“I’ve turned out to be kind of a guitar anthropologist exploring
the frontiers of colonialism, because that’s where all the
interesting music happens. European guitars arrive in standard
tuning and often without instruction, so all over the
world—from Mississippi to Hawaii to Papua New Guinea to
Africa and everywhere in between—open tunings are
spontaneously developed by native people who encounter this
bizarre diatonic instrument and try to adapt it to play modal
music. The 12-bar blues, with the three chords as we know
them today, did not develop overnight. It took literally a generation
for black guitarists in Mississippi to figure that out.
African musicians came from a modal culture, not a diatonic
one. So the earliest blues, like Charley Patton’s “When Your
Way Gets Dark” and stuff like that, are one-chord blues. You
can feel the 12-bar structure, and you can actually take the
melodies he sings and put the three chords of the blues under
them, but in fact, it’s just one chord and it’s modal. So I look
at the history of the blues as kind of a struggle of a modal
people to get their heads around the idea of a diatonic instrument
and diatonic music.”