Traces the evolution of the various strands of blues music - from Mississippi Delta Blues, East Texas Blues, Piedmont Blues to Midwestern Urban Blues and Chicago Blues - within the broader context of the culture on which it commented. Barlow describes how the blues sound - with its recognizable dissonance and African musical standards - and the blues text which provided a bottom-up view of U.S. society became "bulwarks of cultural resistance" and how the blues artists themselves became associated with the wandering, fast living, and tragic life histories of archetypal African American folk heroes.