Harmonica player Paul Butterfield and his Blues Band were the catalyst for the explosion of blues rock in America. Their performance of Born In Chicago at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 did as much to introduce white America to electric Chicago blues as the bands spearheading the British invasion. They were of course mining the vein of a sound which had been laid down many years before in the house parties and blues clubs of Chicago's South and West Side by some of the pioneers of the 'Great Migration' - Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, Big Bill Broonzy and Elmore James to name but a few. These were the men who had brought the acoustic Delta blues north via St.Louis and transformed it into a harder-edged style more suited to an urban environment and audience, its wider commercial potential overlooked and unexploited until exposed to a white audience primed and ready for a successor to rock & roll.

The L.A. band Canned Heat were as deeply immersed in the blues as Paul Butterfield, and they reached a wider audience in the late '60's with two huge hits Going Up The Country and On The Road Again, which drew heavily on songs by Henry Thomas and Tommy Johnson recorded way back in the 1920's. Canned Heat veered towards boogie, presaging ther glossier sound of 1970's bands like ZZ Top, The Doobie Brothers and the Allmans, although less so the funkier Little Feat, the straight-ahead blues rock of Johnny Winter or southern rockers Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Stevie Ray Vaughan took blues rock back to its roots in the 1980's, the baton passing after his death in 1990 to the genre's greatest female exponent Bonnie Raitt, and was still very evident in the sound of The Black Crowes and The White Stripes amongst others well into the 21st century. As a style blues rock is now an accepted tradition, but it has to be said that it no longer holds a place at the cutting edge of popular music.

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