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This chapter addresses the influence of the Mississippi Delta style on Chicago's postwar blues. By the time the great Delta blues artists appeared on record the Depression was on, and no matter how magnificent the music is today, the artists really had very little impact. However, after the Depression, when recording picked up again a recognizable style had developed in Chicago. The early country bluesmen had died or disappeared, and by the late 1930s there was an urban blues style that was smoother and more regular, which it had to be because the instrumentation had changed as piano players were added to the solo guitarists. The chapter then looks at the influence of Delta blues on Robert Lockwood Jr., Muddy Waters, Robert Nighthawk, Baby Face Leroy, Johnny Shines, Floyd Jones, Big Joe Williams, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Eddie Taylor, Otis Rush, and Jimmy Reed.

Since 1955, when a Belgian jazz writer helped scribe the first book investigating Big Bill’s life and music, dozens of artists, scholars, journalists, and enthusiasts have left a long trail of written work dedicated to Broonzy and his past. Well into the twenty-first century, this trend continues. These brokers of Broonzy’s life, music, and public memory have shaped and reshaped his story reflecting each respective generation’s own understandings of race, celebrity, blues music, and the black experience in the United States, among other themes. In a sense, Broonzy has become a cipher for unlocking important questions about authenticity, folklore, black identity, music history, and more to a large field of predominately white authors. For nearly sixty-five years, Big Bill and his history pop up along a long trajectory of studies that have viewed him as an object of intrigue and mystery rather than how he wanted to be remembered. Big Bill was an African American, pre-war, pop music celebrity who built and reached the height of that celebrity recording and performing for black audiences. Unearthing his vague, working class past has prevented history from accepting Big Bill for what he was—an agent of black modernity.

The final chapter addresses the temporality of a genre based on tradition. Working from conceptions of tradition gleaned from the epic and historical chronicle, and of modern anxieties about the weight of the past, reveals a resonating, vibrant, multi-temporal field for the blues that employs meta-textual references to the tradition to create ironic distance. Tracing the genealogy of a riff from Robert Johnson’s “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day” to Muddy Waters’s “Rollin’ and Tumblin’, ” through to Nick Moss and the Flip Tops’ “The Money I Make” reveals the dynamic forms of temporal simultaneity that define the blues as a genre. An investigation of improvisation foregrounds the historical rootedness of all creative expression, while the necessary interplay between tradition and reception enables a final interrogation of the relationship between individual and community in the blues.

This chapter discusses the events pertaining to the 1941 Fisk-Library of Congress recording sessions, a project that came about from a study proposed by John Wesley Work III with respect to the 1940 fire incident in Natchez, Mississippi. Work's idea was pitched to the Library of Congress and eventually approved by Alan Lomax. Work and Lomax arrived in Clarksdale and came across Muddy Waters and Son House, possibly by asking for the names of the leading blues musicians. The recording proceeded with House performing five songs, four of them together with his band—Willie Brown on guitar, Leroy Williams on harp, and Fiddlin' Joe Martin on mandolin. Lomax returned to Mississippi the following year and recorded with House once more, spawning ten more tracks. That same year, House headed north and spent the next twenty-one years of his life in musical exile.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of waiting and, in particular, the extreme experience of prison time doing hard labor in the Jim Crow South. The forms of waiting that are created musically echo the tension experienced both by loved ones waiting for someone’s return and by the prisoner enduring the unbearable cruelty of time at Parchman Farm or as a leased convict. The discussion culminates in an analysis of the “extreme present” of enduring physical and emotional pain echoed in blues that depict the experience of addiction and withdrawal, tying together the temporality of waiting with attempts to limit suffering by dwelling in the present. Key to the argument are analyses of Muddy Waters’s “Long Distance Call,” Bessie Smith’s “In the House Blues,” and Tommy Johnson’s “Canned Heat Blues.”

Jimi deepens his entanglement with manager Michael Jeffery by signing another ill-advised contract, and moves with Chas Chandler and Kathy Etchingham into an apartment owned by Ringo Starr. He begins assembling a wide-ranging collection of albums, including many by favourite blues artists Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Elmore James. After a visit with his former bandleader, Little Richard, Hendrix is accosted by the London police due to his skin color and clothing choices. The Jimi Hendrix Experience make their television debut on Ready Steady Go!, and record “Foxey Lady,” “Can You See Me,” “Love or Confusion,” “Red House,” and other original Hendrix compositions. The band’s first single, “Hey Joe” backed with “Stone Free,” is released to rave reviews. Then, while waiting backstage to perform at a Boxing Day matinee, Jimi composes “Purple Haze,” drawing inspiration from a Philip José Farmer science fiction short story. He rings in the new year with Noel Redding’s family.

This chapter describes the recordings of Ora Dell Graham. In the fall of 1940, the year she turned twelve, Ora Dell stood before her classmates in her school auditorium. As John A. Lomax operated a disc recorder, she performed a handful of songs that she animated with dance steps, hand clapping, and vocal effects. Three of these numbers, along with the earliest published recordings of Muddy Waters, subsequently appeared on an album of African American blues and game songs issued by the Library of Congress. This news came as a surprise to her nephew, Sonny Milton. He then asked why anyone would care about a little black girl from Mississippi. The reason is that in November 1940, just three weeks after Ora Dell made her recordings, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish summarized the Library's acquisition policy in the “Canons of Selection,”: “The Library of Congress should possess all books and other materials ... which express and record the life and achievements of the people of the United States.” The Library's canon embraced the entire nation, welcoming not only the papers of a president but the poetry of a schoolyard child. The recordings she made gave tangible evidence of this policy of inclusion.