The blues highway winds past the plantation houses of the Mississippi Delta to the south-side clubs and tenements of postwar Chicago. While it's a somber trip, humbling, and even distressing, it's also enchanting and joyful -- and reassuring in its success.

The history of the blues is more than a musical chronology. The blues was born the day the West African shoreline fell from the horizon. It was raised amid the institutionalized savagery of the Deep South and flourished in the dark heart of America's largest cities. We owe the blues to those who bore the pain of enslavement behind the frightful shadows of our collective soul. All of the blues then, is dedicated to the men and women who traveled beyond our ignorant place, and to those who could not.

During the thirties and forties, the blues spread northward with the migration of many blacks from the South. The blues also became electrified with the introduction of the amplified guitar. In some cities like Chicago and Detroit, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, and Elmore James among others, played what was basically Mississippi Delta blues, backed by bass, drums, piano and occasionally harmonica. At about the same time, T-Bone Walker in Houston and B.B. King in Memphis were pioneering a style of guitar playing that combined jazz technique with the blues tonality and repertoire.

In the early nineteen-sixties, the urban bluesmen were "discovered" by young white American and European musicians. Many of these blues-based bands like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Cream, Canned Heat, and Fleetwood Mac, brought the blues to young white audiences. 

Some rock guitarists, such as Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, and Eddie Van Halen have used the blues as a foundation for offshoot styles. While the originators like John Lee Hooker, Albert Collins and B.B. King--inspired their heirs Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, and later Eric Clapton and the late Roy Buchanan, among many others to make fantastic music in the blues tradition.

The latest generation of blues players like Robert Cray and the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, among others, as well as gracing the blues tradition with their incredible technicality, have drawn a new generation listeners to the blues.