Country blues (also folk blues, rural blues, backwoods blues, or downhome blues) refers to all the acoustic, mainly guitar-driven forms of the blues. After blues' birth in the southern United States, it quickly spread throughout the country (and elsewhere), giving birth to a host of regional styles. These include Memphis, Detroit, Chicago, Texas, Piedmont, Louisiana, West Coast, Atlanta, St. Louis, East Coast, Swamp, New Orleans, Delta and Kansas City blues.

According to Richard Middleton (1990, p. 142) folk blues "was constructed as a distinct discursive category in the early decades of this century [20th], mostly as the result of the activities of record companies, marketing 'old-fashioned' music to rural Southern 'folk' and newly arrived urban dwellers." Also contributing to the documentation of the genre were John and Alan Lomax, Samuel Charters, Paul Oliver, David Evans[disambiguation needed], Peter B. Lowry, Jeff Todd Titon, Bruce Bastin and William Ferris (all bourgeois, as pointed out by Middleton). Country blues were constructed from "a much more heterogeneous, fluid musical field" participated in by black and some white people including ragtime, early jazz, religious song, Tin Pan Alley, minstrel, and other theater songs (Oliver 1984 and Russell 1970). Blues was "defined...functionally - it was 'good time music' - or experientally - blues was a feeling - rather than by reference to any formal characteristics or stereotypes," though, "at the same time, many of those characteristics (pentatonic melody, blue tonality, typical chord progression and stanza patterns, call and response) could be found in other forms and contexts too: in hillbilly and Country music, gospel song, ragtime, jazz and Tin Pan Alley hits."

Titon (1977, p.xvi) points out, however, that "downhome blues songs...do not sound like the folk songs of singers like Leadbelly...yet...early downhome blues is best regarded as folk music...despite the dangers of the implication that if downhome blues is folk music, then downhome black Americans must constitute a folk group." (Middleton 1990, p. 144) Countering the idea of country blues as folk music is the blues individualism. Abbey Niles wrote that the blues have to do with "the element of pure 'self'." W.C. Handy wrote that they are able to "express...personal feeling in a sort of musical soliloquy" (both quoted in Levine 1977, p. 222), and Robert Palmer (1981, p. 75) states that the singer's "involvement becomes both the subject and substance of the work."...