I Should Take More Photos: Traces of Blues Revival in Today’s Hit Music

How do we see the blues in 2025? Where do we find the traces of this history-bending American form, more than a hundred years since its development? You can hear pianist Jon Batiste playing the blues at Carnegie Hall, blending it with Beethoven, or you can buy an Eric Clapton Stratocaster® for $2,149. These are examples of a living legacy that can simultaneously be paradigmatic and also invisible. A close listening to the current Billboard Top 40 suggests that there is little left of the blues in the structure of pop, while nobody would take serious issue with the assertion that the blues is where popular music comes from.

Amiri Baraka, in his fundamental text, Blues People, wrote in 1963 that the blues “is the parent of all legitimate jazz, and it is impossible to say exactly how old blues is — certainly no older than the presence of Negroes in the United States.” More crucially, Baraka writes that “blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives.” Baraka also knew how we got to the world of Eric Clapton and Jack White (both heavily represented on Spotify “blues” playlists): “Rhythm & blues, the urban contemporary expression of blues, was the source of the new popular revitalization; rock ’n’ roll is its product.”¹

So what happens next? The rock ’n’ roll that came out of rhythm and blues is most easily found in Chuck Berry, beloved of The Beatles, a story that does not need retelling here. But the blues rock that has becomes synonymous with the word “blues” is a hybrid that asks us to pause. The blues that led to the form’s mass popularization in the sixties comes from a different source: original blues 78s made in the twenties and thirties and reissued in 1952 on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and the field recordings made in the thirties of artists like Lead Belly by John Lomax and his son, Alan. A folk singer named Bob Dylan released his debut album in 1962, and it included songs like “House of the Rising Sun,” made popular later by The Animals. By the time the blues rock explosion explodes, bands like Led Zeppelin are covering traditional blues folks like “Gallows Pole,” almost certainly derived from Lead Belly’s version (though the financially canny Jimmy Page managed to copyright the arrangement, something he often did with traditional songs popularized or arranged by others).

These songs were different than the party R&B tunes that flowed through Little Richard and Chuck Berry into the Beatles and Stones, and that slowed through the DNA of jazz improvisers like Coleman Hawkins. Delta blues recordings have a sense of mourning and a linguistic complexity that is distinct, even when the chord changes are the same as those in the party tunes. In “Blues People and the Poetic Spirit,” a keynote given at NYU in 2013, the scholar Robin D.G. Kelley pointed out that “the blues emerged under the violent, oppressive conditions of the post-Reconstruction South.” As he points out, “the Delta was a major industrial source of cotton production for the world, major battlefield for national labor struggles, and a port to world commerce and opening to the Mississippi river, major conduit of global capital.” One of his points is worth siting with for a minute: “The blues was forged not in some isolated backwater but in one of the centers of American global capitalism at the height of a revolution.”²

Think about work songs like “Waterboy,” which Odetta performed on Harry Belafonte’s television show in 1959. Dylan has said repeatedly that Odetta was one of the people who inspired him to do what he did, and there are few more powerful live performances than her rendition of “Waterboy,” and if you’ve never seen it, pair that with Kelley’s quote and let it all marinate. She is singing about global capitalism — these are enslaved laborers calling for water while they work. The song’s many original writers know their hammer might end them up in jail, and they know that “silver and gold” has been “robbed” from their pockets. Whatever the song’s (disputed) origins in terms of melody and structure, we know it because — to fuse Baraka and Kelley — enslaved Africans in the Delta were being robbed by capitalists and recorded by people like the Lomaxes.

The use of what Kelley calls the “highly racialized category of the ‘folk’” needs a quick look here. As he writes, “The Folk Art category imposes a kind of timelessness of the primitive, the anti-modern, making it impossible to see the blues as an African expression of Modernity.”³ We need to take one more cue from our theoretical founders, to adduce Stuart Hall’s famous dictum, but in its fuller, less-often reproduced form: “Race is... the modality in which class is ‘lived,’ the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and ‘fought through.’”⁴

The class resistance of work songs and the blues is there in Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” an extended cousin of the blues, Ozzy Osbourne ably channeling the same wail that Odetta uses in “Waterboy,” and talking of the same workers when he sings of "the poor" carrying out the wishes of the “war machine.” Note that guitarist Tony Iommi was the son of Italian immigrants and lost his fingertips in an accident at a sheet metal factory. A working-class band from Birmingham, without any doubt.

The sixties blues juggernaut was in many ways an imagined community, to borrow and slightly distort historian Benedict Anderson’s phrase, an historical leap across decades and countries. When the blues rockers hit the charts, Black American music was approaching the juggernaut of James Brown. In an almost identical leap, when rap started to pilfer the records Brown made in the seventies, it was the exact same historical refining and extrapolating that blues fans had carried out: in both cases, recordings begat new recordings, not oral transmission of songs, as the original conception of folk (often a fanciful projection) held that music was conveyed across generations.

This mode of historical recapture, a modality of knowledge that refracts both class and race, is where I see traces of the blues today. As of this writing, Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos is the number one album on the Billboard 200.⁵ The YouTube visualizer for the title track is not much like anything in popular music (though you could say it owes something to the deeply layered songs Kendrick Lamar has been making in the last five years). The text in Bad Bunny’s video is three slides of musicology, currently pushing 80 million views. What it expresses is the historical line of bomba, through plena, all the way to reggaeton. Bomba, like the blues, is the music of “enslaved Afro-descendants,” and its relationship to reggaeton is almost precisely analogous to the bond between American blues and rap.

These slides are also all in Spanish, itself a subtle flex against the jingoism of the Trump administration, which is apparently failing to prevent the spread of solidarity that Bad Bunny represents. As part of an album that also samples a beloved 1975 song by El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico in order to sign what Bad Bunny calls “a love letter to Puerto Rico,” this visualizer seems exactly in line with the various iterations of the blues across the last century. Whatever is legislated in Congress is no match for the rule of song, perhaps the only American law worth learning.