Linda Edition Mapper

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▶ Duga — Cordes Anciennes — Sidiki Diabaté & Djelimady Sissoko (1970)

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The Birth of Blues

Formed in

Mississippi Delta

Dockery Plantation / rural Southern fields

Scroll down to follow the journey from source to birth

1970 — the year the kora first became the sole star of a recording
Original A

The West African griot tradition of modal pitch flexibility (the origin of blue notes) and narrative oral storytelling, providing the melodic soul of the blues.

Now playing
1933 — when the Lomaxes began recording Black labor songs on Southern prison farms
Original B

Unaccompanied field hollers and call-and-response chants forged under the brutality of Southern plantations and railroad labor, providing the structural cadence and physical rhythm.

After · Blues
Mississippi Delta
Blues

Recorded by Mamie Smith in 1920, this surprise smash hit sold hundreds of thousands of copies, uncovering the massive black non-consumer market and creating the 'Race Records' industry.

The dawn of blues recording and the birth of the race records market.

Two sources become one genre

What to listen for

  • 01 The intuitive change

    It breaks the rules of the parlor sheet-music song: twelve-bar AAB storytelling and the blue-note moan give voice to a brutal, everyday life.

  • 02 Adding / subtracting structure

    A bottleneck slide recreates the portamento of the bare human voice; a single cheap guitar and three chords alone carry melody, bass, and beat.

  • 03 Reading it historically

    Oral culture forged under slavery and sharecropping was fixed onto disc by Okeh and other traveling field-recording sessions — opening a Black non-consumer market ignored by the white industry and formalizing "race records".