Styles: Bar Band Blues (aka Chicago/Electric Blues) 3

While the club blues, jazz, and jump blues traditions were largely centered on the two coasts and represented the sophisticated styles of an emerging upwardly mobile, working-class, urban Black population, the bar band blues style found in midwestern cities such as Chicago and Memphis was much more the music of the industrialized working poor. The sound and the sartorial culture of the performers reflect the differences between those regions. While club blues and jump blues bands dressed in neatly tailored suits, bar band blues musicians tended to dress in everyday work or street clothes, and their music tended to be much more distorted, with much less enunciated lyrics. Even though their music was exciting and certainly met its social moment, bar band blues musicians tended to be less technically proficient and musically tutored than club blues or jump blues musicians.

With his more sophisticated brand of post-war blues, Memphis's B.B. King is somewhat of an anomaly amongst this panoply of bar band blues guitarists. Fronting a large band with horns, he simultaneously drew on the jump blues tradition, the early electric guitar stylings of T-Bone Walker, gospel vocalists, and eventually jazz arranging and chord voicing. Here is his 1950 recording of "Mistreated Woman"♫ .