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History Of The Delta Blues

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The blues is the earliest genre of music to come from the United States. It started as the poor, often slaves, singing or playing music on whatever they could afford.

Blues can trace its origins back to slaves and the poor of the U.S., who sang and played whatever acoustic instruments they could find. As the blues became more popular and mainstream, it began to take shape as a real genre. One of the first mainstream musicians was Charley Patton. He is considered by many the father of the delta blues. He was born down south in Mississippi. He lived on the Dockery Plantation, where both Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker both lived as well. They both learned from Patton’s style and later would become stars. Patton’s guitar playing mostly consisted …show more content…

Even the loudest archtops couldn’t keep up with pianos, drums, horns, and vocals. Through the 1930s, most guitarists were limited to playing rhythm backgrounds while all the other instrumentalists played all the solos. They simply could not get the sound to cut over the other louder instruments. People had been trying to get a louder sound from the guitar for years. One attempt was doubling up on the strings, twelve instead of six. This found little success in increasing volume. Microphones worked fairly well, but caught all the background noise. George Beauchamp with a few partners made the tri-cone guitar with a few partners. This had three aluminum disks built into the guitar for amplification. The disks were attached inside under the bridge of the guitar. While this increased the sound some, it was not satisfying to Beauchamp. He went on to develop the electric …show more content…

They created the electromagnetic pickup which allowed a clean and sustained sound. Two horseshoe magnets had the strings pass through them, and they picked up the vibrations from the strings without touching them or needing to pick up vibrations from the guitar’s body. In 1931, he and Rickenbacker released the first electric guitar, nicknamed the Frying Pan because of its aluminum body and strange shape. Its pickup grew in popularity and led to pickups becoming a fairly common technology. Soon after the Frying Pan, Gibson came out with the ES-150, which is often considered the first commercially successful electric guitar. It was a simple archtop with a pickup, and it sold many units. Soon, electric guitar became influential in

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