Piedmont Blues History

Since Charlotte is in the center of the Piedmont, it became a popular center for early North Carolina blues. As industry and the population more than doubled, musicians began taking notice of the city as a home for recording. Between 1927 and 1938, Victor/RCA established a recording center in Charlotte, after which it moved to Rock Hill, South Carolina.

But it was actually Durham, a small city wedged between three metropolises, that managed to step into the forefront of blues tradition. Tobacco's popularity increased Durham's population by thousands between 1865 and 1930. With tobacco came factories and jobs, and with jobs came people with income who liked music.

Peg Leg Sam, a peg-legged harmonica player, said, "any musician who was any good would come to Durham." Most musicians situated themselves right outside the tobacco warehouses, waiting for workers to take a break or leave to go home. While the warehouses were a popular venue, the work was as seasonal as the crop, so musicians played in other settings as well. Some played in theaters that provided music; others played in private homes. Other settings were cafés, barbershops and house parties.

Blues and pre-blues traditions existed simultaneously in North Carolina, sometimes contiguously. Durham, for instance, was the blues central for the piedmont, while its neighbor, Orange County, still had a strong string band tradition. Even when this Piedmont Blues style was at its height, the North Carolina press ignored it. Knowledge of the music on Pettigrew and Fayetteville streets passed only by word of mouth, because newspapers and radio never made reference to it.

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