Celebrating the Guitar: Origins of the Transatlantic Blues

By Emma Leibowitz, August 2 2026

Long ago, before Blues music emerged within enslaved African American communities in the American South, its essential elements took root on the other side of the globe: the Sahel region of West Africa.

Though there has been much speculation surrounding the specific origin of the Blues, historians have noticed similarities between the pentatonic scales of Sahelian music and the Blues music we recognize today as distinctly American. 12.5 million Africans were trafficked to the Americas through the Transatlantic Slave Trade between 1500 and 1820, though only 10.7 million survived the journey.

Through instruments including the ngoni, xalam, and akonting, Africans taken from the Senegambia and West Central Sudanic belts brought with them the beginnings of Blues to the United States. The legacy of these instruments laid the foundation for the origins of Blues in America, as enslaved Africans began adapting their West African musical techniques to the only instruments available: the European acoustic guitar, violin (fiddle), and harmonica.

At first, enslaved Africans’ music relied heavily on drums. But that shifted with the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina in 1739, after which slavemasters banned drums in North America. Only string instruments remained. Thus, the Blues guitar was born.

Rooted in the South: The Development of Blues Music

“Blues can be traced back to slavery times of Black people in the United States,” says Grammy-nominated West Georgia Bluesman Jontavious Willis as he sits in his living room, guitar cradled on his knee. “I think the majority of it is Black American folkways, y’know—food and agriculture and poems—all these kinds of things put together.”

Generations since the advent of Blues, Jontavious Willis has a mission: to reinvigorate today’s Blues with the spirit of the past. Taking shape within Black communities years before the Emancipation Proclamation, Willis says the “heyday” of Blues took place during the 1920s. “It really got to a head with the combination of ragtime and vaudeville and work songs and spiritual songs, Black-faced minstrel—a lot of those things went right into the Blues world.”

Having grown from the forced interweaving of European instruments with West African musical styles, Blues today reflects a unique cross-pollination that spans continents. “The Blues has almost every instrument you can think of: the fiddle, the mandolin, the piano, harmonica, guitar, on and on,” says Willis. But for the first time, without white Europeans playing them, “the Blues really transformed the playing style of all those instruments. Especially the harmonica, which was a German instrument, but when you look for a harmonica, you’ll probably find a Blues musician on the front of it, because nobody were playing instruments in the hole like a lot of the Black musicians were playing.”

Old Techniques and New Tricks: Shaping the Blues of Today

Furthering the intermeshing of European and West African instruments, 29-year-old Virginia native Yasmin Williams’s 2021 album Urban Driftwood—for which she learned to play the 21-stringed West African kora—honors Blues and its history.

“It’s a special record to me in that it ties together a lot of influences of mine, such as musical influences,” Williams told Fifteen Questions, “West African griots, go-go music grooves, the Piedmont Blues of Elizabeth Cotten or Algia Mae Hinton, the solo guitar tunes I’d be listening to at the time, along with my own style.”

Paying homage to the past, Williams’ techniques include flipping the guitar from “normal” position to lap tapping mid-song, adding percussion with her tap shoes, floating another voice on a kalimba affixed to her guitar, or even switching fingerpicking styles partway through a piece.

Inspired by the work of Amadou Kouyate, 150th generation of the Kouyate family of Manding Dali, who are renowned oral historians and musicians from West Africa, Williams challenged herself to extend the reach of West African music and see “how it could mesh with more African American/urban musical styles.” She told Foxy Digitals, “Incorporating Amadou Kouyate’s djembe and cadjembe in a more hip hop style in some parts of the song along with my kora, guitar, and kalimba playing, allowed me to combine my West African classical music influences and my childhood hip hop influences, which is very cool and unlike anything else I’ve released so far.”

Bringing It Home

For Willis, Blues music is about connection—to others, to the past, but especially to his family. “Blues is just an extension of Black folkway and Black art,” he says. “A lot of it wasn’t documented—or very little documentation on just the community aspect of the Blues. And that’s kind of how I got into it.”

For Williams, it’s the same. Until her album Urban Driftwood, which weaves her heritage into her instrumental acoustic music through rhythmic homages, culturally rooted instruments, and personal storytelling, Williams admits, “I didn’t acknowledge that my identity had any influence on my music at all.”

Like Willis, Williams felt as though the techniques of her ancestors had been lost to time. “I also feel like, since I didn’t have much exposure to acoustic guitar music at all when I started playing as a kid, that my identity and musical background could influence my playing much more since I really didn’t have anyone I looked up to as someone to emulate or try to sound like.”

Both artists have stepped up to the plate, bridging the gap between traditional West African styles and the European-inspired Blues guitar of enslaved peoples in the American South, carving brand-new niches for themselves in today’s musical landscape.