The Mark Naftalin Show with Mark Naftalin. Blues keyboardist, recording artist, composer, and record producer. Band member on the first 4 Paul Butterfield Blues Band albums from the mid-1960’s. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015. Photo Credit: Ellen Naftalin Mark Naftalin appears on the first five albums by Paul Butterfield Blues Band in the mid-1960s as a band member, and as such was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015. Learn More

Created by African-Americans in the United States in the late 1800s, the blues is a music genre, a style of music, a way of presenting musical ideas, different musical cultures, and an emotion. Its roots are in African American slave songs such as field hollers, work songs, spirituals, and country string ballads. Rural music that captured the suffering, anguish, and hopes of 300 years of slavery and tenant farming, the blues was typically played by roaming solo musicians on acoustic guitar, piano, or harmonica. Early on, the lyrics and instruments of the blues were improvised, giving rise to the one-stringed diddley bow, the percussive washboard, the jug, the spoons, and ...