Editing Country blues (section)

==History==
Artists such as [[Blind Lemon Jefferson]] (Texas), [[Charley Patton]] (Mississippi), [[Blind Willie McTell]] (Georgia) were among the first to record blues songs in the 1920s.  Country blues ran parallel to [[urban blues]], which was popular in cities.<ref name="Gordon"/>

Historian Elijah Wald notes many similarities between blues, [[Bluegrass music|bluegrass]], and [[Country music|country & western]] styles with roots in the American south.{{sfn|Wald|2010|pp=1589}}  Record labels in the 1920s and 1930s carefully segregated musicians and defined styles for racially targeted audiences.{{sfn|Wald|2010|pp=1391}}  Over time, the rural black and rural white music evolved into different styles, with artists such as [[Bobby Bland]], [[Ray Charles]], and [[Willie Nelson]] lamenting the divide.{{sfn|Wald|2010|pp=1589}}

Folklorist [[Alan Lomax]] was one of the first to use the term and applied it to a [[field recording]] he made of [[Muddy Waters]] at the [[Stovall, Mississippi|Stovall Plantation, Mississippi]], in 1941.<ref name="Gordon">
{{cite book
| last = Gordon
| first = Robert
| title = Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters
| location = New York City
| publisher  = [[Little, Brown and Company|Little, Brown]]
| year = 2002
| isbn = 0-316-32849-9
| pages = 38–39
}}</ref>  In 1959, music historian [[Samuel Charters]] wrote ''[[The Country Blues (book)|The Country Blues]]'', an influential scholarly work on the subject.<ref name="Gioia">
{{cite book
| last = Gioia
| first = Ted
| author-link = Ted Gioia
| year = 2008
| title = Delta Blues
| edition = Norton Paperback 2009
| location = New York City
| publisher = [[W. W. Norton]]
| isbn = 978-0-393-33750-1
| pages = [https://archive.org/details/deltablueslifeti00gioi/page/351 351–352]
| url-access = registration
| url = https://archive.org/details/deltablueslifeti00gioi/page/351
}}</ref>  He also produced an album, also titled ''[[The Country Blues]]'', with early recordings by Jefferson, McTell, [[Sleepy John Estes]], [[Bukka White]], and [[Robert Johnson]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/us/dallas-church-preserving-the-legacy-of-robert-johnson.html?_r=0|last=Christensen|first=Thor|date=November 19, 2011|title=Dallas Church Preserving the Legacy of Robert Johnson|website=[[Nytimes.com]]| access-date=12 August 2022}}</ref>

Charters's works helped to introduce the then-nearly forgotten music to the [[American folk music revival]] of the late 1950s and 1960s.<ref name="Gioia"/> The acoustic roots-focused movement also gave rise to the terms "folk blues" and "acoustic blues", especially being applied to performances and recordings made around this period.<ref name="Rev"/>  "Country blues" has also been used to describe regional acoustic styles, such as [[Delta blues]], [[Piedmont blues]], or the earliest [[Chicago blues|Chicago]], [[Texas blues|Texas]], and [[Memphis blues|Memphis]] blues.<ref name="Rev"/>