The blues.
Where almost everything began.

Howlin' Wolf had been performing "Smokestack Lightning" since the early 1930s before Chess Records captured it in January 1956. The song reached the UK before most American teenagers knew it existed, became a touchstone for the British Invasion, and was handed back to US audiences via the Rolling Stones on ABC's Shindig! in 1965.

T-Bone Walker's 1942 Capitol recording "Mean Old World" and his 1947 Black and White Records session that produced "Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad)" are the documents where electric blues guitar was invented. By fusing Delta blues structure with big-band jazz harmony, Walker handed a new language to B.B. King and every amplified guitarist who followed.

Released on October 5, 1968, on Chess Records' Cadet Concept imprint, "Electric Mud" put Muddy Waters's voice over a psychedelic rock band assembled by producer Marshall Chess, co-produced with Charles Stepney and Gene Barge, and featuring guitarist Pete Cosey, who would later define Miles Davis's electric period. The album sold 150,000 copies in six weeks, peaked at number 127 on the Billboard 200, got called the worst blues album ever made by Rolling Stone, and went on to influence Jimi Hendrix, John Paul Jones, and Chuck D.

B.B. King and Albert King were born two years apart in the Mississippi Delta, shared a borrowed surname, and built the two most influential and opposite guitar techniques in blues history. The story of their parallel careers, Albert's landmark 1967 Stax album "Born Under a Bad Sign," and the rock world they jointly unlocked is the real architecture of the electric blues.

Christone "Kingfish" Ingram's 2019 debut album, produced by Tom Hambridge at Ocean Way Studios with Buddy Guy guesting on "Fresh Out" and Keb' Mo' playing across six tracks, was the blues canon making a formal introduction in real time. A twenty-year-old from Clarksdale, ninety-one weeks at number one on the Billboard Blues Chart, and a generation that had never heard it.

Son House was the direct teacher of both Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, and the same song passed through all three men's hands across two decades. The story of how House vanished to Rochester while his students became legends is the real root of the blues canon.

The Black Keys' fourteenth album 'Peaches!' is a blues covers record born from personal grief — Dan Auerbach's father was terminally ill during the sessions — and recorded live at Easy Eye Sound in Nashville with guitarist Kenny Brown, bassist Eric Deaton, and multi-instrumentalist Jimbo Mathus. Here's why its stripped-back return to R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough hits differently than a simple stylistic reset.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd's "Ledbetter Heights (The 30th Anniversary Sessions)" re-records his landmark 1995 debut in full, with co-producer Jerry Harrison and drummer Chris "Whipper" Layton back in the room — and, for the first time, vocalist Noah Hunt singing material originally recorded with Corey Sterling. Here's why it works.

Taj Mahal's new album 'Time' — out May 1 via Resonatin' Records — was recorded in 2010 but arrives now carrying a previously unheard Bill Withers song, a 30-year band partnership, and proof that the 84-year-old blues legend has nothing left to prove and everything left to say.