Blues
The 10 Best Blues
Tracks of All Time
Twelve bars, three chords and a form flexible enough to carry a century. First recorded in 1920, moved north to Chicago and plugged in after the war, and the ancestor of very nearly every American music on this map.
- Origin
- The Mississippi Delta, 1920
- Tempo
- 60–130 BPM
- Also known as
- delta blues, chicago blues, country blues, electric blues
- Tracks
- 10
- Updated
- 2026-08-30
Listen to the whole list
Play it through here →One record after another, with the verdicts
Take this list to YouTube → (opens in a new tab)
Opens the list on YouTube as a playlist you can save to your own account. We never see your account, and nothing is stored here.
Number 1: Robert Johnson / Cross Road Blues
1936 · Vocalion
One man, one guitar, and a sense of pursuit that no amount of retelling has managed to domesticate. The myth around Johnson is a distraction from how precise the playing actually is.
Number 2: Howlin' Wolf / Smokestack Lightnin'
1956 · Chess
One chord, a harmonica and a howl, held for three minutes without developing at all. The most hypnotic record on this list and the one the British bands could never get right.
Number 3: Muddy Waters / I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man
1954 · Chess
Willie Dixon's stop-time riff, and the record that turned a Delta form into a band arrangement. Everything electric downstream of here is standing on this bassline.
Number 4: Mamie Smith / Crazy Blues
1920 · OKeh
The first blues record ever released, and it sold in numbers nobody in the industry had predicted. An entire market for Black music was discovered by accident, in one afternoon.
Number 5: John Lee Hooker / Boogie Chillen'
1948 · Modern
A foot on a board, one guitar and no interest whatsoever in the bar line. Hooker's refusal to count is not a limitation, and half of rock and roll failed to notice.
Number 6: Bessie Smith / Downhearted Blues
1923 · Columbia
The Empress of the Blues on her debut, outselling everything around her. Smith phrases like a horn player, which is the technique every singer on the soul list inherited.
Number 7: T-Bone Walker / Call It Stormy Monday
1947 · Black & White
The electric guitar stops imitating a voice and becomes a lead instrument with its own vocabulary. B.B. King said hearing it was the reason he started; that is the whole review.
Number 8: B.B. King / 3 O'Clock Blues
1951 · RPM
King's first hit, and the arrival of the single-note, vibrato-heavy style that became the default setting for lead guitar everywhere for fifty years.
Number 9: Blind Willie McTell / Statesboro Blues
1928 · Victor
Twelve-string ragtime blues played with a lightness the Delta players never went in for. A reminder that the form was regional long before it was a genre.
Number 10: Bo Diddley / I'm a Man
1955 · Checker
A boast, a riff and a maraca, all sharpened to a point. Muddy answered it within months, which is the closest the blues ever came to a rap battle.