Origins of the blues
Encyclopedia
Little is known about the exact origin of the music now known as the blues
. No specific year can be cited as the origin of the blues, largely because the style evolved over a long period of time and existed in approaching its modern form before the term blues was introduced, 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". One important early reference to 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.
s were an important precursor to the modern blues; these included the songs sung by laborers like stevedores and roustabout
s, and the field hollers and "shouts" of slaves.
There are few characteristics common to all blues, as the genre takes its shape from the peculiarities of each individual performance. 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". 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".
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"
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 griot
s or jalis) and is not considered folk music. Jola
music was actually not influenced much by Islamic
and North African
/Middle Eastern music
, and this may give us an important clue as to how African American music does not, according to many scholars such as Sam Charters, bear hardly any relation to kora music. Rather, African-American music may reflect a hold over from a pre-Islamicized form of African music. 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.
However, while the findings of Kubik and others also 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. 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" neighbours.
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The most important American antecedent of the blues was the spiritual
, a form of religious song with its roots in the camp meeting
s 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. Spirituals, however, were less specifically concerning the performer, instead about the general loneliness of mankind, and were more figurative than direct in their lyrics. 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.
The social and economic reasons for the appearance of the blues are not fully known. 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. 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, "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
Blue note
s 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.
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:
Handy had mixed feelings about this music, which he regarded as rather primitive and monotonous, 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. "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 show
s and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment. 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".
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. Another early rag/blues mix was "I Got The Blues
" published in 1908 by Anthony Maggio of New Orleans
In later blues music, one often encounters titles of the format "The ___ Blues", or variations, in which the singer describes the kind of blues he or she has, or where they originated. In earlier music, one often meets with similar titles including the word "blues", but there referring to the emotional state of the blues only, and having few if any of the typical features associated with this music today. For example, in "Good Morning Blues", Lead Belly simply recounts waking up in an unhappy state of mind, whereupon he says good morning to "the blues", as if addressing another person in the room.
" by Hart A. Wand
of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
. Two other blues-like compositions, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley
adoption of blues elements, were also published in 1912: "Baby Seals' Blues" by "Baby" F. Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews
) and "Memphis Blues
", another ragtime arrangement with a single 12-bar section, by W. C. Handy
. Also in 1912 (on November 9), another song, "The Blues", was copyrighted by LeRoy "Lasses" White, but not actually published until 1913.
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 Latin habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime; 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. However, the twelve-
, eight-bar, or sixteen-bar structure based on tonic, subdominant and dominant chords became the most common. Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the lowered third and dominant seventh (so-called blue note
s) of the associated major scale
. 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.
, who claimed to have coined the term blues. Classic female urban
or vaudeville
blues singers were popular in the 1920s, among them Mamie Smith
, Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith
, and Victoria Spivey
. Mamie Smith, more a vaudeville performer than a blues artist, was the first African- American to record a blues in 1920; her "Crazy Blues" sold 75,000 copies in its first month.
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.
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
. No specific year can be cited as the origin of the blues, largely because the style evolved over a long period of time and existed in approaching its modern form before the term blues was introduced, 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". One important early reference to something closely resembling the blues comes from 1901, when an archaeologist in Mississippi
Mississippi
Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
described the songs of black workers which had lyrical themes and technical elements in common with the blues.
African roots
African American work songWork song
A work song is a piece of music closely connected to a specific form of work, either sung while conducting a task or a song linked to a task or trade which might be a connected narrative, description, or protest song....
s were an important precursor to the modern blues; these included the songs sung by laborers like stevedores and roustabout
Roustabout
A roustabout is a labourer typically performing temporary, unskilled work. The term has traditionally been used to refer to traveling-circus workers, natural gas, or oil rig workers....
s, and the field hollers and "shouts" of slaves.
There are few characteristics common to all blues, as the genre takes its shape from the peculiarities of each individual performance. Some characteristics, however, were present prior to the creation of the modern blues, and are common to most styles of African American music
African American music
African-American music is an umbrella term given to a range of musics and musical genres emerging from or influenced by the culture of African Americans, who have long constituted a large and significant ethnic minority of the population of the United States...
. The earliest blues-like music was a "functional expression, rendered in a call-and-response
Call and response (music)
In music, a call and response is a succession of two distinct phrases usually played by different musicians, where the second phrase is heard as a direct commentary on or response to the first...
style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure". 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".
Music of Africa
Africa is a vast continent and its regions and nations have distinct musical traditions. The music of North Africa for the most part has a different history from sub-Saharan African music traditions....
. The use of melisma
Melisma
Melisma, in music, is the singing of a single syllable of text while moving between several different notes in succession. Music sung in this style is referred to as melismatic, as opposed to syllabic, where each syllable of text is matched to a single note.-History:Music of ancient cultures used...
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
Mali
Mali , officially the Republic of Mali , is a landlocked country in Western Africa. Mali borders Algeria on the north, Niger on the east, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire on the south, Guinea on the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania on the west. Its size is just over 1,240,000 km² with...
is reflected in Martin Scorsese’s often quoted characterization of Ali Farka Touré
Ali Farka Touré
Ali Ibrahim “Farka” Touré was a Malian singer and guitarist, and one of the African continent’s most internationally renowned musicians. His music is widely regarded as representing a point of intersection of traditional Malian music and its North American cousin, the blues...
’s tradition as constituting "the DNA of the blues"
Akonting
The akonting is the folk lute of the Jola people, found in Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau in West Africa...
", a folk lute of the Jola tribe of Senegambia. It is a clear predecessor to the American banjo
Banjo
In the 1830s Sweeney became the first white man to play the banjo on stage. His version of the instrument replaced the gourd with a drum-like sound box and included four full-length strings alongside a short fifth-string. There is no proof, however, that Sweeney invented either innovation. This new...
in its playing style, the construction of the instrument itself and in its social role as a folk instrument. The Kora
Kora (instrument)
The kora is a 21-string bridge-harp used extensively in West Africa.-Description:A kora is built from a large calabash cut in half and covered with cow skin to make a resonator, and has a notched bridge. It does not fit well into any one category of western instruments and would have to be...
is played by a professional caste of praise singers for the rich and aristocracy (called griot
Griot
A griot or jeli is a West African storyteller. The griot delivers history as a poet, praise singer, and wandering musician. The griot is a repository of oral tradition. As such, they are sometimes also called bards...
s or jalis) and is not considered folk music. Jola
Jola people
The Jola are an ethnic group found in Senegal , The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. There are great numbers on the Atlantic coast between the southern banks of the Gambia River, the Casamance region of Senegal and the northern part of Guinea-Bissau...
music was actually not influenced much by Islamic
Islamic music
Islamic music is Muslim religious music, as sung or played in public services or private devotions. The classic heartland of Islam is the Middle East, North Africa, Iran, Central Asia, Horn of Africa and South Asia. Due to Islam being a multi-ethnic religion, the musical expression of its adherents...
and North African
Music of North Africa
North Africa has contributed much to popular music, especially Egyptian classical and el Gil, Algerian raï and Moroccan chaabi. The broad region is sometimes called the Maghreb , and the term Maghrebian music is in use. For a variety of reasons, Tunisia and Libya do not have as extensive a...
/Middle Eastern music
Middle Eastern music
The music of Western Asia and North Africa spans across a vast region, from Morocco to Afghanistan, and its influences can be felt even further afield. Middle Eastern music influenced the music of India, as well as Central Asia, Spain, Southern Italy, the Caucasus and the Balkans, as in chalga...
, and this may give us an important clue as to how African American music does not, according to many scholars such as Sam Charters, bear hardly any relation to kora music. Rather, African-American music may reflect a hold over from a pre-Islamicized form of African music. 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.
However, while the findings of Kubik and others also clearly attest to the essential Africanness of many essential aspects of blues expression, studies by Willie Ruff
Willie Ruff
Willie Ruff is the hornist and bassist of the Mitchell-Ruff Duo and one of the founders of the W. C. Handy Music Festival. He was born in Florence, Alabama. The duo regularly performs and lectures all over the United States, Asia, Africa and Europe...
and others have situated the origin of "black" spiritual music inside enslaved peoples' exposure to their masters' Hebridean
Hebrides
The Hebrides comprise a widespread and diverse archipelago off the west coast of Scotland. There are two main groups: the Inner and Outer Hebrides. These islands have a long history of occupation dating back to the Mesolithic and the culture of the residents has been affected by the successive...
-originated gospels. African-American economist and historian Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author. A National Humanities Medal winner, he advocates laissez-faire economics and writes from a libertarian perspective...
also notes that the southern, black, ex-slave population was acculturated to a considerable degree by and among their Scots-Irish "redneck" neighbours.
Influence of spirituals
Spiritual (music)
Spirituals are religious songs which were created by enslaved African people in America.-Terminology and origin:...
, a form of religious song with its roots in the camp meeting
Camp meeting
The camp meeting is a form of Protestant Christian religious service originating in Britain and once common in some parts of the United States, wherein people would travel from a large area to a particular site to camp out, listen to itinerant preachers, and pray...
s of the Great Awakening
Second Great Awakening
The Second Great Awakening was a Christian revival movement during the early 19th century in the United States. The movement began around 1800, had begun to gain momentum by 1820, and was in decline by 1870. The Second Great Awakening expressed Arminian theology, by which every person could be...
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. Spirituals, however, were less specifically concerning the performer, instead about the general loneliness of mankind, and were more figurative than direct in their lyrics. 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.
Social and economic aspects
Abolitionism
Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery.In western Europe and the Americas abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free. At the behest of Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas who was shocked at the treatment of natives in the New World, Spain enacted the first...
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, "there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual
Individualism
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses "the moral worth of the individual". Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance while opposing most external interference upon one's own...
, the popularity of Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915...
'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
Blues around 1900
Blue note
In jazz and blues, a blue note is a note sung or played at a slightly lower pitch than that of the major scale for expressive purposes. Typically the alteration is a semitone or less, but this varies among performers and genres. Country blues, in particular, features wide variations from the...
s pre-date their use in blues. English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was an English composer who achieved such success that he was once called the "African Mahler".-Early life and education:...
's "A Negro Love Song", from his The African Suite for Piano composed in 1898, contains blue third and seventh notes.
African American composer W. C. Handy
W. C. Handy
William Christopher Handy was a blues composer and musician. He was widely known as the "Father of the Blues"....
wrote in his autobiography of the experience of sleeping on a train traveling through (or stopping at the station of) Tutwiler, Mississippi
Tutwiler, Mississippi
Tutwiler is a town in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 1,364 at the 2000 census.-History:In 1899 Tom Tutwiler, a civil engineer for a local railroad, made his headquarters seven miles northeast of Sumner. The town of Tutwiler was founded and named for him...
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 popularised by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. ... The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly... The singer repeated the line ("Goin' 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, 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. "Yellow Dog" was the nickname of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad.
Blues later adopted elements from the "Ethiopian (here, meaning "black
Black people
The term black people is used in systems of racial classification for humans of a dark skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups.Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class, socio-economic status also plays a...
") airs" of minstrel show
Minstrel show
The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....
s and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment. The style also was closely related to ragtime
Ragtime
Ragtime is an original musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged," rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published...
, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music".
Since the 1890s, the American sheet music
Sheet music
Sheet music is a hand-written or printed form of music notation that uses modern musical symbols; like its analogs—books, pamphlets, etc.—the medium of sheet music typically is paper , although the access to musical notation in recent years includes also presentation on computer screens...
publishing industry had produced a great deal of ragtime
Ragtime
Ragtime is an original musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged," rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published...
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. Another early rag/blues mix was "I Got The Blues
I Got The Blues
"I Got the Blues" is a song from the Rolling Stones' 1971 album Sticky Fingers.Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, "I Got the Blues" is a slow-paced, ravished song...
" published in 1908 by Anthony Maggio of New Orleans
In later blues music, one often encounters titles of the format "The ___ Blues", or variations, in which the singer describes the kind of blues he or she has, or where they originated. In earlier music, one often meets with similar titles including the word "blues", but there referring to the emotional state of the blues only, and having few if any of the typical features associated with this music today. For example, in "Good Morning Blues", Lead Belly simply recounts waking up in an unhappy state of mind, whereupon he says good morning to "the blues", as if addressing another person in the room.
Birth of the blues (1910s)
In 1912 the sheet music industry published the first known blues composition—"Dallas BluesDallas Blues
"Dallas Blues", written by Hart Wand, was the first true blues song ever published. "Oh, You Beautiful Doll", a Tin Pan Alley song whose first verse is twelve-bar blues, had been published a year earlier...
" by Hart A. Wand
Hart A. Wand
Hart A. Wand , born in Kansas of German extraction, was an early fiddler and bandleader from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In the musical world he is chiefly noted for publishing the "Dallas Blues" in March 1912 . "Dallas Blues" was the first ever published twelve-bar blues song.Little is known about...
of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Oklahoma City is the capital and the largest city in the state of Oklahoma. The county seat of Oklahoma County, the city ranks 31st among United States cities in population. The city's population, from the 2010 census, was 579,999, with a metro-area population of 1,252,987 . In 2010, the Oklahoma...
. Two other blues-like compositions, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley is the name given to the collection of New York City music publishers and songwriters who dominated the popular music of the United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century...
adoption of blues elements, were also published in 1912: "Baby Seals' Blues" by "Baby" F. Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews
Artie Matthews
Artie Matthews was a songwriter, pianist, and ragtime composer.Artie Matthews was born in Braidwood, Illinois; his family moved to Springfield, Illinois in his youth. He learned to play piano, mostly popular songs and light classics, until he heard ragtime played by a pianist named Banty Morgan...
) and "Memphis Blues
Memphis blues
The Memphis blues is a style of blues music that was created in the 1920s and 1930s by Memphis-area musicians like Frank Stokes, Sleepy John Estes, Furry Lewis and Memphis Minnie...
", another ragtime arrangement with a single 12-bar section, by W. C. Handy
W. C. Handy
William Christopher Handy was a blues composer and musician. He was widely known as the "Father of the Blues"....
. Also in 1912 (on November 9), another song, "The Blues", was copyrighted by LeRoy "Lasses" White, but not actually published until 1913.
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 Latin habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime; 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
Henry Thomas (blues musician)
Henry Thomas was an American pre-World War II country blues singer, songster and musician. He was often billed as "Ragtime Texas".-Life and career:Thomas was born in Big Sandy, Texas, United States....
's recordings. However, the twelve-
Twelve bar blues
The 12-bar blues is one of the most popular chord progressions in popular music, including the blues. The blues progression has a distinctive form in lyrics and phrase and chord structure and duration...
, eight-bar, or sixteen-bar structure based on tonic, subdominant and dominant chords became the most common. Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the lowered third and dominant seventh (so-called blue note
Blue note
In jazz and blues, a blue note is a note sung or played at a slightly lower pitch than that of the major scale for expressive purposes. Typically the alteration is a semitone or less, but this varies among performers and genres. Country blues, in particular, features wide variations from the...
s) of the associated major scale
Major scale
In music theory, the major scale or Ionian scale is one of the diatonic scales. It is made up of seven distinct notes, plus an eighth which duplicates the first an octave higher. In solfege these notes correspond to the syllables "Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti/Si, ", the "Do" in the parenthesis at...
. The standard 12-bar blues form is noted in uncorroborated oral histories
Oral history
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews...
as appearing communities throughout the region along the lower Mississippi River
Mississippi River
The Mississippi River is the largest river system in North America. Flowing entirely in the United States, this river rises in western Minnesota and meanders slowly southwards for to the Mississippi River Delta at the Gulf of Mexico. With its many tributaries, the Mississippi's watershed drains...
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
Beale Street
Beale Street is a street in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, which runs from the Mississippi River to East Street, a distance of approximately . It is a significant location in the city's history, as well as in the history of the blues. Today, the blues clubs and restaurants that line Beale Street are...
in Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis is a city in the southwestern corner of the U.S. state of Tennessee, and the county seat of Shelby County. The city is located on the 4th Chickasaw Bluff, south of the confluence of the Wolf and Mississippi rivers....
. However, author Eileen Southern
Eileen Southern
Eileen Jackson Southern was an African American musicologist, researcher, author and teacher.-Early life:She attended public schools in her hometown, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and in Sioux Falls, South Dakota...
has pointed out several contrasting statements by old-time musicians. She cites Eubie Blake
Eubie Blake
James Hubert Blake was an American composer, lyricist, and pianist of ragtime, jazz, and popular music. In 1921, Blake and long-time collaborator Noble Sissle wrote the Broadway musical Shuffle Along, one of the first Broadway musicals to be written and directed by African Americans...
as saying "Blues in Baltimore? Why, Baltimore is the blues!" and Bunk Johnson
Bunk Johnson
Willie Gary "Bunk" Johnson was a prominent early New Orleans jazz trumpet player in the early years of the 20th century who enjoyed a revived career in the 1940s....
as claiming that the blues was around in his childhood, in the 1880s.
Growth of the blues (1920s onward)
One of the first professional blues singers was Ma RaineyMa Rainey
Ma Rainey was one of the earliest known American professional blues singers and one of the first generation of such singers to record. She was billed as The Mother of the Blues....
, who claimed to have coined the term blues. Classic female urban
Classic female blues
Classic female blues was an early form of blues music, popular in the 1920s. An amalgam of traditional folk blues and urban theater music, the style is also known as vaudeville blues. Classic blues were performed by female vocalists accompanied by pianists or small jazz ensembles, and were the...
or vaudeville
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
blues singers were popular in the 1920s, among them Mamie Smith
Mamie Smith
-External links:* African American Registry* with photos* with .ram files of her early recordings* NPR special on the selection on "Crazy Blues" to the 2005...
, Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith was an American blues singer.Sometimes referred to as The Empress of the Blues, Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s...
, and Victoria Spivey
Victoria Spivey
Victoria Spivey was an American blues singer and songwriter. She is best known for her recordings of "Dope Head Blues" and "Organ Grinder Blues", and Spivey variously worked with her sister, Addie "Sweet Pease" Spivey, and with Bob Dylan, Lonnie Johnson, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Clarence...
. Mamie Smith, more a vaudeville performer than a blues artist, was the first African- American to record a blues in 1920; her "Crazy Blues" sold 75,000 copies in its first month.
The musical forms and styles that are now considered the "blues" as well as modern "country music
Country music
Country music is a popular American musical style that began in the rural Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from Western cowboy and folk 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.
External links
- Cora Connection -- Information on the kora and related Manding folk music
- http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/MusicAtlas/Volume2/playpagevol2ch10.html Slave shout samples