Top Ten Blues Artists of All Time

Selecting only 10 top artists to choose as your top blues bands of all time is a daunting task, and you maybe asking yourself how or why each of the blues artists on my list got there. So let me tell you.

Personal preference obviously plays a big role in selecting my top picks but that's not all that went into it. In fact, I'm not above putting an artist on my list that I don't even listen to, if they have had a big impact on the music world. In order to be a top blues artist of all time the band has to have had a big impact on the blues genre as it is today. So I also put a heavy weight on how many other blues bands they have influenced and how groundbreaking their work was for their time. If they opened the door to a new style that wasn't popular before they came along, they get big points in my book whether I like that style or not.

I didn't number this list or place them in any particular order, because who am I to say who the very best blues band of all time is? The best I can do is narrow it down to the ten top blues artists. I don't expect everyone to agree with my picks so I'd love to know what you think. Please take a moment to vote on who you think is the best blues artist is from my list and use the comments section of the bottom of the page to tell me who you think I missed. I hope you enjoy reading this list as much as I enjoyed creating it!

Robert Leroy Johnson (May 8, 1911 – August 16, 1938) was an American blues musician, among the most famous of Delta blues musicians. His landmark recordings from 1936–1937 display a remarkable combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that have influenced generations of musicians. Johnson's shadowy, poorly documented life and death at age 27 have given rise to much legend.

Considered by some to be the "Grandfather of Rock 'n' Roll", his vocal phrasing, original songs, and guitar style have influenced a broad range of musicians, including Muddy Waters, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Johnny Winter, Jeff Beck, and Eric Clapton, who called Johnson "the most important blues singer that ever lived". He was also ranked fifth in Rolling Stone's list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

Huddie William Ledbetter (January 1888 – December 6, 1949) was an American folk musician, notable for his clear and forceful singing, his virtuosity on the twelve string guitar, and the rich songbook of folk standards he introduced.

He is best known as Leadbelly or Lead Belly. Though many releases list him as "Leadbelly," he himself spelled it "Lead Belly." This is also the usage on his tombstone, as well as of the Lead Belly Foundation.

Although he most commonly played the twelve string, he could also play the piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin, concertina, and accordion. In some of his recordings, such as in one of his versions of the folk ballad "John Hardy", he performs on the accordion instead of the guitar. In other recordings he just sings while clapping his hands or stomping his foot. The topics of Lead Belly's music covered a wide range of subjects, including gospel songs; blues songs about women, liquor and racism; and folk songs about cowboys, prison, work, sailors, cattle herding and dancing. He also wrote songs concerning the newsmakers of the day, such as President Franklin Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Jean Harlow, the Scottsboro Boys, and Howard Hughes.

Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed Lady Day by her loyal friend and musical partner Lester Young, Holiday was a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing.

Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. Above all, she was admired for her deeply personal and intimate approach to singing. Critic John Bush wrote that she "changed the art of American pop vocals forever."

She co-wrote only a few songs, but several of them have become jazz standards, notably "God Bless the Child", "Don't Explain", and "Lady Sings the Blues". She also became famous for singing jazz standards written by others, including "Easy Living" and "Strange Fruit."

Mississippi John Hurt (July 3, 1893 or March 8, 1892 — November 2, 1966) was an influential country blues singer and guitarist. He sang in a loud whisper, to a melodious finger-picked guitar accompaniment. Born John Smith Hurt in Teoc, Carroll County, Mississippi and raised in Avalon, Mississippi, Hurt learned to play guitar at age 9. He spent much of his youth playing old time music for friends and dances, earning a living as a farm hand into the 1920s. In 1923 he partnered with the fiddle player Willie Narmour as a substitute for his regular partner Shell Smith. When Narmour got a chance to record for Okeh Records as a prize for winning first place in a 1928 fiddle contest, Narmour recommended John Hurt to Okeh Records producer Tommy Rockwell. After auditioning "Monday Morning Blues" at his home, he took part in two recording sessions, in Memphis and New York City . The "Mississippi" tag was added by Okeh as a sales gimmick. After the commercial failure of the resulting records, and Okeh Records going out of business during the Great Depression, Hurt returned to Avalon and obscurity, working as a sharecropper and playing local parties and dances.

In 1963, however, a folk musicologist, Tom Hoskins, inspired by the recordings, was able to locate Hurt near Avalon, Mississippi. Seeing that Hurt's guitar playing skills were still intact, Hoskins encouraged him to move to Washington, D.C., and begin performing on a wider stage. His performance at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival saw his star rise amongst the new folk revival audience. Before his death he played extensively in colleges, concert halls, coffee houses and also on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, as well as recording three further albums for Vanguard Records. The numbers his devotees particularly liked were the ragtime songs "Salty Dog" and "Candy Man", and the blues ballads "Spike Driver Blues" (a variant of "John Henry") and "Frankie".

Hurt's influence spanned several music genres including blues, country, bluegrass, folk and contemporary rock and roll. A soft-spoken man, his nature was reflected in the work, which remained a mellow mix of country, blues and old time music to the end.

Hurt died in November 1966 from a heart attack in Grenada, Mississippi.

Bessie Smith (July 9, 1892 or April 15, 1894 — September 26, 1937) was an American blues singer. The most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s, Smith is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era, and along with Louis Armstrong, a major influence on subsequent jazz vocalists.

The Complete Recordings, Vol. 1 is the first set in a series that collects all of her recorded work on 5 two-disc sets. The music here was recorded between February 1923 and April 1924 and features her mostly just accompanied by piano. From ‘Downhearted Blues’ all the way through to ‘Hateful Blues’ Smith’s voice is equal parts iron and velvet, and she sings like a woman who would – and has – spit in the face of the devil himself.

Before she died in 1937 – at age 43, from injuries sustained in an automobile accident – she laid a foundation of blues songs that have influenced generations of female singers, including Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, & Norah Jones.

Reverend Gary Davis, also Blind Gary Davis, (April 30, 1896 – May 5, 1972) was a blues and gospel singer and guitarist. His unique finger-picking style influenced many other artists and his students in New York included Stefan Grossman, David Bromberg, Roy Book Binder, Woody Mann, Nick Katzman, Dave Van Ronk, Tom Winslow, and Ernie Hawkins. He has influenced the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Wizz Jones, Jorma Kaukonen, Keb' Mo', Ollabelle and Resurrection Band.

Born in Laurens, South Carolina, Davis became blind at a young age. He took to the guitar and assumed a unique multi-voice style produced solely with his thumb and index finger, playing not only ragtime and blues tunes, but also traditional and original tunes in four-part harmony.

In the mid-1920s, Davis migrated to Durham, North Carolina, a major center for black culture at the time. There he collaborated with a number of other artists in the Piedmont blues scene including Blind Boy Fuller and Bull City Red. In 1935, J. B. Long, a store manager with a reputation for supporting local artists, introduced Davis, Fuller and Red to the American Record Company. The subsequent recording sessions marked the real beginning of Davis' career. During his time in Durham, Davis converted to Christianity; he would later become ordained as a Baptist minister. Following his conversion and especially his ordination, Davis began to express a preference for inspirational gospel music.

In the 1940s, the blues scene in Durham began to decline and Davis migrated to New York. The folk revival of the 1960s re-invigorated Davis' career, culminating in a performance at the Newport Folk Festival and the recording by Peter, Paul and Mary of "Samson and Delilah", also known as "If I Had My Way", originally a Blind Willie Johnson recording that Davis had popularized.

Big Bill Broonzy (26 June 1898 – 14 August 1958) was a prolific American blues singer, songwriter and guitarist. His career began in the 1920s when he played Country blues to mostly black audiences. Through the ‘30s and ‘40s he successfully navigated a transition in style to a more urban blues sound popular with white audiences. In the 1950s a return to his traditional folk-blues roots made him one of the leading figures of the emerging American folk music revival and an international star. His long and varied career marks him as one of the key figures in the development of blues music in the 20th century.

Broonzy copyrighted more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including both adaptations of traditional folk songs and original blues songs. As a blues composer, he was unique in that his compositions reflected the many vantage points of his rural-to-urban experiences.

Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James (June 9, 1902 – October 3, 1969) was an American delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter.

James' sound was unique to the blues genre and although he influenced other blues musicians, such as Robert Johnson, few have been able to recreate his style. His high pitched voice seems otherworldly and frail, even in his early recordings. He is said to have had a 'preaching' style of singing and was known to also sing spirituals. James is regarded as a gifted and distinctive guitarist. He often used an open D-minor tuning (DADFAD) which gave his instrument a dark and desolate tone. James reportedly learned this tuning from his musical mentor, the unrecorded bluesman Henry Stuckey. Stuckey in turn was said to have acquired it from Bahamanian soldiers during the First World War. Robert Johnson also recorded in this "Bentonia" tuning (see below), his "Hell Hound On My Trail" being based on the James opus "Devil Got My Woman." James' classically-informed, finger-picking style was fast and clean, using the entire register of the guitar with heavy, hypnotic bass lines. James' style of playing had more in common with the Piedmont blues of the East Coast than with the Delta blues of his native Mississippi.

James has often been called one of the exponents of the Bentonia School of blues playing, which was later carried on by guitarist and singer Jack Owens. Calt, in his 1994 biography of James, I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues, maintains that there was indeed no style of blues that originated in Bentonia, and that this is simply a notion of later blues writers who overestimated the provinciality of Mississippi during the early 20th century, when railways linked small towns, and who failed to see that in the case of Owens, "the 'tradition' he bore primarily consisted of musical scraps from James' table." Whatever the truth is regarding the origins of James' style, or of the "Bentonia School," he certainly stands as one of the most original of all blues performers.

Albert King (April 25, 1923 – December 21, 1992) was an American blues guitarist and singer.

One of the "Three Kings of the Blues Guitar" (along with B. B. King and Freddie King), he stood 6' 4" (192 cm) and weighed 250 lbs (118 kg) and was known as "The Velvet Bulldozer". He was born Albert Nelson on a cotton plantation in Indianola, Mississippi. During his childhood he would sing at a family gospel group at a church. He began his professional work as a musician with a group called In The Groove Boys, in Osceola, Arkansas.^[1] He also briefly played drums for Jimmy Reed's band and on several early Reed recordings. Influenced by blues musicians Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson, but also interestingly Hawaiian music, the electric guitar became his signature instrument, his preference being the Gibson Flying V, which he named "Lucy".

King was a left-handed "upside-down/backwards" guitarist. He was left-handed, but usually played right-handed guitars flipped over upside-down so the low E string was on the bottom. In later years he played a custom-made guitar that was basically left-handed, but had the strings reversed (as he was used to playing). He also used very unorthodox tunings (i.e., tuning as low as C to allow him to make sweeping string bends). A "less is more" type blues player, he was known for his expressive "bending" of notes, a technique characteristic of blues guitarists.