The mainly solo vocal with acoustic fingerstyle guitar accompaniment developed in the rural Southern United States in the early 20th century.
[2] Historian Elijah Wald notes many similarities between blues, bluegrass, and country & western styles with roots in the American south.
[3] Folklorist Alan Lomax was one of the first to use the term and applied it to a field recording he made of Muddy Waters at the Stovall Plantation, Mississippi, in 1941.
[2] In 1959, music historian Samuel Charters wrote The Country Blues, an influential scholarly work on the subject.
[5] He also produced an album, also titled The Country Blues, with early recordings by Jefferson, McTell, Sleepy John Estes, Bukka White, and Robert Johnson.