What is Piedmont Blues?
Piedmont blues (also known as East Coast or Southeastern blues) refers primarily to a guitar style characterized by a fingerpicking approach in which a regular, alternating thumb bass string rhythmic pattern supports a syncopated melody using the treble strings generally picked with the fore-finger, occasionally others. The result is comparable in sound to ragtime or stride piano styles. The Piedmont style is differentiated from other styles, particularly the Mississippi Delta blues, by its ragtime-based rhythms.
Unlike the raw, slide-heavy Delta blues, Piedmont blues features a lighter touch, greater melodic complexity, and a bouncing, danceable quality. Blues researcher Peter B. Lowry coined the term, giving co-credit to fellow folklorist Bruce Bastin. The style draws from multiple roots: African American work songs and spirituals, white string band traditions, banjo frailing techniques, and ragtime piano music adapted to the guitar.
Origins & Lineage
The Piedmont blues was named after the Piedmont plateau region, on the East Coast of the United States from about Richmond, Virginia to Atlanta, Georgia. Piedmont blues musicians come from this area, as well as Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and northern Florida, western South Carolina, central North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama – later the Northeastern cities such as Boston, Newark, New Jersey, and New York.
Blues music in North Carolina likely developed in the period around the turn of the twentieth century. It developed at a time when Black people in the South were faced with increasing hardships. The basis of the Piedmont style began with the older “frailing” or “framming” guitar styles that may have been universal throughout the South, and was also based, at least to some extent, on formal “parlor guitar” techniques as well as earlier banjo playing, string band, and ragtime.
What was particular to the Piedmont was that a generation of players adapted these older, ragtime-based techniques to blues in a singular and popular fashion, influenced by guitarists such as Blind Blake and Gary Davis. Recording artists such as Blind Blake, Josh White, Buddy Moss, and Blind Boy Fuller helped spread the style on the strength of their sales throughout the region. It was nationally popular with the African-American audience for about twenty years from the mid-1920s through to the mid-1940s.
Key figures include Blind Blake, who recorded more than 80 tracks before his demise in 1933; Reverend Gary Davis, who taught Blind Boy Fuller and collaborated with a number of other artists in the Piedmont blues scene; Blind Boy Fuller (1904–1941), who was one of the most popular of the recorded Piedmont blues artists; Blind Willie McTell, who provided a solid blues repertoire for the Allman Brothers, and Bob Dylan was a devoted disciple of McTell’s work; and female pioneers like Etta Baker and Elizabeth Cotten, who preserved the tradition across generations.
How It’s Practiced
In the Piedmont finger style, the thumb picks a regular, alternating bass string pattern while the fore-finger(s) picks out a syncopated melody on the treble strings. The resulting sound is a highly-rhythmic walking beat comparable to ragtime piano styles. Practitioners often use open tunings, particularly open G (D-G-D-G-B-D), to facilitate complex patterns and fluid chord voicings.
Techniques include sliding, hammer-ons, pull-offs, and banjo-style rolls—all executed in fingerstyle to create rapid melodic runs and percussive effects. Sometimes finger picks are used for volume, and there is often a hint of banjo technique in the typical Piedmont sound. The guitar was most commonly acoustic—six-string or twelve-string—though Blind Boy Fuller famously played a National steel resonator guitar for extra volume on street corners.
Piedmont blues styles reflects this, meshing traces of gospel, fiddle tunes, blues, country, and ragtime into its rolling, exuberant sound. Subject matter ranged from humorous hokum songs with double entendres to melancholy blues about love, poverty, and hardship, reflecting the lived experience of Black communities in tobacco-farming regions.
Piedmont Blues Today
As a form of Black American popular music, Piedmont blues fell out of favor on a national basis after World War II. By the late-1950s, it was being performed at US folk music revivals and festivals initially by established Piedmont blues artists such as Josh White, Rev. Gary Davis, and Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, as well as Cephas & Wiggins, John Jackson in later years.
While musicologists such as George Mitchell, Peter B. Lowry and Tim Duffy collected recordings by the aging community of Piedmont blues players, younger musicians such as Stefan Grossman, Roy Book Binder, Jorma Kaukonen, Paul Geremia, Keb Mo’, Michael Roach, Samuel James, Eric Bibb, Ry Cooder, David Bromberg, and Guy Davis have carried on the Piedmont tradition, often having “studied” under some of the old Piedmont masters.
Today, seekers encounter Piedmont blues through instructional workshops, streaming playlists, online video lessons, and regional blues societies. Organizations like the Music Maker Foundation in North Carolina and the Piedmont Blues Preservation Society support living artists and educational programs. Festivals, documentary films, and reissues on labels like Smithsonian Folkways have made historical recordings widely accessible.
Common Misconceptions
Piedmont blues is not a single, monolithic sound. While often described as “lighter” than Delta blues, this oversimplifies a diverse regional tradition that includes slide guitar, mournful slow blues, and deeply emotional material. Some played slide guitar, which is generally left out of the Piedmont characterizations. Blues from the Atlantic coast is more varied than is usually acknowledged.
It is not solely an instrumental virtuoso tradition, though technical mastery is prominent. Many Piedmont artists were gifted vocalists and storytellers whose lyrics addressed social realities—poverty, segregation, migration—as directly as any Delta blues artist.
The style is also not exclusively male. Women like Etta Baker, Elizabeth Cotten, Algia Mae Hinton, and Precious Bryant were formidable tradition-bearers, though social conventions left women much more tied to their homes. It was not considered proper for wives and mothers to travel and perform in drink houses, juke joints and bars.
How to Begin
Start by listening to the masters. Essential recordings include Blind Blake’s “Southern Rag,” Reverend Gary Davis’s “Cocaine Blues,” Blind Boy Fuller’s “Step It Up and Go,” Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues,” and Etta Baker’s “Railroad Bill.”
For technique, work first on establishing an alternating thumb bass pattern—the foundation of the style—before layering in treble-string melodies. Instructional resources include Stefan Grossman’s books and DVDs (a direct student of Rev. Gary Davis), online courses from the Blues Guitar Institute, and workshops offered by contemporary practitioners like Roy Book Binder and Paul Geremia.
Seek out regional blues societies, particularly in North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia, which host workshops and jam sessions. The Smithsonian Folkways collection “Classic Piedmont Blues” offers annotated historical context. Listen repeatedly, slowly, and study how the thumb and fingers work independently—this is the gateway to the ragtime-blues marriage at the heart of Piedmont style.