**Shooby **sort of said this, but my impression is that there aren’t many artists thought of as blues singers because most have wider repertoires. Blues, like most identifiable schools of music, was the product of a time and place and culture that is mostly gone. Most of my Pandora channels cross into bluesmen, from the classics to the current, and I find Keb Mo’ and others blending pretty seamlessly into the mix of other styles and subgenres.
The always under-appreciated Colin James has a new album of blues covers, Blue Highways
Highly recommended.
I suspect that a lot of people today might have the same impression of “the blues” that I do. Aside from Robert Cray and SRV, most blues I’ve listened to (and I confess it’s not a lot) seems to consist of a wanky guitar solo sandwiched between a couple verses of lyrics, and the lyrics are just there to justify the guitar solo.
There are a handful of really good local blues guitarists around here, and I’ve attended some of their shows, and … I got bored before the show was over. Sure, I admired the great guitar playing, but damned if every song didn’t start sounding the same after a while.
Edit: It’s like that cliche I-vi-IV-V chord progression that every other pop song from the 1950s used. “God, haven’t I already heard this song?”
I’m surprised Jonny Lang hadn’t been mentioned yet, though it’s been a few years since “Lie to Me.”
Monte Montgomery and Kenny Wayne Shepherd get after it in the guitar blues genre.
x1000
Exhibit A: Strong Persuader
I can’t believe I forgot the best of the best these days: Alicia Keys
Really though,I think what the OP is seeing is more the freedom that artists have today. Time was, if you sang blues you couldn’t really do other genres. Everything was so divided by the record companies and if you’d signed with a blues label then that’s what you had to do. A voice and soul like Alicia is not relegated to one mood, or one set of chord progressions today the way it would have been 30 years ago.
Which is what, 30 years old? Not really contemporary.
Stuff White People Like #116: Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore
You might as well ask where is the musical innovation in the blues? Where are the great songwriters in the blues? The answer is the same. They live and die by each other. No innovation means no great performers to remember.
Speaking of innovation issues and such …
The Rolling Stones have just released a new album: Blue & Lonesome. Includes another Blues lover, Eric Clapton, on two tracks.
12 covers of classic Blues songs by folks such as Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf. One of the videos from the album.
Sort of going back to their roots. Might stir up a little interest in the genre.
But, yeah. White folk in an old blue land.
I think David Bromberg answered the OP in his song, You’ve Got To Suffer If You Want To Sing The Blues. I’ve met many of the old time blues legends (my buddy owns a blues bar). Invariably they played the blues because they lived the blues.
I saw Pinetop Perkins perform shortly before the end of his career/life. He was 93 when I met him, and he was touring because he needed the cash. I asked him how he chose keyboards of all things. Turns out he was playing guitar at a bar when he was in his late teens. His gf (he told me it was his wife?) showed up at the bar and caught him with a woman. She grabbed a knife from the kitchen and sliced up one of his arms so badly that he couldn’t play guitar and learned piano as a fall back. For a big chunk of his career he played bars where black people weren’t welcome as customers. When he was 92(?) he survived his car being hit by a freaking train. When he died in early 2011 he was 97 and had twenty dates scheduled to play.
Son Seals was another blues legend who was touring out of necessity in his sixties (and he looked like a 90 year old). He died of diabetes complications just a year after we met. He had 14 siblings and all but one died before him. His wife shot him in the face, requiring all sorts of reconstructive surgery. Someone broke into his house and stole his collection of valuable guitars. They weren’t insured. Years later, while on tour, his house burned to the ground. He lost a leg to diabetes.
Sam Myers was another great one who lived the blues (his autobiography is titled Sam Myers: The Blues is My Story). He developed juvenile cataracts when he was seven. Botched surgery left him blind. He toured the last fifteen years of his life with Texas blues legend Anson Funderburg. The last time I hung out with Sam he was planning surgery for his laryngeal cancer (which made his vocals even more poignant) while chain smoking like a demon. He died shortly thereafter.
TL/DR: We generally have things better nowadays. Without slaves working the fields you do not get the kind of music inspired by that horror. Different times, different expressions.
He’s still recording and touring, it was just a suggested album in his body of work.
I’ve always liked Hamilton Loomis. He stretches across a few genres: pop funk and blues.
That song is, yes, but Cray has been releasing albums regularly all along, and is still touring and recording.
Cray is absolutely contemporary.
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The other responses have certainly covered some important contributors like Robert Cray etc. I just wanted to include a local legend (to the Bay Area anyway) Kelvin Dixon. Very humble guy but has played with many of the greats including Irma Thomas. You can still catch him performing around the East Bay, mainly at the Cheeseboard in Berkeley, CA. Her performs there with The Mighty Mules Blues Band.
Taj Mahal is still going.
I’ll double the previously mentioned Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band (though it’s country blues, rather than what you’d usually think of as the blues).
I’ll add in the British performer, Stealth, and the American, Valerie June.
There’s also The Dead Weather, who are a much heavier and more mechanical sound but still very much the blues.
There is Christone Kingfish, Samantha Fish just to name a couple. We’ve been going to a couple of blues clubs in Houston over the last fifteen years and there is some great talent, albeit not very well known. But, I agree there is not a huge audience for it as it maybe once was.
Innovation in the blues is hard because the genre is so limited in structure. But just because the radio stations don’t play it much doesn’t mean it’s dying. There are plenty of blues practitioners out there. You just have to search them out.