Blues fiddle

"Blues fiddle" is a generic term for bowed, stringed instruments played on the arm or shoulder that are used to play blues music. Since no blues artists played violas, the term is synonymous with violin, and blues players referred to their instruments as "fiddle" and "violin".

While unequivocally an African-American creation, with the rising popularity of the blues, violinists in the Anglo-American dance fiddling traditions and white country fiddlers, adopted stylistic elements and added songs from the blues to their repertoire.

Blues violin features most prominently in rural blues, string-band, jug band and jazz. It won this attention because, "The violin is by nature a lead instrument that can replicate vocal expressions through the use of vibrato and sliding notes."

In the 17th century, before the blues existed as a genre, the violin featured prominently in African-American string bands.

As a result of the social climate in the early 20th century, especially in the rural Southern United States, black fiddlers and black music in general were under-represented in the music industry. Blues violin comprises a part of the larger repertoire of African American string-band music, first recorded in the 1920s. Some of the earliest documented blues fiddling is Bessie Smith's recording with Robert Robbins in 1924.

The surviving recorded music from this era presents a skewed portrait. Dixon, Goderich and Rye's discography of pre-1999 blues and gospel recordings identifies sixty-eight fiddlers as principal artists and accompanists. As Marshall Wyatt points out, "the violin once held center stage in the rich pageant of vernacular music that evolved in the American South … and the fiddle held sway as the dominant folk instrument of both races until the dawn of the 20th century." As the practice demands of the fiddle conflicted with the work life of most musicians during the Depression, fiddlers found little opportunities to record. The violin fell out of use among blues players beginning in the 1930s.

When the record business began to expand in the mid 1950s, increasing demand for guitarists and a change in style resulted in even fewer chances for frontline fiddlers to participate. Another reason for the violin's exclusion in post war blues was that it could not be effectively electrified. When artists migrated to the industrial centers from the Mississippi delta and rural south, they found a way to do so, but African-American music later mostly abandoned the instrument.

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