Blues Band Name Generator

Blues band names come in three classic shapes. The oldest is a bluesman or blueswoman and their band: a nickname built from a physical trait, a hometown or a hard-luck adjective (Blind, Howlin', Slim, Big, Little, Lightnin', Sonny Boy) attached to a first name, then the band as an afterthought: Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Big Mama Thornton, or here Howlin' Mae and the Backporch Sinners. The second is the place name: a crossroads, a levee, a highway, a juke joint, a street in Chicago or Memphis. The third is an object or condition borrowed from old song titles: a bottleneck slide, a boxcar, a killing floor, a dead shrimp.

What makes a name sound like blues rather than rock or country is the vocabulary: trains, whiskey, mules, levees, graveyards, preachers and sinners, rent parties, Saturday night and Sunday morning. Regional flavour helps too. Delta and hill country names lean rural (Catfish Row, Dockery Farm), Chicago and Detroit names are urban and electric (Maxwell Street, Hastings Street), Texas and jump blues names are slick and brassy (Pork Pie Hat Club, Eighteenth and Vine), and British blues nods to Ealing and the Thames.

Use the names as-is for a gigging band, tribute act or fictional group, or lift the frontman nickname and build your own outfit around it.