Blues~Roots Of The Blues
The origins of the blues--a form which really didn't have a name until the early 20th century, although it had surely been around for some time before then--are impossible to pin down with any degree of certainty. There's the convenient thesis that the blues were imported to North America when African slaves were shipped to the continent in the centuries preceding the Civil War. Much of the blues is undeniably African in origin, but in fact there were many other influences that shaped the music as well. It's also reasonably certain that the blues did not take a recognizable shape until African-Americans were a large, established part of the population of the American South. Formulating the origins of the blues is a much more difficult task than, say, describing the birth of rock'n'roll. For one thing, there are no tapes or recordings available to trace and document the sounds as they coalesced prior to 1900. The standard historical record of written and oral accounts, too, is much sketchier than it is for comparitively recent genres. Offering postulations and generalizations in a short overview such as this, really, is just asking for trouble--there are plenty of blues and folklore scholars that will challenge whatever point of view is exsposed, often armed with considerable evidence. This piece will simply identify some of the likely sources. Readers interested in investigating the topic in greater depth will find many book-length studies of the subject in libraries and bookstores with a large selection. The African roots of the blues are undeniable, particularly in the griots of western Africa. The griots functioned as sorts of musical storytellers for their communities, no doubt singing about subjects like romance, family, famine, ruling governments, and struggle that are commonplace in blues music--and, indeed, folk/popular music as a whole. They often used stringed instruments that bore some resemblance to ones that became prevalent in blues. When Ali Farka Toure, of Senegal reached an international audience in the 1980s and 1990s, he was frequently described as "the African John Lee Hooker"; it's possible that his work is also an illustration of the close ties between the blues and some strains of African music. Blues music, however, most likely didn't approach anything resembling its 20th century form until slavery was instituted in the American South. The mere fact that the slaves came from many different regions and spoke many different languages, for one thing, would have worked against the retention of the music of their homeland as they began working together. Subsequent generations lost the tongues or their mothers and fathers, by necessity adopting English, the language of their overlords. The brutal and inhumane conditions of slavery, from some viewpoints, may have seemed to make it unlikely that any forms of artistic expression could develop and thrive. In some respects, however, slavery fostered such musical communication, simply as a means of making life bearable. Work songs and field hollers, some of the most oft-discussed precursors to the blues, were chanted and sung as the slaves worked or endured their punishment. They were also a means of telling stories, passing the endless hours of toil, or simply venting emotion that was impossible to express in more confined or closely supervised circumstances. The call-and-response quality of some blues music (and much gospel) may have derived in part from such singing; the blues' concentration upon earthy, day-to-day realities and struggles may have some of its roots in these styles as well. The history of American popular music is often one of Black and White styles meeting and mixing. As wide as the racial divide was in slavery days, the music of American Blacks inevitably absorbed a lot of White flavor, from European, Southern folk, and Applachian influences. In their limited contact with Whites, Blacks were also exposed to piano and string instruments that would figure strongly in their own music. By the time blues began to be recorded in the early 1920s, guitars and pianos were the most frequent instruments of choice among blues artists. There was also the considerable influence of the church. Gospel music afforded the African-American community opportunities to sing with committed fervor. The harmonies and solo vocal styles associated with vocal music have left a strong imprint on Black music to this day, including the blues. Relatively recent releases like Mississippi Fred McDowell's, recordings of spirituals in the 1960s demonstrate how strong the ties can be between down-home blues and gospel; Reverend Gary Davis, was another acoustic bluesman known for performing a lot of gospel material. The extraordinary power of the rural blues recorded in the 1920s and 1930s have sometimes left the impression that deep blues dominated the music of Southern Black communities. The repertoire of Black musicians from the Deep South was much more diverse than many people realize. Blues music was often only one element of their repertoire; some singers who only recorded blues music were likely able to play pop, country, and ragtime tunes as well in live performance, as the circumstances of the occasion demanded. Some of these musicians performed as part of traveling minstrel, vaudeville, and medicine shows; occasionally ones who toured with such concerns in the early 20th century would survive to make recordings in the early days of the LP, such as Pink Anderson. Ragtime styles also made their way onto blues records, not only via pianists but guitarists such as Reverend Gary Davis. Jug bands and the all-around entertainers that have been dubbed "songsters" are sometimes also thought of as precursors to the blues, although many such musicians were actually contemporaries of the early blues artists, and recorded often in the 1920s and 1930s. Jug bands like the Mississippi Sheiks and those of Gus Cannon used instruments not associated with the blues these days, such as the washboard, kazoo, and fiddle. They also frequently espoused a good-time air, in contrast to the more melancholic tone of deep rural guitar blues. They were still a vital part of the African-American popular music of the South in the 1930s, although afterwards their styles were deemed hokey and passe, a relic of the minstrel tradition. The wide repertoire of Southern Black music lived on in blues performers that have come to be called the "songsters," who are examined in greater depth in a separate piece. They could play blues, certainly, but also folk tunes, country songs, pop, ragtime, and spirituals. Some of the oldest bluesmen who made it onto record, such as pan pipe-quill player Henry Thomas (famous for "Bull Doze Blues," which Canned Heart turned into "Going Up the Country), were songsters. The eclecticism of the songsters lived on in some performers who became popular during the 1960s blues revival, such as Mance Lipscomb and Mississippi John Hurt. Leadbelly and Josh White could be called "songsters" of sort, although they were more commonly categorized as folk singers, or blues/folk singers. The blues, or forms closely tied to the blues, had likely existed for some time, and in various blends of the previously described styles, before its famous "discovery," at least in terms of verified historical accounts, by W.C. Handy, who recalled hearing something resembling the blues as early as 1892. The incident that has been enshrined in popular legend, however, occurred in Tuwiler, Mississippi, in 1903, as Handy, a black bandleader of a minstrel orchestra, was waiting for a train. In his autobiography, Father of the Blues, he recalls listening to the guitarist that began to play: "The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard. The tune stayed in my mind. When the singer paused, I leaned over and asked him what the words meant. He rolled his eyes, showing a trace of mild amusement. Perhaps I should have known, but he didn't mind explaining. At Morehead, the eastbound and westbound met and crossed the north and southbound trains four times a day... "He was simply singing...as he waited. This was not unusual. Southern Negroes sang about everything. Trains, steamboats, steam whistles, sledge hammers, fast women, mean bosses, stubborn mules--all became subjects for their songs. They accompany themselves on anything from which they can extract a musical sound or rhythmical effect, anything from a harmonica to a washboard." Despite his title "Father of the Blues," Handy did not invent the blues. He was responsible for popularizing them by copyrighting and publishing blues compositions. "Memphis Blues," published in 1912, was the first one; "St. Louis Blues," which followed in 1914, was his most successful, and indeed one of the most popular tunes of any kind in the 20th century, performed and recorded by numerous jazz, blues, and pop artists. Handy published/wrote other numbers in the same vein, such as "Yellow Dog Blues" and "Beale Street Blues" (named after the main thoroughfare of the Black community in Memphis). "St. Louis Blues" can sound more like jazz than blues to contemporary listeners, perhaps reflecting the fact that Handy was steeped not the blues but in brass bands, which may have shaped his arrangements. The same can be said of the first popular blues recordings of the 1920s, mostly performed by women with jazz accompanists, who sang such pop- and jazz-influenced "blues" compositions as those devised by Handy. Arguably, these records reflected a more urban and pop-oriented sensibility than what you would have heard from the mouths of the proto-blues and early blues performers of the South. Those early blues songs and singles, however, were responsible to some degree for codifying certain blues trademarks. The blues is too volatile a form to ever be standardized, but much of it is typified by a 12-bar structure and three-line verses that follow what is called an AAB rhyming scheme. These are the traits, more than any other, that have endured in much (perhaps most) acoustic and modern electric blues, live or recorded, to this day. Modern mass communications--the phonograph record and radio-began to unify the blues stylistically, exposing listeners and musicians to sounds, similar and different, from other regions. The inherent demands of a two- or three-minute 78 RPM single also necessitated a brevity and conciseness, forcing musicians to cut down the length of their songs, and perhaps to adopt certain standard methods (like the 12-bar structure and AAB scheme) to present their music commercially. The similar structure of many blues songs may have even been matters of convenience or imitation in many cases. What's certain is that after the phenomenal success of Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" (the first blues record) in 1920, and many other women singers performing in a similar vein over the next few years, the record industry--then in its infancy--was eager to record blues artists of all kinds, with a particular eye toward what was then called the "race" (i.e. African-American) market. This led to labels scouring several regions for talent, particularly the South, where most blues performers were based. Here they encountered the guitarists who sang deep country blues, as well as songsters and jug bands. Blues was off and running as an established part of the music industry, with an ever-widening repertoire of songs and styles that has endured to this day as one of the most popular and important forms of American music.
If you would like to read more about the Origin of the Blues, you can do so by going here:
MORE BLUES INFO.
If you would like to read biography's about your favorite blues singers or read biography's about blues singers you didn't even know about, just go here:
List of Artists Names
and Biography's
If you would like to go back to the Main Page, just go here:
MAIN PAGE