These are some of the words that come to the minds of many people when they think of folk music. But human beings are creative animals, and they have a tendency to change things of value handed down to them by their forefathers to fit their own way of life. This has certainly been the case with that type of folk music called blues. Two powerful social forces--migration to the cities and advancing technology--changed blues as they changed the way of life of the people who sang and played blues.

Blues were born in the relative quiet and solitude of the fields and shacks of black sharecroppers in the rural South. At the end of a day's toil, a ...