Why the Blues Really Hit The Spot

I love the blues, but by its very nature its a pretty limited art form. There's only so much you can do with a couple of verses and choruses. The folks playing today just don't have anything new to add to the conversation. Its not to suggest they aren't good musicians, its just that they're playing someone elses breaks from forty-five years ago. Plus those old recordings have a certain essense of their time and place that you're never going to recapture with newer recordings.

For pre-war the best way is to do a run of the south by region, starting with the delta. The fine work of Samuel Charters can inform this process quite a bit. Here is a partial bibilography:

1959 - The Country Blues. New York: Rinehart. Reprinted by Da Capo Press, with a new introduction by the author, in 1975.
1963 - The Poetry of the Blues. With photos by Ann Charters. New York: Oak Publications.
1963 - Jazz New Orleans (1885-1963): An Index to the Negro Musicians of New Orleans. New York: Oak Publications
1967 - The Bluesmen. New York: Oak Publications
1975 - The Legacy of the Blues: A Glimpse Into the Art and the Lives of Twelve Great Bluesmen: An Informal Study. London: Calder & Boyars.
1977 - Sweet As the Showers of Rain. New York: Oak Publications
1981 - The Roots of the Blues: An African Search. Boston: M. Boyars.
1984 - Jelly Roll Morton's Last Night at the Jungle Inn: An Imaginary Memoir. New York: M. Boyars.
1986 - Louisiana Black: A Novel. New York: M. Boyars.
1991 - The Blues Makers. (Incorporates The Bluesmen and Sweet As the Showers of Rain) Da Capo.
1999 - The Day is So Long and the Wages So Small: Music on a Summer Island. New York: Marion Boyars.
2004 - Walking a Blues Road: A Selection of Blues Writing, 1956-2004. New York: Marion Boyars.
2006 - New Orleans: Playing a Jazz Chorus. Marion Boyars.

Blues evolved. Never defined, only refined. At which point can we say it's not authentic? Before piano, upright bass, electricity? It's still evolving and statements that it's dead is diminishing to current artists like Marcia Ball and Susan Tedeschi.

I'm sorry, but your examples of Marcia Ball and Susan Tedeschi only prove my point. They are gifted craftspeople, they have mastered a form. They are not producing innovation on the level of those who forged the genre. Respectfully, I cannot listen to their stuff without thinking 'why listen to this when I can have Freddie King, T-Bone Walker, Otis Rush, or even Ike Turner'. In those guys the innovation crackles out of every nuance. With the artists you mentioned all I can think is 'heard that before'.

Chashmal, your point is somewhat true, but it's of limited value and you overstate it's importance. Furthermore, you offer no explanation for why the blues has stopped evolving. The way I see it Blues morphed into R&B which later became Rock 'n Roll. While some branches of the Rock tree are decidedly non-blues, the dominate, at least commercially, form of rock for the past 20 years, namely rap, is fundamentally a mutation of blues.

I believe what you take as innovation in the past is more accurately described as artists trying to crossover to a larger, mainly white, audience. Freddie King did surf guitar music and played the theme to "Bonanza". T-Bone Walker worked supper clubs as a dancer/singer. Muddy Waters pretended he was a Folk Singer. Ike Turner was trying to sell records. For the most part current blues artist are not stretching the blues form because their audience doesn't want them to. It's a niche market and the audience wants to hear what they consider "authentic" blues. There are exceptions and I would argue that recent recordings by James Ulmer, Otis Taylor or even V.M. Bhatt are quite innovative.