so from a variety of angles that appeal to different aspects of the fan base.
In past decades, the argument that blues is a genre in danger of dying out made some sense. However, it seems that today any such argument that persists is rooted in a very narrow and traditional definition of what constitutes authentic blues. As a blues fan who has seen the options for enjoying and learning about blues expand so much just in the decade I have been following the genre, it is my strong personal opinion that the blues is now in better shape than it has been at any point since the 1960s, and it is in no danger of dying out.
*After-deadline edit--In our small group discussion in class, Logan brought up another concern I had forgotten to mention. He had reviewed an article on Gary Clark, Jr., a young Austin, TX, musician whose style is rooted in the blues but crosses over into other genres. The article criticizes blues fans for not supporting young artists who are pushing the music into new areas. On the one hand, this article could be dismissed as being written from the outside by someone who is not familiar with the blues community. However, this article does raise a valid concern. Many blues-rock bands such as the White Stripes, the Black Keys, Gary Clark, Jr., and Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears have risen to prominence with little attention from the blues community, and this does not necessarily reflect well on the blues community. However, part of the issue is the path such musicians have taken to get where they are. While blues was an important part of their music, they ultimately aspired to the status of modern rock musicians, and so they approached their music careers through the channels of modern rock music for the most part. On the other hand, musicians who are doing comparably innovative things with their music such as Anders Osborne and Derek Trucks, forged strong connections within the blues community and therefore enjoyed the blues community's support during the development of their careers. As far as I can tell, the blues community did not shun one group while supporting the other. Rather, the musicians themselves determined the paths they wished to take and the ways in which they wanted to develop their careers. It would be advisable for the blues community to reach out more to performers such as Gary Clark, Jr., Jack White, and the Black Keys to include them alongside the likes of the Tedeschi Trucks Band and Joe Bonamassa, but on the other hand many blues fans do already follow and appreciate these musicians' efforts. And there also does seem to be an innate sense within most blues fans of whether something is more blues or more something else. If one looks at the music of Derek Trucks and Joe Bonamassa versus the music of the Black Keys and Gary Clark, Jr., there is clearly a mix of blues and rock in both instances, but general consensus seems to indicate that the former acts are slightly more blues, while the latter two are slightly more rock. All four should serve to inspire future blues musicians, but it seems that Trucks and Bonamassa are more pushing from within the blues community, while the Black Keys and Gary Clark, Jr. are within the rock community and are instead pulling the blues in a new direction from without, much in the same manner that the heavily blues-influenced rockers Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix so successfully pulled the blues in new directions for earlier generations.
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