City Blues
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City Blues is blues shaped by urban recording studios, theaters, cabarets, street districts, piano rooms, and professional accompaniment. The sound is more arranged than country blues: piano, horns, small jazz bands, guitar accompanists, verse-chorus craft, clearer diction, and lyrics about apartments, streets, jobs, nightlife, trains, and city trouble.
History
City Blues developed as the record industry, vaudeville circuits, and migration-era urban life converted blues from local folk practice into commercial entertainment. Mamie Smith's 1920 success opened the market, while Bessie Smith, Clara Smith, Victoria Spivey, Lonnie Johnson, Leroy Carr, and Tampa Red built a sophisticated recorded blues vocabulary in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, and other cities. It influenced classic female blues, piano blues, early R&B, jazz-blues singing, and the polished urban sound that electric blues inherited after World War II.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues
- Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues
- Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta
- AllMusic