Tarheel Slim: The Legacy of Carolina Blues in the Music of Alden Bunn

Over a 30-year career, East Coast blues musician Alden Bunn performed and recorded a wide range of music, learning the regional blues styles of his home state of North Carolina before embarking on a successful urban blues, pop, and rhythm ‘n’ blues career in New York in the 1950s, and finally enjoying a blues revival career in the 1970s. Extant narratives of Bunn’s career segment his output into distinct periods, often discounting the significance of his popular records in his overall contributions as a musician. This thesis uses close listening and comparative musical analysis to recontextualize his career as a continuation of the earlier regional blues tradition on which he was raised. East Coast blues—including the blues of North Carolina—remains underrepresented in broader academic discourses on blues narrative and is rarely connected to any musical practices arising after World War II. This thesis adds a new perspective to this understanding by using Alden Bunn as a case study to assert that blues artists from the East Coast interwove their musical roots with more contemporary styles arising in the 1950s.