3 Songs To Learn if You Want To Start a Blues Band

If you want to start a blues band, there’s no shortage of classic tunes to guide you. Though choosing only three songs feels impossible, I decided to highlight distinct paths of equal importance. We’ll move through the list in reverse order, beginning with a radical transformation of the form in the late 1960s. Next, we’ll stop in Chicago to hear an artist who had traveled north from Mississippi and helped modernize the blues. And finally, we return to the South for a Faustian bargain tale, without which music today might sound very different.

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“Red House” by Jimi Hendrix (1967)

In the 1960s, they called Eric Clapton “God.” But I’m not sure what you call the guy who arrives in London and blows God’s mind by playing the guitar with his teeth. For us mortals, we’ll just call James Marshall Hendrix, Jimi. “Red House” appears on Hendrix’s debut, Are You Experienced. Though the chord progression in “Red House” follows a standard 12-bar blues arrangement, there’s very little conventionality here. Instead, Hendrix aims his psych-blues for the cosmos, igniting a different kind of Big Bang right here on earth.

“Mannish Boy” by Muddy Waters (1955)

In 1981, The Rolling Stones joined Muddy Waters on stage at the Checkerboard Lounge on Chicago’s South Side. At this momentous gig, the world’s greatest rock and roll band ripped through “Mannish Boy” with their idol. And watching them perform with their hero feels like a rare instance where one can observe evolution in real time. (It was Waters’s song “Rollin’ Stone” that gave the band its name.) The 10-minute jam shows how The Stones first learned the blues before perfecting rock and roll. So if you aspire to such heights, Waters’s answer to Bo Diddley’s “I’m A Man” is required learning. Just ask Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

“Cross Road Blues” by Robert Johnson (1937)

You don’t get to the electric blues of Muddy Waters and others in Chicago without the genre’s rural origins in the Mississippi Delta. According to blues mythology, Robert Johnson made a pact with the devil, trading his soul for guitar mastery. However, listening to Johnson’s recordings reveals that the devil must have walked away empty-handed. Johnson’s soulful howl in “Cross Road Blues”, as an example, continues to shape generations of rock and blues musicians. He may have received little recognition in his lifetime, but Johnson’s music has proved to be immortal.    

And speaking of any truth behind Johnson’s fateful deal, well, there’s no mention of it in “Cross Road Blues”.

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees,
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees,
Asked the Lord above, “Have mercy, now, save poor Bob if you please.”

Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns