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organised a ban on the record labels to secure more royalties for the Musicians. Decca settled 12 months later and new independent labels like Savoy, Aladdin and Modern sprung up in New York , Chicago and LA. Two consequences of the strike were that singers like Frank Sinatra became as famous as band leaders like Henry James and Tommy Dorsey and the new labels then specialised in black jazz, Blues and Gospel.

Early post-war blues

The wars had meant mass migration with papers like the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier even advertising for blacks to make the migration north to a better life via the Illinois Central and famous Highway 61 as blacks replaced white workers in Detroit , Chicago and New York who had gone off to fight in the wars. With the migration was brought the blues, but the acoustic solo finger picking styles of the early bluesmen got kind of drowned out in the city noise. Jazz guitarists in the mid-thirties were the first to experiment with an electric sound,but the key blues men who linked the rural south with the industrial North were T-Bone walker and Muddy Waters. T-Bone Walkers' sound was smooth, richly complex and jazz like.
There was no hard connection to country blues. It was Muddy who modernized country blues making the sound bigger louder and hotter than anything that had gone before

Electric blues used amplified electric guitars, electric bass, drums, and harmonica. Chicago became a center for electric blues in the early 1950s. But the first innovation was ensembles as opposed to the single Blues guitar player. Chicago blues was influenced to a large extent by the Mississippi blues style, because many performers had migrated from the Mississippi region. In addition to T-Bone and Muddy Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, and Jimmy Reed were all born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. Their style was characterized by the use of electric guitar, sometimes slide guitar, harmonica, and a rhythm section of bass and drums. J. T. Brown who played in Elmore Jame s's or J. B. Lenoir's bands, also used saxophones, but these were used more as "backing" or rhythmic support than as solo instruments.

Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) were well known excellent harmonica (called "harp" by blues musicians) players of the early Chicago blues scene. Other harp players such as Big Walter Horton were also influential. Muddy Waters and Elmore James were known for their innovative use of slide electric guitar. B.

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