Many laborers, wanting a little recreation after many hours hours of work picking cotton, or some other kind of work would create basic instruments with one string using discarded wood and a cigar box. Sometimes they would be plucked and sometimes ‘drawn’ with a bow, like a violin. We should remember that mass produced guitars were not available then, and common working folk couldn’t have bought them anyway.
At the beginning of the twentieth, the Sears company began to offer things at a distance and created the celebrated Sears catalogue, which was sent all over the U.S.. From the catalogue someone could get a cheaply manufactured Stellar guitar for around one dollar, and this is how early blues performers taught themselves how to play the blues
The first blues music to be produced in the Mississippi Delta was most likely played using a bottleneck or slide. This might have been made of metal or glass, and most commonly the real neck of a beer bottle! Two other things support this idea. The strings on less well made instruments tend to be set high off the frest than more expensive models, which makes them hard to perform with in the standard way, by forming chords in standard tuning for example. Bottleneck guitar is normally performed in open G, C or D, which reduces the chord structures, and, what’s more the slide does not have to touch the frets. The bottleneck just sits on top of the strings, so string height is not a problem.
The second thing is that the environment in the Southern states was often stuffy and with high humidity. These conditions are not good for guitars and they can lose their tuning quite. It’s a whole lot simpler to make the right note and compensate for any tuning problems if using a bottleneck.
A huge turning point in blues guitar playing arrived when a musician started to play around with finger picking the strings. Banjo finger picking of course existed, but all guitar playing was done with some kind of plectrum, fabricated from ivory or bone.
At some time in the Southern states, the playing of drums was against the law, possibly due to the war-like connections – the plantation bosses were always sure to remove anything that could lift men’s spirits and incite rebellious thoughts. But of course, all men need release from their worries and labors, and music was an easy path way for these sons of African slave labour.
The first complicated finger style contained the sound of the drum in the single string thumb stroke, while a finger described the tune. The lyrics passed on the pain of the ‘blues’ and the blues music resulting emanated from souls in tormnt – this was the painful birth of the blues.
Since those days long gone, blues guitar music has branched out and changed enormously, with probably five or six important different styles evolving in the 20s and 30s, such as the Texas Blues, South Carolina, Chicago Swing and Piedmont ragtime blues. The advent of the electric guitar paved the way for ever greater evolution and the rest is history.
