Instruments
Delta blues guitarists commonly put this object on one of their fingers to alter the sound.
What is a bottleneck slide?
The blues first developed in this area of the United States that is sometimes called "The Most Southern Place on Earth."
What is the Mississippi Delta?
This rhythmic device that emphasizes offbeats is often present in blues music.
What is syncopation?
This technological development separates Chicago and Texas blues styles from the earlier Delta blues.
What is the electrification of instruments?
This mass movement saw over 6 million African Americans move from the rural south to urban cities between 1916 and 1970 to find better work opportunities and avoid racial discrimination.
What is the Great Migration?
The lyrics of "Down in the Dirt Road Blues" by Charley Patton, and many other blues songs, follow this repetitive lyric form.
What is AAB form?
This alternative type of guitar, used in acoustic Delta blues performances, has a steel dome on its face.
What is a resonator guitar?
Until composer and musician W. C. Handy visited the Delta and did this, the blues were only an oral tradition, and were not yet nationally known.
What is wrote down and published blues songs?
Blues musicians choose notes from this minor pentatonic scale with an added flat 5th degree.
What is the blues scale?
Skip James, and other singers from his town Bentonia in the Delta, sang in this register of their voices for a gentle, sometimes haunting effect.
What is the falsetto register?
These 4 musical genres had a hand in influencing the birth of the blues.
What are African American work songs, spirituals, field hollers, and also Hawaiian slack-key guitar?
This "long-short" tripletized rhythm present in blues music divides the beat unevenly, and can create a laid-back, dragging feeling.
What is shuffle rhythm?
This is the term for the guitar technique that sees the finger stretch the string slightly down along the fretboard for a slight change in pitch.
What is string bending?
Early Delta blues was often performed in these informal rural gathering places, where musicians played for tips, food, and community rather than fame.
What are juke joints?
This musical form organizes blues music into a repeating harmonic cycle built on I, IV, and V chords, and makes the music take on a familiar emotional progression.
What is 12-bar blues form?