Electric Blues

Electric blues refers to any type of blues music characterized by the use of electric amplification for musical instruments. The guitar was the first instrument to be popularly amplified and used by early pioneers T-Bone Walker in the late 1930s and John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters in the 1940s. Their styles evolved into the West Coast blues, the Detroit blues, and the Chicago blues after World War II, which differed from the earlier blues in a largely acoustic style. In the early 1950s, Little Walter was a featured soloist on blues harmonica using a small hand-held microphone fed into a guitar amplifier. Although it took a little longer, electric bass guitar gradually replaced stand-up bass in the early 1960s. Electric organs and especially keyboards were later widely used in electric blues.