The blues comes from what word

Asked by: Devon Legros

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Blues became a code word for a record designed to sell to black listeners. The origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of Afro-American community, the spirituals.

Are there blues words?

blues Add to list Share. … Since the fourteenth century, the word blue has been used to mean «sad.» The noun blues came into use in the 1700s to describe a state of sadness or melancholy.

What is the true meaning of the blues?

“The blues” stems from the 17th-century English expression, “the blue devils,” which described the intense visual hallucinations of delirium tremens — the trembling and psychosis associated with alcohol withdrawal. Shortened over time to “the blues,” the phrase came to mean a state of emotional agitation or depression.

Why are the blues called blues?

The name of this great American music probably originated with the 17th-century English expression «the blue devils,» for the intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal. Shortened over time to «the blues,» it came to mean a state of agitation or depression.

How do you use the word blues?

Bliss sentence example

31 related questions found

Blues
Stylistic origins	Work songs Spirituals folk music[1]
Cultural origins	1860s,[2] Deep South, U.S.
Derivative forms	Bluegrass country jazz jug band ragtime rhythm and blues rock and roll
Subgenres
Subgenres Boogie-woogie classic female blues country blues Delta blues dirty blues electric blues hokum blues jump blues
Fusion genres
Fusion genres Biker metal blues rock desert blues gospel blues punk blues soul blues
Regional scenes
Regional scenes British blues Canadian blues Chicago blues Delta blues Detroit blues Hill country blues Kansas City blues Louisiana blues Memphis blues New Orleans blues Piedmont blues St. Louis blues Swamp blues Texas blues West Coast blues
Other topics
List of genres list of musicians lists of musicians by genre list of standards origins

Blues is a music genre^[3] and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s.^[2] Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale, and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or «worried notes»), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove.

Blues, as a genre, is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the racial discrimination and other challenges experienced by African-Americans.^[4]

Many elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa. The origins of the blues are also closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery and, later, the development of juke joints. It is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century. The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues rock developed, which blended blues styles with rock music.

Etymology[edit]

The term Blues may have originated from «blue devils,» meaning melancholy and sadness. An early use of the term in this sense is in George Colman’s one-act farce Blue Devils (1798).^[5] The phrase blue devils may also have been derived from a British usage of the 1600s referring to the «intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal.»^[6] As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils and came to mean a state of agitation or depression. By the 1800s in the United States, the term «blues» was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase blue law, which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday.^[6]

In 1827, it was in the sense of a sad state of mind that John James Audubon wrote to his wife that he «had the blues.»^[7] The phrase «the blues» was written by Charlotte Forten, then aged 25, in her diary on December 14, 1862. She was a free-born black woman from Pennsylvania who was working as a schoolteacher in South Carolina, instructing both slaves and freedmen, and wrote that she «came home with the blues» because she felt lonesome and pitied herself. She overcame her depression and later noted a number of songs, such as «Poor Rosy,» that were popular among the slaves. Although she admitted being unable to describe the manner of singing she heard, Forten wrote that the songs «can’t be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit,» conditions that have inspired countless blues songs.^[8]

Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, when Hart Wand’s «Dallas Blues» became the first copyrighted blues composition.^[9][10] In lyrics, the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood.^[11]

Lyrics[edit]

Early traditional blues verses often consisted of a single line repeated four times. However, the most common structure of blues lyrics today was established in the first few decades of the 20th century, known as the «AAB» pattern. This structure consists of a line sung over the first four bars, its repetition over the next four, and a longer concluding line over the last bars.^[12] This pattern can be heard in some of the first published blues songs, such as «Dallas Blues» (1912) and «Saint Louis Blues» (1914). According to W.C. Handy, the «AAB» pattern was adopted to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times.^[13] The lyrics are often sung in a rhythmic talk style rather than a melody, resembling a form of talking blues.

Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative. African-American singers voiced their «personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, [and] hard times».^[14] This melancholy has led to the suggestion of an Igbo origin for blues because of the reputation the Igbo had throughout plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and outlook on life when they were enslaved.^[15][16]

The lyrics often relate troubles experienced within African American society. For instance Blind Lemon Jefferson’s «Rising High Water Blues» (1927) tells of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927:

Backwater rising, Southern peoples can’t make no time
I said, backwater rising, Southern peoples can’t make no time
And I can’t get no hearing from that Memphis girl of mine

Although the blues gained an association with misery and oppression, the lyrics could also be humorous and raunchy:^[17]

Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,
Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,
It may be sending you baby, but it’s worrying the hell out of me.^[18]

Hokum blues celebrated both comedic lyrical content and a boisterous, farcical performance style.^[19] Tampa Red and Georgia Tom’s «It’s Tight Like That» (1928)^[20] is a sly wordplay with the double meaning of being «tight» with someone, coupled with a more salacious physical familiarity. Blues songs with sexually explicit lyrics were known as dirty blues. The lyrical content became slightly simpler in postwar blues, which tended to focus on relationship woes or sexual worries. Lyrical themes that frequently appeared in prewar blues, such as economic depression, farming, devils, gambling, magic, floods and drought, were less common in postwar blues.^[21]

The writer Ed Morales claimed that Yoruba mythology played a part in early blues, citing Robert Johnson’s «Cross Road Blues» as a «thinly veiled reference to Eleggua, the orisha in charge of the crossroads».^[22] However, the Christian influence was far more obvious.^[23] The repertoires of many seminal blues artists, such as Charley Patton and Skip James, included religious songs or spirituals.^[24] Reverend Gary Davis^[25] and Blind Willie Johnson^[26] are examples of artists often categorized as blues musicians for their music, although their lyrics clearly belong to spirituals.

Form[edit]

The blues form is a cyclic musical form in which a repeating progression of chords mirrors the call and response scheme commonly found in African and African-American music. During the first decades of the 20th century blues music was not clearly defined in terms of a particular chord progression.^[27] With the popularity of early performers, such as Bessie Smith, use of the twelve-bar blues spread across the music industry during the 1920s and 30s.^[28] Other chord progressions, such as 8-bar forms, are still considered blues; examples include «How Long Blues», «Trouble in Mind», and Big Bill Broonzy’s «Key to the Highway». There are also 16-bar blues, such as Ray Charles’s instrumental «Sweet 16 Bars» and Herbie Hancock’s «Watermelon Man». Idiosyncratic numbers of bars are occasionally used, such as the 9-bar progression in «Sitting on Top of the World», by Walter Vinson.

Chords played over a 12-bar scheme:	Chords for a blues in C:
I I or IV I I7 IV IV I I7 V V or IV I I or V	C C C C F F C C G G C C

The basic 12-bar lyric framework of a blues composition is reflected by a standard harmonic progression of 12 bars in a 4/4 time signature. The blues chords associated to a twelve-bar blues are typically a set of three different chords played over a 12-bar scheme. They are labeled by Roman numbers referring to the degrees of the progression. For instance, for a blues in the key of C, C is the tonic chord (I) and F is the subdominant (IV).

The last chord is the dominant (V) turnaround, marking the transition to the beginning of the next progression. The lyrics generally end on the last beat of the tenth bar or the first beat of the 11th bar, and the final two bars are given to the instrumentalist as a break; the harmony of this two-bar break, the turnaround, can be extremely complex, sometimes consisting of single notes that defy analysis in terms of chords.

Much of the time, some or all of these chords are played in the harmonic seventh (7th) form. The use of the harmonic seventh interval is characteristic of blues and is popularly called the «blues seven».^[29] Blues seven chords add to the harmonic chord a note with a frequency in a 7:4 ratio to the fundamental note. At a 7:4 ratio, it is not close to any interval on the conventional Western diatonic scale.^[30] For convenience or by necessity it is often approximated by a minor seventh interval or a dominant seventh chord.

In melody, blues is distinguished by the use of the flattened third, fifth and seventh of the associated major scale.^[31]

Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and call-and-response, and they form a repetitive effect called a groove. Characteristic of the blues since its Afro-American origins, the shuffles played a central role in swing music.^[32] The simplest shuffles, which were the clearest signature of the R&B wave that started in the mid-1940s,^[33] were a three-note riff on the bass strings of the guitar. When this riff was played over the bass and the drums, the groove «feel» was created. Shuffle rhythm is often vocalized as «dow, da dow, da dow, da» or «dump, da dump, da dump, da»:^[34] it consists of uneven, or «swung», eighth notes. On a guitar this may be played as a simple steady bass or it may add to that stepwise quarter note motion from the fifth to the sixth of the chord and back.

History[edit]

Origins[edit]

Hart Wand’s «Dallas Blues» was published in 1912; W.C. Handy’s «The Memphis Blues» followed in the same year. The first recording by an African American singer was Mamie Smith’s 1920 rendition of Perry Bradford’s «Crazy Blues». But the origins of the blues were some decades earlier, probably around 1890.^[35] This music is poorly documented, partly because of racial discrimination in U.S. society, including academic circles,^[36] and partly because of the low rate of literacy among rural African Americans at the time.^[37]

Reports of blues music in southern Texas and the Deep South were written at the dawn of the 20th century. Charles Peabody mentioned the appearance of blues music at Clarksdale, Mississippi, and Gate Thomas reported similar songs in southern Texas around 1901–1902. These observations coincide more or less with the recollections of Jelly Roll Morton, who said he first heard blues music in New Orleans in 1902; Ma Rainey, who remembered first hearing the blues in the same year in Missouri; and W.C. Handy, who first heard the blues in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903. The first extensive research in the field was performed by Howard W. Odum, who published an anthology of folk songs from Lafayette County, Mississippi, and Newton County, Georgia, between 1905 and 1908.^[38] The first noncommercial recordings of blues music, termed proto-blues by Paul Oliver, were made by Odum for research purposes at the very beginning of the 20th century. They are now lost.^[39]

Other recordings that are still available were made in 1924 by Lawrence Gellert. Later, several recordings were made by Robert W. Gordon, who became head of the Archive of American Folk Songs of the Library of Congress. Gordon’s successor at the library was John Lomax. In the 1930s, Lomax and his son Alan made a large number of non-commercial blues recordings that testify to the huge variety of proto-blues styles, such as field hollers and ring shouts.^[40] A record of blues music as it existed before 1920 can also be found in the recordings of artists such as Lead Belly^[41] and Henry Thomas.^[42] All these sources show the existence of many different structures distinct from twelve-, eight-, or sixteen-bar.^[43][44]
The social and economic reasons for the appearance of the blues are not fully known.^[45] The first appearance of the blues is usually dated after the Emancipation Act of 1863,^[36] between 1860s and 1890s,^[2] a period that coincides with post-emancipation and later, the establishment of juke joints as places where African-Americans went to listen to music, dance, or gamble after a hard day’s work. This period corresponds to the transition from slavery to sharecropping, small-scale agricultural production, and the expansion of railroads in the southern United States. Several scholars characterize the development of blues music in the early 1900s as a move from group performance to individualized performance. They argue that the development of the blues is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the enslaved people.^[47]

According to Lawrence Levine, «there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the popularity of Booker T. Washington’s teachings, and the rise of the blues.» Levine stated that «psychologically, socially, and economically, African-Americans were being acculturated in a way that would have been impossible during slavery, and it is hardly surprising that their secular music reflected this as much as their religious music did.»^[47]

There are few characteristics common to all blues music, because the genre took its shape from the idiosyncrasies of individual performers.^[48] However, there are some characteristics that were present long before the creation of the modern blues. Call-and-response shouts were an early form of blues-like music; they were a «functional expression … style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure».^[49] A form of this pre-blues was heard in slave ring shouts and field hollers, expanded into «simple solo songs laden with emotional content».^[50]

Blues has evolved from the unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves imported from West Africa and rural blacks into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States. Although blues (as it is now known) can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and the African call-and-response tradition that transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar,^[51][52] the blues form itself bears no resemblance to the melodic styles of the West African griots.^[53][54] Additionally, there are theories that the four-beats-per-measure structure of the blues might have its origins in the Native American tradition of pow wow drumming.^[55] Some scholars identify strong influences on the blues from the melodic structures of certain West African musical styles of the savanna and sahel. Lucy Durran finds similarities with the melodies of the Bambara people, and to a lesser degree, the Soninke people and Wolof people, but not as much of the Mandinka people.^[56] Gerard Kubik finds similarities to the melodic styles of both the west African savanna and central Africa, both of which were sources of slaves.^[57]

No specific African musical form can be identified as the single direct ancestor of the blues.^[58] However the call-and-response format can be traced back to the music of Africa. That blue notes predate their use in blues and have an African origin is attested to by «A Negro Love Song», by the English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, from his African Suite for Piano, written in 1898, which contains blue third and seventh notes.^[59]

The Diddley bow (a homemade one-stringed instrument found in parts of the American South sometimes referred to as a jitterbug or a one-string in the early twentieth century) and the banjo are African-derived instruments that may have helped in the transfer of African performance techniques into the early blues instrumental vocabulary.^[60] The banjo seems to be directly imported from West African music. It is similar to the musical instrument that griots and other Africans such as the Igbo^[61] played (called halam or akonting by African peoples such as the Wolof, Fula and Mandinka).^[62] However, in the 1920s, when country blues began to be recorded, the use of the banjo in blues music was quite marginal and limited to individuals such as Papa Charlie Jackson and later Gus Cannon.^[63]

Blues music also adopted elements from the «Ethiopian airs», minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment.^[64] The style also was closely related to ragtime, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved «the original melodic patterns of African music».^[65]

The musical forms and styles that are now considered the blues as well as modern country music arose in the same regions of the southern United States during the 19th century. Recorded blues and country music can be found as far back as the 1920s, when the record industry created the marketing categories «race music» and «hillbilly music» to sell music by blacks for blacks and by whites for whites, respectively. At the time, there was no clear musical division between «blues» and «country», except for the ethnicity of the performer, and even that was sometimes documented incorrectly by record companies.^[66][67]

Though musicologists can now attempt to define the blues narrowly in terms of certain chord structures and lyric forms thought to have originated in West Africa, audiences originally heard the music in a far more general way: it was simply the music of the rural south, notably the Mississippi Delta. Black and white musicians shared the same repertoire and thought of themselves as «songsters» rather than blues musicians. The notion of blues as a separate genre arose during the black migration from the countryside to urban areas in the 1920s and the simultaneous development of the recording industry. Blues became a code word for a record designed to sell to black listeners.^[68]

The origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of Afro-American community, the spirituals. The origins of spirituals go back much further than the blues, usually dating back to the middle of the 18th century, when the slaves were Christianized and began to sing and play Christian hymns, in particular those of Isaac Watts, which were very popular.^[69] Before the blues gained its formal definition in terms of chord progressions, it was defined as the secular counterpart of spirituals. It was the low-down music played by rural blacks.^[23]

Depending on the religious community a musician belonged to, it was more or less considered a sin to play this low-down music: blues was the devil’s music. Musicians were therefore segregated into two categories: gospel singers and blues singers, guitar preachers and songsters. However, when rural black music began to be recorded in the 1920s, both categories of musicians used similar techniques: call-and-response patterns, blue notes, and slide guitars. Gospel music was nevertheless using musical forms that were compatible with Christian hymns and therefore less marked by the blues form than its secular counterpart.^[23]

Pre-war blues[edit]

The American sheet music publishing industry produced a great deal of ragtime music. By 1912, the sheet music industry had published three popular blues-like compositions, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley adoption of blues elements: «Baby Seals’ Blues», by «Baby» Franklin Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews); «Dallas Blues», by Hart Wand; and «The Memphis Blues», by W.C. Handy.^[70]

Handy was a formally trained musician, composer and arranger who helped to popularize the blues by transcribing and orchestrating blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers. He became a popular and prolific composer, and billed himself as the «Father of the Blues»; however, his compositions can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Cuban habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime;^[22][71] Handy’s signature work was the «Saint Louis Blues».

In the 1920s, the blues became a major element of African American and American popular music, also reaching white audiences via Handy’s arrangements and the classic female blues performers. These female performers became perhaps the first African American «superstars», and their recording sales demonstrated «a huge appetite for records made by and for black people.»^[72] The blues evolved from informal performances in bars to entertainment in theaters. Blues performances were organized by the Theater Owners Bookers Association in nightclubs such as the Cotton Club and juke joints such as the bars along Beale Street in Memphis. Several record companies, such as the American Record Corporation, Okeh Records, and Paramount Records, began to record African-American music.

As the recording industry grew, country blues performers like Bo Carter, Jimmie Rodgers, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red and Blind Blake became more popular in the African American community. Kentucky-born Sylvester Weaver was in 1923 the first to record the slide guitar style, in which a guitar is fretted with a knife blade or the sawed-off neck of a bottle.^[73] The slide guitar became an important part of the Delta blues.^[74] The first blues recordings from the 1920s are categorized as a traditional, rural country blues and a more polished city or urban blues.

Country blues performers often improvised, either without accompaniment or with only a banjo or guitar. Regional styles of country blues varied widely in the early 20th century. The (Mississippi) Delta blues was a rootsy sparse style with passionate vocals accompanied by slide guitar. The little-recorded Robert Johnson^[75] combined elements of urban and rural blues. In addition to Robert Johnson, influential performers of this style included his predecessors Charley Patton and Son House. Singers such as Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller performed in the southeastern «delicate and lyrical» Piedmont blues tradition, which used an elaborate ragtime-based fingerpicking guitar technique. Georgia also had an early slide tradition,^[76] with Curley Weaver, Tampa Red, «Barbecue Bob» Hicks and James «Kokomo» Arnold as representatives of this style.^[77]

The lively Memphis blues style, which developed in the 1920s and 1930s near Memphis, Tennessee, was influenced by jug bands such as the Memphis Jug Band or the Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers. Performers such as Frank Stokes, Sleepy John Estes, Robert Wilkins, Joe McCoy, Casey Bill Weldon and Memphis Minnie used a variety of unusual instruments such as washboard, fiddle, kazoo or mandolin. Memphis Minnie was famous for her virtuoso guitar style. Pianist Memphis Slim began his career in Memphis, but his distinct style was smoother and had some swing elements. Many blues musicians based in Memphis moved to Chicago in the late 1930s or early 1940s and became part of the urban blues movement.^[78][79]

Urban blues[edit]

City or urban blues styles were more codified and elaborate, as a performer was no longer within their local, immediate community, and had to adapt to a larger, more varied audience’s aesthetic.^[80] Classic female urban and vaudeville blues singers were popular in the 1920s, among them «the big three»—Gertrude «Ma» Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Lucille Bogan. Mamie Smith, more a vaudeville performer than a blues artist, was the first African American to record a blues song in 1920; her second record, «Crazy Blues», sold 75,000 copies in its first month.^[81] Ma Rainey, the «Mother of Blues», and Bessie Smith each «[sang] around center tones, perhaps in order to project her voice more easily to the back of a room». Smith would «sing a song in an unusual key, and her artistry in bending and stretching notes with her beautiful, powerful contralto to accommodate her own interpretation was unsurpassed».^[82]

In 1920, the vaudeville singer Lucille Hegamin became the second black woman to record blues when she recorded «The Jazz Me Blues»,^[83] and Victoria Spivey, sometimes called Queen Victoria or Za Zu Girl, had a recording career that began in 1926 and spanned forty years. These recordings were typically labeled «race records» to distinguish them from records sold to white audiences. Nonetheless, the recordings of some of the classic female blues singers were purchased by white buyers as well.^[84] These blueswomen’s contributions to the genre included «increased improvisation on melodic lines, unusual phrasing which altered the emphasis and impact of the lyrics, and vocal dramatics using shouts, groans, moans, and wails. The blues women thus effected changes in other types of popular singing that had spin-offs in jazz, Broadway musicals, torch songs of the 1930s and 1940s, gospel, rhythm and blues, and eventually rock and roll.»^[85]

Urban male performers included popular black musicians of the era, such as Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy and Leroy Carr. An important label of this era was the Chicago-based Bluebird Records. Before World War II, Tampa Red was sometimes referred to as «the Guitar Wizard». Carr accompanied himself on the piano with Scrapper Blackwell on guitar, a format that continued well into the 1950s with artists such as Charles Brown and even Nat «King» Cole.^[74]

Boogie-woogie was another important style of 1930s and early 1940s urban blues. While the style is often associated with solo piano, boogie-woogie was also used to accompany singers and, as a solo part, in bands and small combos. Boogie-Woogie style was characterized by a regular bass figure, an ostinato or riff and shifts of level in the left hand, elaborating each chord and trills and decorations in the right hand. Boogie-woogie was pioneered by the Chicago-based Jimmy Yancey and the Boogie-Woogie Trio (Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis).^[86] Chicago boogie-woogie performers included Clarence «Pine Top» Smith and Earl Hines, who «linked the propulsive left-hand rhythms of the ragtime pianists with melodic figures similar to those of Armstrong’s trumpet in the right hand».^[80] The smooth Louisiana style of Professor Longhair and, more recently, Dr. John blends classic rhythm and blues with blues styles.

Another development in this period was big band blues. The «territory bands» operating out of Kansas City, the Bennie Moten orchestra, Jay McShann, and the Count Basie Orchestra were also concentrating on the blues, with 12-bar blues instrumentals such as Basie’s «One O’Clock Jump» and «Jumpin’ at the Woodside» and boisterous «blues shouting» by Jimmy Rushing on songs such as «Going to Chicago» and «Sent for You Yesterday». A well-known big band blues tune is Glenn Miller’s «In the Mood». In the 1940s, the jump blues style developed. Jump blues grew up from the boogie woogie wave and was strongly influenced by big band music. It uses saxophone or other brass instruments and the guitar in the rhythm section to create a jazzy, up-tempo sound with declamatory vocals. Jump blues tunes by Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner, based in Kansas City, Missouri, influenced the development of later styles such as rock and roll and rhythm and blues.^[87] Dallas-born T-Bone Walker, who is often associated with the California blues style,^[88] performed a successful transition from the early urban blues à la Lonnie Johnson and Leroy Carr to the jump blues style and dominated the blues-jazz scene at Los Angeles during the 1940s.^[89]

1950s[edit]

The transition from country blues to urban blues that began in the 1920s was driven by the successive waves of economic crisis and booms that led many rural blacks to move to urban areas, in a movement known as the Great Migration. The long boom following World War II induced another massive migration of the African-American population, the Second Great Migration, which was accompanied by a significant increase of the real income of the urban blacks. The new migrants constituted a new market for the music industry. The term race record, initially used by the music industry for African-American music, was replaced by the term rhythm and blues. This rapidly evolving market was mirrored by Billboard magazine’s Rhythm & Blues chart. This marketing strategy reinforced trends in urban blues music such as the use of electric instruments and amplification and the generalization of the blues beat, the blues shuffle, which became ubiquitous in rhythm and blues (R&B). This commercial stream had important consequences for blues music, which, together with jazz and gospel music, became a component of R&B.^[90]

After World War II, new styles of electric blues became popular in cities such as Chicago,^[91] Memphis,^[92] Detroit^[93][94] and St. Louis. Electric blues used electric guitars, double bass (gradually replaced by bass guitar), drums, and harmonica (or «blues harp») played through a microphone and a PA system or an overdriven guitar amplifier. Chicago became a center for electric blues from 1948 on, when Muddy Waters recorded his first success, «I Can’t Be Satisfied».^[95] Chicago blues is influenced to a large extent by Delta blues, because many performers had migrated from the Mississippi region.

Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Jimmy Reed were all born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. Their style is characterized by the use of electric guitar, sometimes slide guitar, harmonica, and a rhythm section of bass and drums.^[96] The saxophonist J. T. Brown played in bands led by Elmore James and by J. B. Lenoir, but the saxophone was used as a backing instrument for rhythmic support more than as a lead instrument.

Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) and Sonny Terry are well known harmonica (called «harp» by blues musicians) players of the early Chicago blues scene. Other harp players such as Big Walter Horton were also influential. Muddy Waters and Elmore James were known for their innovative use of slide electric guitar. Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters were known for their deep, «gravelly» voices.

The bassist and prolific songwriter and composer Willie Dixon played a major role on the Chicago blues scene. He composed and wrote many standard blues songs of the period, such as «Hoochie Coochie Man», «I Just Want to Make Love to You» (both penned for Muddy Waters) and, «Wang Dang Doodle» and «Back Door Man» for Howlin’ Wolf. Most artists of the Chicago blues style recorded for the Chicago-based Chess Records and Checker Records labels. Smaller blues labels of this era included Vee-Jay Records and J.O.B. Records. During the early 1950s, the dominating Chicago labels were challenged by Sam Phillips’ Sun Records company in Memphis, which recorded B. B. King and Howlin’ Wolf before he moved to Chicago in 1960.^[97] After Phillips discovered Elvis Presley in 1954, the Sun label turned to the rapidly expanding white audience and started recording mostly rock ‘n’ roll.^[98]

In the 1950s, blues had a huge influence on mainstream American popular music. While popular musicians like Bo Diddley^[93] and Chuck Berry,^[99] both recording for Chess, were influenced by the Chicago blues, their enthusiastic playing styles departed from the melancholy aspects of blues. Chicago blues also influenced Louisiana’s zydeco music,^[100] with Clifton Chenier^[101] using blues accents. Zydeco musicians used electric solo guitar and cajun arrangements of blues standards.

In England, electric blues took root there during a much acclaimed Muddy Waters tour in 1958. Waters, unsuspecting of his audience’s tendency towards skiffle, an acoustic, softer brand of blues, turned up his amp and started to play his Chicago brand of electric blues. Although the audience was largely jolted by the performance, the performance influenced local musicians such as Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies to emulate this louder style, inspiring the British Invasion of the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds.^[102]

In the late 1950s, a new blues style emerged on Chicago’s West Side pioneered by Magic Sam, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush on Cobra Records.^[103] The «West Side sound» had strong rhythmic support from a rhythm guitar, bass guitar and drums and as perfected by Guy, Freddie King, Magic Slim and Luther Allison was dominated by amplified electric lead guitar.^[104][105] Expressive guitar solos were a key feature of this music.

Other blues artists, such as John Lee Hooker, had influences not directly related to the Chicago style. John Lee Hooker’s blues is more «personal», based on Hooker’s deep rough voice accompanied by a single electric guitar. Though not directly influenced by boogie woogie, his «groovy» style is sometimes called «guitar boogie». His first hit, «Boogie Chillen», reached number 1 on the R&B charts in 1949.^[106]

By the late 1950s, the swamp blues genre developed near Baton Rouge, with performers such as Lightnin’ Slim,^[107] Slim Harpo,^[108] Sam Myers and Jerry McCain around the producer J. D. «Jay» Miller and the Excello label. Strongly influenced by Jimmy Reed, swamp blues has a slower pace and a simpler use of the harmonica than the Chicago blues style performers such as Little Walter or Muddy Waters. Songs from this genre include «Scratch my Back», «She’s Tough» and «I’m a King Bee». Alan Lomax’s recordings of Mississippi Fred McDowell would eventually bring him wider attention on both the blues and folk circuit, with McDowell’s droning style influencing North Mississippi hill country blues musicians.^[109]

1960s and 1970s[edit]

By the beginning of the 1960s, genres influenced by African American music such as rock and roll and soul were part of mainstream popular music. White performers such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles had brought African-American music to new audiences, within the U.S. and abroad. However, the blues wave that brought artists such as Muddy Waters to the foreground had stopped. Bluesmen such as Big Bill Broonzy and Willie Dixon started looking for new markets in Europe. Dick Waterman and the blues festivals he organized in Europe played a major role in propagating blues music abroad. In the UK, bands emulated U.S. blues legends, and UK blues rock-based bands had an influential role throughout the 1960s.^[110]

Blues performers such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters continued to perform to enthusiastic audiences, inspiring new artists steeped in traditional blues, such as New York–born Taj Mahal. John Lee Hooker blended his blues style with rock elements and playing with younger white musicians, creating a musical style that can be heard on the 1971 album Endless Boogie. B. B. King’s singing and virtuoso guitar technique earned him the eponymous title «king of the blues». King introduced a sophisticated style of guitar soloing based on fluid string bending and shimmering vibrato that influenced many later electric blues guitarists.^[111] In contrast to the Chicago style, King’s band used strong brass support from a saxophone, trumpet, and trombone, instead of using slide guitar or harp. Tennessee-born Bobby «Blue» Bland, like B. B. King, also straddled the blues and R&B genres. During this period, Freddie King and Albert King often played with rock and soul musicians (Eric Clapton and Booker T & the MGs) and had a major influence on those styles of music.

The music of the civil rights movement^[112] and Free Speech Movement in the U.S. prompted a resurgence of interest in American roots music and early African American music. As well festivals such as the Newport Folk Festival^[113] brought traditional blues to a new audience, which helped to revive interest in prewar acoustic blues and performers such as Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and Reverend Gary Davis.^[112] Many compilations of classic prewar blues were republished by the Yazoo Records. J. B. Lenoir from the Chicago blues movement in the 1950s recorded several LPs using acoustic guitar, sometimes accompanied by Willie Dixon on the acoustic bass or drums. His songs, originally distributed only in Europe,^[114] commented on political issues such as racism or Vietnam War issues, which was unusual for this period. His album Alabama Blues contained a song with the following lyric:

I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me,
I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me.
You know they killed my sister and my brother
and the whole world let them peoples go down there free

White audiences’ interest in the blues during the 1960s increased due to the Chicago-based Paul Butterfield Blues Band featuring guitarist Michael Bloomfield and singer/songwriter Nick Gravenites, and the British blues movement. The style of British blues developed in the UK, when musicians such as Cyril Davies, Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, the Rolling Stones, Animals, the Yardbirds, Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation,^[115] Chicken Shack,^[116] early Jethro Tull, Cream and the Irish musician Rory Gallagher performed classic blues songs from the Delta or Chicago blues traditions.

In 1963, LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, was the first to write a book on the social history of the blues in Blues People: The Negro Music in White America. The British and blues musicians of the early 1960s inspired a number of American blues rock performers, including Canned Heat, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, The J. Geils Band, Ry Cooder, and the Allman Brothers Band. One blues rock performer, Jimi Hendrix, was a rarity in his field at the time: a black man who played psychedelic rock. Hendrix was a skilled guitarist, and a pioneer in the innovative use of distortion and audio feedback in his music.^[117] Through these artists and others, blues music influenced the development of rock music. Later in the 1960s, British singer Jo Ann Kelly started her recording career. In the US, from the 1970s, female singers Bonnie Raitt and Phoebe Snow performed blues.^[118]

In the early 1970s, the Texas rock-blues style emerged, which used guitars in both solo and rhythm roles. In contrast with the West Side blues, the Texas style is strongly influenced by the British rock-blues movement. Major artists of the Texas style are Johnny Winter, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Fabulous Thunderbirds (led by harmonica player and singer-songwriter Kim Wilson), and ZZ Top. These artists all began their musical careers in the 1970s but they did not achieve international success until the next decade.^[119]

1980s to the present[edit]

Since the 1980s there has been a resurgence of interest in the blues among a certain part of the African-American population, particularly around Jackson, Mississippi and other deep South regions. Often termed «soul blues» or «Southern soul», the music at the heart of this movement was given new life by the unexpected success of two particular recordings on the Jackson-based Malaco label:^[121] Z. Z. Hill’s Down Home Blues (1982) and Little Milton’s The Blues is Alright (1984). Contemporary African-American performers who work in this style of the blues include Bobby Rush, Denise LaSalle, Sir Charles Jones, Bettye LaVette, Marvin Sease, Peggy Scott-Adams, Mel Waiters, Clarence Carter, Dr. «Feelgood» Potts, O.B. Buchana, Ms. Jody, Shirley Brown, and dozens of others.

During the 1980s blues also continued in both traditional and new forms. In 1986 the album Strong Persuader announced Robert Cray as a major blues artist. The first Stevie Ray Vaughan recording Texas Flood was released in 1983, and the Texas-based guitarist exploded onto the international stage. John Lee Hooker’s popularity was revived with the album The Healer in 1989. Eric Clapton, known for his performances with the Blues Breakers and Cream, made a comeback in the 1990s with his album Unplugged, in which he played some standard blues numbers on acoustic guitar.

However, beginning in the 1990s, digital multitrack recording and other technological advances and new marketing strategies including video clip production increased costs, challenging the spontaneity and improvisation that are an important component of blues music.^[122] In the 1980s and 1990s, blues publications such as Living Blues and Blues Revue were launched, major cities began forming blues societies, outdoor blues festivals became more common, and^[123] more nightclubs and venues for blues emerged.^[124] Tedeschi Trucks band and Gov’t Mule released blues rock albums. Female blues singers such as Bonnie Raitt, Susan Tedeschi, Sue Foley and Shannon Curfman recorded blues also.

In the 1990s, the largely ignored hill country blues gained minor recognition in both blues and alternative rock music circles with northern Mississippi artists R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough.^[109] Blues performers explored a range of musical genres, as can be seen, for example, from the broad array of nominees of the yearly Blues Music Awards, previously named W.C. Handy Awards^[125] or of the Grammy Awards for Best Contemporary and Traditional Blues Album. The Billboard Blues Album chart provides an overview of current blues hits. Contemporary blues music is nurtured by several blues labels such as: Alligator Records, Ruf Records, Severn Records, Chess Records (MCA), Delmark Records, NorthernBlues Music, Fat Possum Records and Vanguard Records (Artemis Records). Some labels are famous for rediscovering and remastering blues rarities, including Arhoolie Records, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (heir of Folkways Records), and Yazoo Records (Shanachie Records).^[126]

Musical impact[edit]

Blues musical styles, forms (12-bar blues), melodies, and the blues scale have influenced many other genres of music, such as rock and roll, jazz, and popular music.^[127] Prominent jazz, folk or rock performers, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Bob Dylan have performed significant blues recordings. The blues scale is often used in popular songs like Harold Arlen’s «Blues in the Night», blues ballads like «Since I Fell for You» and «Please Send Me Someone to Love», and even in orchestral works such as George Gershwin’s «Rhapsody in Blue» and «Concerto in F». Gershwin’s second «Prelude» for solo piano is an interesting example of a classical blues, maintaining the form with academic strictness. The blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music and informs many modal frames, especially the ladder of thirds used in rock music (for example, in «A Hard Day’s Night»). Blues forms are used in the theme to the televised Batman, teen idol Fabian Forte’s hit, «Turn Me Loose», country music star Jimmie Rodgers’ music, and guitarist/vocalist Tracy Chapman’s hit «Give Me One Reason».

Early country bluesmen such as Skip James, Charley Patton, Georgia Tom Dorsey played country and urban blues and had influences from spiritual singing. Dorsey helped to popularize Gospel music.^[129] Gospel music developed in the 1930s, with the Golden Gate Quartet. In the 1950s, soul music by Sam Cooke, Ray Charles and James Brown used gospel and blues music elements. In the 1960s and 1970s, gospel and blues were merged in soul blues music. Funk music of the 1970s was influenced by soul; funk can be seen as an antecedent of hip-hop and contemporary R&B.

R&B music can be traced back to spirituals and blues. Musically, spirituals were a descendant of New England choral traditions, and in particular of Isaac Watts’s hymns, mixed with African rhythms and call-and-response forms. Spirituals or religious chants in the African-American community are much better documented than the «low-down» blues. Spiritual singing developed because African-American communities could gather for mass or worship gatherings, which were called camp meetings.

Edward P. Comentale has noted how the blues was often used as a medium for art or self-expression, stating: «As heard from Delta shacks to Chicago tenements to Harlem cabarets, the blues proved—despite its pained origins—a remarkably flexible medium and a new arena for the shaping of identity and community.»^[130]

Before World War II, the boundaries between blues and jazz were less clear. Usually, jazz had harmonic structures stemming from brass bands, whereas blues had blues forms such as the 12-bar blues. However, the jump blues of the 1940s mixed both styles. After WWII, blues had a substantial influence on jazz. Bebop classics, such as Charlie Parker’s «Now’s the Time», used the blues form with the pentatonic scale and blue notes.

Bebop marked a major shift in the role of jazz, from a popular style of music for dancing to a «high-art», less-accessible, cerebral «musician’s music». The audience for both blues and jazz split, and the border between blues and jazz became more defined.^[131][132]

The blues’ 12-bar structure and the blues scale was a major influence on rock and roll music. Rock and roll has been called «blues with a backbeat»; Carl Perkins called rockabilly «blues with a country beat». Rockabillies were also said to be 12-bar blues played with a bluegrass beat. «Hound Dog», with its unmodified 12-bar structure (in both harmony and lyrics) and a melody centered on flatted third of the tonic (and flatted seventh of the subdominant), is a blues song transformed into a rock and roll song. Jerry Lee Lewis’s style of rock and roll was heavily influenced by the blues and its derivative boogie-woogie. His style of music was not exactly rockabilly but it has been often called real rock and roll (this is a label he shares with several African American rock and roll performers).^[133][134]

Many early rock and roll songs are based on blues: «That’s All Right Mama», «Johnny B. Goode», «Blue Suede Shoes», «Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin On», «Shake, Rattle, and Roll», and «Long Tall Sally». The early African American rock musicians retained the sexual themes and innuendos of blues music: «Got a gal named Sue, knows just what to do» («Tutti Frutti», Little Richard) or «See the girl with the red dress on, She can do the Birdland all night long» («What’d I Say», Ray Charles). The 12-bar blues structure can be found even in novelty pop songs, such as Bob Dylan’s «Obviously Five Believers» and Esther and Abi Ofarim’s «Cinderella Rockefella».

Early country music was infused with the blues.^[135] Jimmie Rodgers, Moon Mullican, Bob Wills, Bill Monroe and Hank Williams have all described themselves as blues singers and their music has a blues feel that is different, at first glance at least, from the later country-pop of artists like Eddy Arnold. Yet, if one looks back further, Arnold also started out singing bluesy songs like ‘I’ll Hold You in My Heart’. A lot of the 1970s-era «outlaw» country music by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings also borrowed from the blues. When Jerry Lee Lewis returned to country music after the decline of 1950s style rock and roll, he sang with a blues feel and often included blues standards on his albums.

In popular culture[edit]

Like jazz, rock and roll, heavy metal music, hip hop music, reggae, country music, Latin music, funk, and pop music, blues has been accused of being the «devil’s music» and of inciting violence and other poor behavior.^[136] In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable, especially as white audiences began listening to the blues during the 1920s.^[71] In the early twentieth century, W.C. Handy was the first to popularize blues-influenced music among non-black Americans.

During the blues revival of the 1960s and 1970s, acoustic blues artist Taj Mahal and Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins wrote and performed music that figured prominently in the critically acclaimed film Sounder (1972). The film earned Mahal a Grammy nomination for Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture and a BAFTA nomination.^[137] Almost 30 years later, Mahal wrote blues for, and performed a banjo composition, claw-hammer style, in the 2001 movie release Songcatcher, which focused on the story of the preservation of the roots music of Appalachia.

Perhaps the most visible example of the blues style of music in the late 20th century came in 1980, when Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi released the film The Blues Brothers. The film drew many of the biggest living influencers of the rhythm and blues genre together, such as Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, and John Lee Hooker. The band formed also began a successful tour under the Blues Brothers marquee. 1998 brought a sequel, Blues Brothers 2000 that, while not holding as great a critical and financial success, featured a much larger number of blues artists, such as B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Erykah Badu, Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Charlie Musselwhite, Blues Traveler, Jimmie Vaughan, and Jeff Baxter.

In 2003, Martin Scorsese made significant efforts to promote the blues to a larger audience. He asked several famous directors such as Clint Eastwood and Wim Wenders to participate in a series of documentary films for PBS called The Blues.^[138] He also participated in the rendition of compilations of major blues artists in a series of high-quality CDs. Blues guitarist and vocalist Keb’ Mo’ performed his blues rendition of «America, the Beautiful» in 2006 to close out the final season of the television series The West Wing.

The blues was highlighted in season 2012, episode 1 of In Performance at the White House, entitled «Red, White and Blues». Hosted by Barack and Michelle Obama, the show featured performances by B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Gary Clark Jr., Jeff Beck, Derek Trucks, Keb Mo, and others.^[139]

See also[edit]

• List of blues festivals
• List of blues musicians
• List of blues standards

References[edit]

Bibliography[edit]

• Barlow, William (1993). «Cashing In: 1900-1939». In Dates, Jannette L.; Barlow, William (eds.). Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media (2nd ed.). Howard University Press. p. 31. ISBN 978-0-88258-178-1.
• Bransford, Steve (2004). «Blues in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley» Southern Spaces.
• Clarke, Donald (1995). The Rise and Fall of Popular Music. St. Martin’s Press. ISBN 978-0-312-11573-9.
• Lawrence Cohn, ed. (1993). Nothing but the Blues: The Music and the Musicians. Abbeville Publishing Group (Abbeville Press, Inc.). ISBN 978-1-55859-271-1.
• Dicaire, David (1999). Blues Singers: Biographies of 50 Legendary Artists of the Early 20th Century. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-0606-7.
• Ewen, David (1957). Panorama of American Popular Music. Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-648360-1.
• Ferris, Jean (1993). America’s Musical Landscape. Brown & Benchmark. ISBN 978-0-697-12516-3.
• Garofalo, Reebee (1997). Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the USA. Allyn & Bacon. ISBN 978-0-205-13703-9.
• Herzhaft, Gérard; Harris, Paul; Debord, Brigitte (1997). Encyclopedia of the Blues. University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 978-1-55728-452-5.
• Komara, Edward M. (2006). Encyclopedia of the Blues. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-92699-7.
• Kunzler, Martin (1988). Jazz Lexikon (in German). Rohwolt Taschenbuch Verlag. ISBN 978-3-499-16316-6.
• Morales, Ed (2003). The Latin Beat. Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-81018-3.
• Oliver, Paul; Wright, Richard (1990). Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-37793-5.
• Palmer, Robert (1981). Deep Blues. Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-49511-5.
• Schuller, Gunther (1968). Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-504043-2.
• Southern, Eileen (1997). The Music of Black Americans. W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-03843-9.
• Curiel, Jonathan (August 15, 2004). «Muslim Roots of the Blues». SFGate. Archived from the original on September 5, 2005. Retrieved August 24, 2005.

Further reading[edit]

• Abbott, Lynn and Doug Seroff. The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African-American Vaudeville, 1889–1926. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019.
• Brown, Luther. «Inside Poor Monkey’s», Southern Spaces, June 22, 2006.
• Dixon, Robert M.W.; Godrich, John (1970). Recording the Blues. London: Studio Vista. 85 pp. SBN 289-79829-9.
• Oakley, Giles (1976). The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues. London: BBC. p. 287. ISBN 978-0-563-16012-0.
• Keil, Charles (1991) [1966]. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-42960-1.
• Oliver, Paul (1998). The Story of the Blues (new ed.). Northeastern University Press. ISBN 978-1-55553-355-7.
• Oliver, Paul (1965). Conversation with the Blues, Volume 1. New York: Horizon Press. ISBN 978-0-8180-1223-5.
• Rowe, Mike (1973). Chicago Breakdown. Eddison Press. ISBN 978-0-85649-015-6.
• Titon, Jeff Todd (1994). Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (2nd ed.). University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-4482-3.
• Welding, Peter; Brown, Toby, eds. (1991). Bluesland: Portraits of Twelve Major American Blues Masters. New York: Penguin Group. 253 + [2] pp. ISBN 0-525-93375-1.

External links[edit]

• Blues at Curlie
• The American Folklife Center’s Online Collections and Presentations
• The Blue Shoe Project – Nationwide (U.S.) Blues Education Programming
• «The Blues», documentary series by Martin Scorsese, aired on PBS
• The Blues Foundation
• The Delta Blues Museum (archived 12 June 1998)
• The Music in Poetry – Smithsonian Institution lesson plan on the blues, for teachers
• American Music: Archive of artist and record label discographies

Little is known about the exact origin of the music now known as the blues.^[1] No specific year can be cited as the origin of the blues, largely because the style evolved over a long period and existed in approaching its modern form before the term blues was introduced and before the style was thoroughly documented. Ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik traces the roots of many of the elements that were to develop into the blues back to the African continent, the «cradle of the blues».^[2] One important early mention of something closely resembling the blues comes from 1901, when an archaeologist in Mississippi described the songs of black workers which had lyrical themes and technical elements in common with the blues.^[3]

African rootsEdit

There are few characteristics common to all blues, as the genre takes its shape from the distinctive attributes of each individual performance.^[4] Some characteristics, however, were present prior to the creation of the modern blues, and are common to most styles of African American music. The earliest blues-like music was a «functional expression, rendered in a call-and-response style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure».^[5] This pre-blues music was adapted from the field shouts and hollers performed during slave times, expanded into «simple solo songs laden with emotional content».^[6]

Master Kora maker Alieu Suso in the Gambia

Many of these blues elements, such as the call-and-response format, can be traced back to the music of Africa. The use of melisma and a wavy, nasal intonation also suggests a connection between the music of West and Central Africa and the blues. The belief that blues is historically derived from the West African music including from Mali is reflected in Martin Scorsese’s often quoted characterization of Ali Farka Touré’s tradition as constituting «the DNA of the blues».^[7]

Perhaps the most compelling African instrument that is a predecessor to an African-American instrument is the «Akonting», a folk lute of the Jola tribe of Senegambia. It is a clear predecessor to the American banjo in its playing style, the construction of the instrument itself and in its social role as a folk instrument. The Kora is played by a professional caste of praise singers for the rich and aristocracy (called griots or jalis) and is not considered folk music. Jola music may not have been influenced much by North African/Middle Eastern music, which may point to African American music not being, according to Sam Charters, related to kora music.^{[citation needed]} The music of the Akonting and that played by on the banjo by elder African-American banjo players, even into the mid 20th century is easily identified as being very similar. The akonting is perhaps the most important and concrete link that exists between African and African-American music.

While the findings of Kubik and others clearly attest to the essential Africanness of many essential aspects of blues expression, studies by Willie Ruff and others have situated the origin of «black» spiritual music inside enslaved peoples’ exposure to their masters’ Hebridean-originated gospels.^[8] African-American economist and historian Thomas Sowell also notes that the southern, black, ex-slave population was acculturated to a considerable degree by and among their Scots-Irish «redneck» neighbors. Additionally, there are theories that the four-beats-per-measure structure of the blues might share its origins with the Native American tradition of pow wow drumming.^[9]

Other African influenceEdit

The historian Sylviane Diouf and ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik identify Islamic music as an influence on blues music.^[10][11] Diouf notes a striking resemblance between the Islamic call to prayer (originating from Bilal ibn Rabah, a famous Abyssinian African Muslim in the early 7th century) and 19th-century field holler music, noting that both have similar lyrics praising God, melody, note changes, «words that seem to quiver and shake» in the vocal chords, dramatic changes in musical scales, and nasal intonation. She attributes the origins of field holler music to African Muslim slaves who accounted for an estimated 30% of African slaves in America. According to Kubik, «the vocal style of many blues singers using melisma, wavy intonation, and so forth is a heritage of that large region of West Africa that had been in contact with the Islamic world via the Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries.»^[10][11] There was particularly a significant trans-Saharan cross-fertilization between the musical traditions of the Maghreb and the Sahel.^[11]

There was a difference in the music performed by the predominantly Muslim Sahelian slaves and the predominantly non-Muslim slaves from coastal West Africa and Central Africa. The Sahelian Muslim slaves generally favoured wind and string instruments and solo singing, whereas the non-Muslim slaves generally favored drums and group chants. Plantation owners who feared revolt outlawed drums and group chants, but allowed the Sahelian slaves to continue singing and playing their wind and string instruments, which the plantation owners found less threatening.^[11] Among the instruments introduced by Muslim African slaves were ancestors of the banjo.^[10] While many were pressured to convert to Christianity, the Sahelian slaves were allowed to maintain their musical traditions, adapting their skills to instruments such as the fiddle and guitar. Some were also allowed to perform at balls for slave-holders, allowing the migration of their music across the Deep South.^[11]

Influence of field hollersEdit

Field holler music, also known as Levee Camp Holler music, was an early form of African American music, described in the 19th century.^[10] Field hollers laid the foundations for the blues, spirituals, and eventually rhythm and blues.^[12] Field hollers, cries and hollers of the slaves and later sharecroppers working in cotton fields, prison chain gangs, railway gangs (Gandy dancers) or turpentine camps were the precursor to the call and response of African American spirituals and gospel music, to jug bands, minstrel shows, stride piano, and ultimately to the blues, rhythm and blues, jazz and African American music in general.^[12] Sylviane Diouf and Gerhard Kubik have traced the origins of field hollers to African Muslim slaves, who were influenced by the Islamic musical tradition of West Africa (see African roots above).^[10]

Influence of spiritualsEdit

A watercolor painting of a camp meeting circa 1839 (New Bedford Whaling Museum).

The most important American antecedent of the blues was the spiritual, a form of religious song with its roots in the camp meetings of the Great Awakening of the early 19th century. Spirituals were a passionate song form, that «convey(ed) to listeners the same feeling of rootlessness and misery» as the blues.^[4] Spirituals, however, were less specifically concerning the performer, instead about the general loneliness of mankind, and were more figurative than direct in their lyrics.^[4] Despite these differences, the two forms are similar enough that they can not be easily separated — many spirituals would probably have been called blues had that word been in wide use at the time.^[13]

Social and economic aspectsEdit

Emancipation from Freedmen’s viewpoint; illustration from Harper’s Weekly 1865

Detail from cover of The Celebrated Negro Melodies, as Sung by the Virginia Minstrels, 1843

The social and economic reasons for the appearance of the blues are not fully known.^[14] Blues has evolved from an unaccompanied vocal music of poor black laborers into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States. African American work songs were an important precursor to the modern blues; these included the songs sung by laborers like stevedores and roustabouts, and the field hollers and «shouts» of slaves.^[3][15] The first appearance of the blues is not well defined and is often dated between 1870 and 1900, a period that coincides with the emancipation of the slaves and the transition from slavery to sharecropping and small-scale agricultural production in the southern United States.

Several scholars characterize the early 1900s development of blues music as a move from group performances to a more individualized style. They argue that the development of the blues is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the slaves. According to Lawrence Levine,^[16] «there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the popularity of Booker T. Washington’s teachings, and the rise of the blues.» Levine states that «psychologically, socially, and economically, Negroes were being acculturated in a way that would have been impossible during slavery, and it is hardly surprising that their secular music reflected this as much as their religious music did.»

An important reason for the lack of certain knowledge about the origins of the blues is the earliest blues musicians’ tendency to wander through communities, leaving little or no record of precisely what sort of music they played or where it came from. Blues was generally regarded as lower-class music, unfit for documentation, study or enjoyment by the upper- and middle-classes^[17]

Blues around 1900Edit

An 1890s photo of the tourist steamer Okahumke’e on the Ocklawaha River, with black guitarists on board

Blue notes pre-date their use in blues. English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s «A Negro Love Song», from his The African Suite for Piano composed in 1898, contains blue third and seventh notes.^[18]

African American composer W. C. Handy wrote in his autobiography of the experience of sleeping on a train traveling through (or stopping at the station of) Tutwiler, Mississippi around 1903, and being awakened by:

… a lean, loose-jointed Negro who had commenced plucking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. … The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly… The singer repeated the line («Going’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog») three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.

Handy had mixed feelings about this music, which he regarded as rather primitive and monotonous,^[19] but he used the «Southern cross’ the Dog» line in his 1914 «Yellow Dog Rag», which he retitled «Yellow Dog Blues» after the term blues became popular.^[20] «Yellow Dog» was the nickname of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad.

Blues later adopted elements from the «Ethiopian (here, meaning «black») airs» of minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment.^[21] The style also was closely related to ragtime, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved «the original melodic patterns of African music».^[22]

Since the 1890s, the American sheet music publishing industry had produced a great deal of ragtime music. The first published ragtime song to include a 12-bar section was «One o’ Them Things!» in 1904. Written by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, it was published in St. Louis, Missouri, by Jos. Plachet and Son.^[23] Another early rag/blues mix was «I Got the Blues» published in 1908 by Antonio Maggio of New Orleans
^[24]

In a long interview conducted by Alan Lomax in 1938, Jelly Roll Morton recalled that the first blues he had heard, probably around 1900, was played by a singer and prostitute, Mamie Desdunes, in Garden District, New Orleans. Morton sang the blues: «Can’t give me a dollar, give me a lousy dime/ You can’t give me a dollar, give me a lousy dime/ Just to feed that hungry man of mine». The interview was released as The Complete Library of Congress Recordings.^[25]

Continued development of the blues in the 1910sEdit

In 1912, the sheet music industry published another blues composition—»Dallas Blues» by Hart A. Wand of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.^[26] Two other blues-like compositions, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley adoption of blues elements, were also published in 1912: «Baby Seals’ Blues» by Baby Franklin Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews) and «Memphis Blues», another ragtime arrangement with a single 12-bar section,^[27] by W. C. Handy.^[28] Also in 1912 (on November 9), another song, «The Blues», was copyrighted by LeRoy «Lasses» White, but not actually published until 1913.^[29]

Handy was a formally trained musician, composer and arranger who helped to popularize the blues by transcribing and orchestrating blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers. He became a popular and prolific composer, and billed himself as the «Father of the Blues»; however, his compositions can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Afro-Cuban habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime;^[30][31] Handy’s signature work was the St. Louis Blues.

Songs from this period had many different structures. A testimony of those times can be found for instance in Henry Thomas’s recordings.^[32] However, the twelve-, eight-bar, or sixteen-bar structure based on tonic, subdominant and dominant chords became the most common.^[33] Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the lowered third and dominant seventh (so-called blue notes) of the associated major scale.^[34] The standard 12-bar blues form is noted in uncorroborated oral histories as appearing communities throughout the region along the lower Mississippi River during the decade of the 1900s (and performed in New Orleans at least since 1908). One of these early sites of blues evolution was along Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. However, author Eileen Southern has pointed out several contrasting statements by old-time musicians. She cites Eubie Blake as saying «Blues in Baltimore? Why, Baltimore is the blues!» and Bunk Johnson as claiming that the blues was around in his childhood, in the 1880s.^[1]

Growth of the blues (1920s onward)Edit

One of the first professional blues singers was Gertrude «Ma» Rainey, who claimed to have coined the term blues. Classic female urban or vaudeville blues singers were popular in the 1920s, among them Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Victoria Spivey. Mamie Smith, more a vaudeville performer than a blues artist,^[35] was the first African-American to record a blues in 1920; her «Crazy Blues» sold over 75,000 copies in its first month.^[36]

The musical forms and styles that are now considered the «blues» as well as modern «country music» arose in the same regions during the nineteenth century in the southern United States. Recorded blues and country can be found from as far back as the 1920s, when the popular record industry developed and created marketing categories called «race music» and «hillbilly music» to sell music by blacks for blacks and by whites for whites respectively. At the time, there was no clear musical division between «blues» and «country», except for the race of the performer, and even that sometimes was documented incorrectly by record companies.^[37]

NotesEdit

ReferencesEdit

• Curiel, Jonathan (August 15, 2004). «Muslim Roots of the Blues». SFGate. Archived from the original on September 5, 2005. Retrieved August 24, 2005.
• Ewen, David (1957). Panorama of American Popular Music. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-648360-7.
• Ferris, Jean (1993). America’s Musical Landscape. Brown & Benchmark. ISBN 0-697-12516-5.
• Garofalo, Reebee (1997). Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the USA. Allyn & Bacon. ISBN 0-205-13703-2.
• Hamilton, Marybeth (2007). In Search of the Blues. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 9780224060189.
• Oliver, Paul (1970). Savannah syncopators: African retentions in the blues. Studio Vista. ISBN 0-289-79828-0.
• Robert Palmer (1981). Deep Blues. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-006223-6.
• Schuller, Gunther (1968). Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-504043-0.
• Southern, Eileen (1997). The Music of Black Americans. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-03843-2.

What is blues?
Answering this question musicians usually say, ‘Blues is when a good man feels sad and lonely,’ or ‘Blues is a feeling of a good man when his girl leaves him.’ In dictionaries, blues is defined not only as a style of music but also as a feeling of deep unhappiness. It was an emotion long before it became a kind of music. Blues was born in North America at the beginning of the last century among Afro-Americans. African roots, influence of ‘white’ folk music and jazz as a basis gave birth to this new style.
The romantic image of a bluesman is a poor lonely man with his guitar and the blues as his only friend. The blues to a singer may be like person, whom he is talking to, an old friend ready to listen and help. One of the most famous blues begins like this:
Good morning, blues,
Blues, how do you do?
Good morning, blues,
Blues, how do you do?
Well, I’m doing all right,
Good morning, how are you?
Что такое блюз?
Отвечая на этот вопрос музыканты, как правило, говорят: «Блюз — это когда хороший человек грустит и чувствует себя одиноким», или «Блюз – это чувство хорошего человека, когда его девушка уходит от него». В словарях, блюз определяется не только как стиль музыки, но также как чувство глубокого несчастья. Он был эмоцией до того как стал видом музыки. Блюз родился в Северной Америке в начале прошлого века среди афро-американцев. Африканские корни, под влиянием «белой» народной музыки и джаза в качестве основы дали рождение этому новому стилю.
Романтический образ блюзмена — бедный одинокий человек с гитарой и блюзом в качестве своего единственного друга. Блюз для певца может быть как человек, с которым он разговаривает, старый друг готовый выслушать и помочь. Один из самых известных блюзов начинается так:
Доброе утро, блюз,
Блюз, как дела?
Доброе утро, блюз,
Блюз, как дела?
Ну, у меня все хорошо,
Доброе утро! Как ты?

This is the latest installment in our weekly series entitled, The Language of the Blues, where author and rocker Debra Devi focuses on the meaning and significance of a unique word used in blues song. Come back every week for the latest! Devi’s The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to ZuZu is now available at Bluescentric.com!

“The blues” stems from the 17th-century English expression, “the blue devils,” which described the intense visual hallucinations of delirium tremens — the trembling and psychosis associated with alcohol withdrawal. Shortened over time to “the blues,” the phrase came to mean a state of emotional agitation or depression. Although there are happy, up-tempo blues songs, many blues songs mine a melancholic vein, and express feelings of loss and emotional turmoil.

For white Americans, “blue” meant “drunk” as early as the 1800s. Among African Americans, an intimate couples dance called the slow drag that involved plastering as much of one’s torso to one’s partner’s as possible and grinding the hips together very slowly was also called “the blues.” A rural juke joint at the turn of the century would be jammed on a Saturday night with couples getting their drink on and doing the pre-coital shuffle to the accompaniment of a bluesman on guitar, stomping the beat out on the floor with his foot.

The link between “blue” and drinking is also indicated by “blue laws” that still prohibit sale of alcohol and operating of saloons on Sundays in some states. The term “blue law” was first used by the English Reverend Samuel Peters in his 1781 book General History of Connecticut, which caused a stir when it appeared in London during the American Revolution.

Peters described ludicrously punitive Sabbath observance laws purportedly enacted by the Puritan governors of Connecticut. Peters also convincingly described the “march of the frogs of Windham” and claimed that Puritans were called “pumpkinheads” in their new homeland. Peters’ book was a hoax, and he is believed to have made up the blue laws to poke fun at the colonies, which he had been forced to leave during the Revolution. Nonetheless, laws prohibiting certain activities on Sundays are still referred to as blue laws.

Today musicians all over the world play the blues, often in the twelve-bar, I-IV-V chord progression structure. That format was imposed on the blues to some extent by William Christopher Handy, the first publisher of blues sheet music. The 1912 publication of his “Memphis Blues” sheet music introduced his style of twelve-bar blues.

The superb singer, guitarist, and bandleader “Little” Milton Campbell, Jr., who was born in Inverness, Mississippi in 1934, told me: “This is just my opinion, of course, but when W.C. Handy heard that gentleman [a slide guitarist] playing down in Tutwiler, Mississippi, it fascinated him and he set out and put it to bars. He created sequences- verse, chorus, and et cetera. But the old timers didn’t really play that way. For instance, the late John Lee Hooker, he didn’t play by bars, he didn’t count- he just made a change whenever he felt like it. He didn’t necessarily rhyme all his words, neither. Whatever he was thinking, whatever came up, that’s what he was singing.

“I think W.C. Handy was trying his best to make the songs seem as professional as possible, yet also simple to play,” Campbell explained, “so he put bars to the music where you could count, where it could be simple. Twelve bars with a turn-back.” Little Milton added, “A lot of people have a wrong concept about the so-called blues. That word has helped and it has also hurt. It’s given people an impression of raggedy alcoholics, dope heads, or what have you.”

The blues evolved from the work songs and hollers slaves made up in the fields. “We were always singing in the fields. Not real singing, you know, just hollerin’, but we made up our songs about things that was happenin’ to us at the time, and I think that’s where the Blues started,” Son House is quoted as saying in Looking Up at Down: the Emergence of Blues Culture by William Barlow,

The singing and drumming of the newly arrived slaves struck American chroniclers as weird, harsh, and “primitive,” when it was anything but. Falsetto singing, for example, was one innovation that in Africa is considered to be the very essence of masculine expression. (Anyone who has become hot and bothered listening to early Bobby “Blue” Bland, or Prince, can testify to that!) African musicians were also more advanced in the use of polyphonic, contrapuntal rhythms than their European peers were. While European composers explored harmonic complexity, Africans focused on rhythmic complexity. To African ears, as Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones) explains in Blues People, European music would have seemed “vapid rhythmically.”

Europeans also did not realize at first that because African languages are tonal, Africans can talk with their drums. African drummers vary pitches while drumming to mimic both the rhythms and pitches of tonal speech. In African Rhythm and African Sensibility, John Miller Chernoff relates how his Ewe drum teacher ordered them some beers: “During my first day practicing with Gideon I was following him well until he suddenly performed a rather complicated series of rhythms and then went back to the basic rhythm he was
showing me. A few minutes later a man who had passed at that moment returned with two bottles of beer.”

African “talking drums” were key to organizing slave rebellions, and so were strictly banned on pain of death after a rebellion in the South Carolina colony in 1739. From the official account of the rebellion:

“On the 9th day of September last, being Sunday, which is the day the Planters allow them to work for themselves, some Angola Negroes assembled, to the number of twenty, at a place called Stonehow…. Several Negroes joined them, they calling out “liberty!” marched on with colour displayed and two drums beating, pursuing all white people they met, and killing man, woman, and child…. They increased every minute by new Negroes coming to them, so that they were above sixty, some say a hundred, on which they halted in a field and set to dancing, singing, and beating drums, to draw more Negroes to them, thinking that they were victorious over the whole province, having marched ten miles and burnt all before them without opposition.”

The Slave Act of 1740 in South Carolina barred slaves from owning or using “drums, horns, or other loud instruments.” Other colonies followed suit with specific legislation against the use of drums by slaves, such the Black Codes of Georgia, which forbade “beating the drum and blowing the trumpet.”

Following the Nat Turner revolt of 1831, all the states imposed similar restrictions, and forbade slaves to learn to read or write.

Although their drums, songs, and languages were outlawed in the colonies, African slaves held fast to the unique rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic features of their music. They continued to employ vibrato, tremolo, overtones, and hoarse-voiced and shouting African vocal techniques to convey many shades of meaning. Over time they mingled all these features and techniques with the work songs they created and with the European hymns and folksongs they heard to create the blues.

Antiphonal singing–call and response between a lead singer and a chorus–is another feature of African music that survived slavery and vitalized American popular music. Africans working in American fields did what they would have done at home: they improvised call-and-response shouts on the spot, to the rhythm of the task at hand. A lead worker chanted the opening lines, and the chorus of workers would answer. We hear this
when James Brown sings “Get up!” and Bobby Byrd answers “Get on up!”

African work songs praised the gods and gave thanks for the harvests, but in America the slaves were not allowed to refer to their gods and were not of a mind to give thanks for anything. Barred from singing in their languages, they sang in self-taught English, retaining the accents and syntaxes of native dialects as they shout-sang their laments:

No more driver call me
No more driver call me
No more driver call me
Many thousand die

In church, the elements of African music — syncopation, polyphony, shouts, and call and response —transformed European hymns into spirituals that rocked the walls. In the
fields, these elements became the improvised work songs that birthed the blues.

Although very early blues did not have the twelve-bar, three-line AAB structure of the classic blues of the 1920s, the three-line structure of the blues verse that eventually emerged was a function of call-and-response singing. The lead singer would repeat a line twice while waiting for another singer to improvise a response. African spiritual chants often repeat an important line. Yorubans, for instance, rely on the poetic chants of a
Divine oracle called Ifá for insights into their personal problems:

The life of Ifá surpasses water’s coolness
The life of Ifá surpasses water’s coolness
The speaker-of-all languages married a woman
Who herself bathed only in water that is cold
The life of Ifá surpasses water in its coolness

Work songs were primarily sung a cappella, but after Emancipation, the guitar and harmonica made it possible for traveling country blues singers to earn money playing for juke joint dances, passing their songs along in the process. Over time, the blues developed into music played and listened to for pleasure, not for work. It became music that expressed the singer’s individual struggles and passions, both carnal and spiritual. It is interesting that the idea of the instrumental solo, relatively unimportant in West African music, became very important in the blues, which emerged in a country that idolized the individual and had steamrolled over the concept of tribe altogether.

Charters wrote in The Roots of the Blues that “The blues function in American black society as a popular love song–in the early period almost obsessively concerned with infidelity.” It is possible, however, that all those songs about wreaking revenge on a “no-good woman” who kept a man “in chains” were metaphorical expressions of the determination of African Americans to free themselves from oppression—in line with the African-American tradition of signifying (using innuendo and doubletalk that is fully understood only by members of one’s community to express bold opinions or feelings without fear of repercussion).

While Charters was in Africa, he observed that “the voices of griots and blues singers had a great deal of similarity in tone and texture. If a griot like Jali Nyama Suso had sung in English the sound of his voice would have been difficult to distinguish from an Afro-American singer. There was the same kind of tone production, the same forcing of higher notes. In the gruffness of the lower range and the strong expressiveness of the middle voice I could hear stylistic similarities to singing I had heard in many parts of the South.”

Blues guitarists transferred African vocal devices to the guitar, bending the strings to reach intervals beyond the limitations of the frets, and mimic singing. They flatted the thirds, fifths, and sevenths into quartertones–blue notes.

Alan Lomax offered an interesting take on this in The Land Where the Blues Began. He theorized that “interval size is correlated cross-culturally to those factors that restrict the social independence of the individual.” He noted that where strict castes have developed, such as in India, musicians use quartertones and other intervals smaller than a second. In contrast, hunters and gatherers from more easy-going societies, such as Native American and African Pygmy, sing songs filled with great leaps, such as octaves and fifths. In sub-Saharan Africa, “where only a modest level of social layering stiffened social intercourse,” the most common intervals were thirds and fifths. These were sometimes flatted but not nearly so much as they are in the blues.

Lomax attributed this favoring of narrowed intervals among blues musicians to “the painful encounter of the black community with the caste-and-class system of the post-Reconstruction period.” Freed by the Civil War, yet hemmed in by racism, African Americans wound up on very bottom of the social heap as day laborers and sharecroppers. “Homelessness and orphaning were the order of the day for Delta working-class blacks, creating the wellspring of melancholy whose theme song was the blues,” Lomax wrote.

This very expression of a tough situation, however, became a way out of poverty for some African Americans. The country blues, sung by one singer accompanying him- or herself on guitar or banjo, evolved into the classic blues of the 1920s and 1930s, sung by such stars as Bessie Smith in front of a big band or piano-led combo. The blues gave options to women like Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith, who without it might have
spent their lives scrubbing white peoples’ floors and washing their clothes. The blues drew together the descendants of once disparate tribal people who had suffered sickening humiliations in a foreign land.

This new African-American community invigorated American music with African musical techniques and its unique aesthetics for musical improvisation. While describing Ewe master drumming in Studies in African Music, A.M. Jones wrote, “To play a string of master drum standard patterns even if each is repeated several times is simply not African music. The full flower of the music is in the variations, of which the standard pattern is the nucleus. The musical technique is this: the master announces a standard pattern and repeats it several times to establish it. Now each standard pattern consists of several phrases or sentences. Any of these can serve as a nucleus for variations.” Jones might as well be giving the aesthetic code for a blues jam or American jazz.

Another African aesthetic that survived slavery and became fundamental to blues improvisation is the definition of mastery of an instrument as the ability to choose the perfect note to evoke an emotion, as opposed to dazzling technical displays. As Chernoff learned from his drum teachers, “One note placed at the right point in the music will prove the strength of the drummer more than the execution of a technically difficult phrase.” This is a guiding principle for blues musicians and is what distinguishes mature masters from showoff-y youngsters.

To see this more clearly, substitute “guitarist” for “drummer” in this observation from Chernoff: “One might imagine that the lead drummer would proceed directly through many styles in order to display his skill and make the music interesting with accentuation. Instead, those drummers considered to be the best do just the opposite. They take their time…. The aesthetic decision which constitutes excellence will be the timing of the
change and the choice of a new pattern.” It’s not about how many notes the musician plays; it’s about whether he or she has cultivated the sensitivity and maturity to choose the right note.

“The blues contains those values,” Texas blues guitarist Jimmie Vaughan told me, adding, “If a musician can get the blues and what it says about space and feeling…the space is as important as the notes. Because if you don’t have space, you don’t allow time for the listener to feel what has been said.”

Somehow, as Africans became African Americans, they maintained their aesthetic codes — even as their languages and songs were stomped out. Their great achievement was that they transferred these values to a new world and created a new music that today transcends racial and cultural boundaries, such that American blues artists can fly to Japan or Poland and be met by hordes of screaming fans who may not speak their language — yet understand their music.

As guitarist Robben Ford likes to say, “The blues is a big house.” An astonishing amount of music has been birthed under its roof, all of it based on what is proving to be one of the strongest, most flexible, and inspiring musical frameworks ever created.

Songs:
“Death Letter Blues” – Son House

“Hobo Blues” – John Lee Hooker

Pick up a copy of The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu at Bluescentric