The 12 bar blues, with the three chords as we know them today, did not develop overnight. It took literally a generation for black guitarists in Mississippi to figure that out. African musicians came from a modal culture, not a diatonic one. So the earliest blues, like Charley Patton’s “When you Way Get Dark”….are one-chord blues. You can feel the 12 bar structure, and you can actually take the melodies he sings and put the three chords of the blues under them, but in fact, it’s just one chord and it’s modal. So I look at the history of the blues as kind of a struggle of a modal people to get their heads around the idea of a diatonic instrument and diatonic music. - Bob Brozman
( Brozman shares a few insteresting anecodes and plays a mean guitar - Ed)
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