A subgenre is a music category within a main category. For example, within blues music, there is Urban Blues, Rural Blues, and Electric Blues. In Rock music, there is Gothic Rock, Punk Rock, and Post-Punk.

Urban Blues, a combination of the soul of spirituals and work songs, and the theatrics of vaudeville, ragtime, and Tin Pan Alley music, was prominent in the 1920s. It typically featured a band of musicians both small and large, but could also just be piano with vocals. Urban Blues dominated by female singers such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey, Alberta Hunter, and more.

Photo: Blues singer Ma Rainey & her band, The Jazz Hounds.

Rural blues refers to blues music directly descended from work songs, field hollers, and sometimes spirituals, accompanied by only a guitar and vocals, or vocals with handclaps and foot-stomps. The first recorded guitar blues song was an instrumental by guitar pioneer Sylvester Weaver in 1923. Other examples include Blind Mamie Forehand, Elizabeth Cotten, Skip James, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Lead Belly.

Photo: “Half-length portrait, seated young lady, holding nine string banjo.” Ambrotype, C. 1865

Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American Collection | Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library | Yale University

Electric Blues rose to prominence at the end of World War II, but had been slowly making its way into the recording world beginning in the mid-1930s. Electric Blues is also where we start to see the beginning of what would go on to become Rock N’ Roll. Some of electric blues’s early pioneers include Charlie Christian, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Memphis Minnie, and Chuck Berry.

Photo: Blues singer-songwriter & composer Memphis Minnie

Gothic Blues takes the darker elements of African American history and daily life—the truth about how violent and depressing slavery was, and how hard its aftermath has been to recover from—as well as the darker aspects of religion & religious storytelling (the crucifixion of Jesus, drinking his blood, etc.), and blends it with the darker aspects of music. Examples of instrumentation in goth music include using minor chords, melodies that can either be stark and simple, layered with ghostly and haunted sounding effects like echos, pianos, and organs, or it could be brash and terrifying, with jumbled up chords, screeching instruments and loud hollers. Lyrics typically include themes that are unsettling, morbid, or depressing.

Sitting side-by-side with Gothic Blues are Blues Novelty Songs; songs that are written deliberately with gothic elements for shock value. These included subjects like murder, voodoo/witchcraft, and various Halloween themes. The early music of Rural Blues artist Skip James, the recording of “Strange Fruit” by Blues & Jazz singer Billie Holiday, the song “Blood Thirsty Blues” by Urban Blues artist Victoria Spivey, and the Electric Blues version of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins “I Put A Spell on You” all fit under the Gothic Blues umbrella.

Photo: “Negro woman praying at grave of son in cemetery at New Roads, Louisiana on All Saints' Day” (Nov. 1938)