The singer was sitting on the faded linoleum that covered the uneven dirt floor of the small hut close to the mouth of the Gambia River in West Africa. A handwoven rug was spread under his dark robes to keep them out of the dust. A handful of people who had heard the music as they passed by were crowded into the small space. Since there was no door, they only had to push aside the flowered cloth curtain that hung in the door opening. He was half singing, half chanting in long, free, poetic lines, reciting a story about a local king before the European came, a king who was fighting against another tribe coming into his territory. As he sang, the people clustered in the room, most of them in shirtsleeves and rumpled cotton trousers, murmured and nodded. In his hands he was holding a small, homemade string instrument that he played in a series of rhythmic figures, over and over, the soft, muted tone of the strings a light, scurrying accompaniment to the deep resonance of his voice. There was a gentle sound of bare feet tapping against the linoleum, following the movements of his fingers.

This is a fragment drawn from one collection of travel writings belonged to an English adventurer called Jobson who lived around the half of the 1800s. The singer was a griot of the tribe wolof , and it’s possible that someone like him first began  to shape the music that today we know as the blues. The term " blues " itself was a word of common use in America much before the birth of the music; it can be traced back to Elizabethan English and by the middle of the 1800s when such word was used in the United States with many of the meanings that still has got. To say I’ve got the blues, in the 1830s and 1840s meant " to be bored ". By 1860s, it had the connotation of unhappiness, sadness, loneliness, sorrow. It happened after 1700s that some slavers, possessory of colonies on the coasts of Africa, began the black cargo transport of selling in America, where unskilled workers represented lower indispensable cost. This is the season of the great forced migration, uprooting from the own earth: we are already to the historical time of  degradation of black people to the rank of animals, amassed like beasts in the holds of the great ships of the European colonizers, from where painful outcry of their soul comes out, torn from their huts, from jungle, where they had organized their life in harmony with the forces of the nature, land that they won’t see anymore. With fatal progression, to the eyes of the white man of the South of the United States, where most of the slaves was lead in order to work in the great plantations, black man translates itself from passive instrument how he was considered before abolition of the slavery, in a potential enemy to fear and to fight. In this historical-social context, a cultural background grew up inside of the black communities of the South from which that musical genre drew origin towards the end of 1800s  and, later on, it will take the definition of Blues. A lot of elements suggest the Blues could have taken shape between poor hills of the State of Mississipi. This State had a large and isolated African-American population and was an area of pervasive poverty, this meant people were forced to create their own entertainment. In the north-west counties of Mississipi, the famous Delta cotton land, where the only possibility to work was that one to spend all the day to plow and pick up cotton in the immense plantations, the concentration of African-American communities was so dense (85% of the total of the population) that musical life preserved melodies and instrumental styles directly coming from typical African elements which, later on, spread over the South: from Louisiana to Texas, Tennensee, Alabama until Oklahoma. What would suggest the fact that Mississipi is the place of birth of the Blues is both the high number of singers coming from the counties of the Delta who, for first, recorded their repertoire and the background from which such musical material originated, that’s to say, the huge plantations where cotton was cultivated and the groups of prisoners who worked along the roads. Anyway, it’s always difficult to resist to the temptation to continue to look for social influences rather than in the genius of a single musician. In different periods we can however  characterize several great bluesmen that can be defined as real engines of this kind of music, for istance, Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and many others. Sometimes in the South today you still can walk along a countryroad and, from across a sunlit field or from a yard close to a tar-paper house, you can hear somebody singing to himself: the songs are free and simply rhymed arranged with one or two melodic phrases verses; this kind of songs are called generally hollers. These old melodies are one of the two  important sources from which the Blues was derived. The other is the work song: twenty or thirty years ago, passing along the countryroads, it was still possible to pass segregated gangs of black workers scattered alongside the dirt roads in Mississipi, Louisiana, or Texas chopping weeds or dragging away stumps and trash. As they were working they followed a song leader who kept them together by singing short improvised phrases that they answered with a single repeated line as a refrain. These loose chants were the work songs, and until 1950s it was possible to hear the rythmic pattern of work-song styles in some of the blues recorded by Mississipi artists. The structure of the Blues is composed therefore from all these elements: the African griots, the hollers, working songs and the traditional songs of the South, land in which many cultures were melted together. The only element that lacks to us is who sang for the very first time a Blues song. However, it’s clear now that we can trace clearly the path of this vital musical style which, for almost one a hundred years, has continued to find ways to keep its unique identity even as it has continually changed and renewed itself.

People keep asking me where the Blues started and all I can say is that when I was a boy we always was singing in the fields. Not real singing, you know, just hollerin’, but we made up our songs about things that was happening to us at that time, and I think that’s where the Blues started. (Eddie Son House)