The Global South

ABSTRACT:

The history of blues music includes, or should include, an account of the way in which this substantially African American creation, a product of the US South and the Great Migration, has been transformed over the past century into a global phenomenon, one performed by local musicians and embraced by audiences in virtually every corner of the world. Since that comprehensive account of the blues’s globalization has yet to be written, this introductory essay offers a provisional outline based on what is currently known—a knowledge base notably augmented by the seven essays addressing this issue’s theme, “blues music in transnational context.” The globalization process takes place in six roughly sequential stages, I argue, beginning with the music’s transatlantic migration from the US to the UK and Europe in the 1950s and early 1960s, an early diffusion framed by British and continental blues scholarship. The UK blues scene isn’t just the first non-US scene to achieve critical mass, but the male blues-rock artists it promotes, especially the Rolling Stones and Cream, end up critically inflecting the aesthetics of emergent scenes in Europe and beyond. B. B. King, touring widely and frequently outside the US, is a key agent of blues’s global spread; the International Blues Challenge in Memphis stages an annual rite of return for the widespread cohort of blues musicians produced by globalization, even as digital technologies radically democratize the performative playing field, enabling musicians such as Luna Lee, a young South Korean YouTuber, to seek and consolidate global audiences.