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The minstrel show, with its blackface performers, crude racial caricatures, and the song "Jump Jim Crow" becomes part of American popular culture.
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Slave Songs, the earliest collection of African-American spirituals, are published.
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Scott Joplin publishes "Maple Leaf Rag." Ragtime will become a key influence on the blues
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Victor Records releases the first known recording of Black music, "Camp Meeting Shouts."
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The musician W.C. Handy sees a bluesman playing guitar with a knife at a train station in Mississippi.
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Ralph Peer makes his first field recordings in Atlanta, Georgia, marking the recording debut of both the folk blues and what will later be called country music.
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The first male folk blues records, featuring singers Papa Charlie Jackson and Daddy Stovepipe, are issued.
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Amid widespread economic ruin, sales of records and phonographs plummet, crippling the recording industry.
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A danceable mix of swing and blues, Jump blues was pioneered by Louis Jordan
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Eddie Durham records the first music featuring the electric guitar. This instrument will help to transform the sound of the blues.
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Muddy Waters makes his first Chicago recordings, beginning his tenure as the dominant figure in the Chicago blues and a key link between the Mississippi Delta and the urban styles.
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Elvis Presley makes his recording debut on Sun Records with a version of Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "That's All Right."
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Samuel Charters publishes The Country Blues, fueling the blues element of the folk music revival.
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Muddy Waters and B.B. King perform at the Fillmore East, a concert venue in the East Village region of New York City, to a predominantly white audience.
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Congress declares 2003 the "Year of the Blues," commemorating the 100th anniversary of W.C. Handy's encounter with an unknown early bluesman at a train station in Mississippi.
