Origins of the blues

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Little is known about the exact origin of the music now known as the

black workers which had lyrical themes and technical elements in common with the blues.[4]

Precursive African Elements of Black American Blues

There are few characteristics common to all blues, as the genre takes its shape from the distinctive attributes of each individual performance.

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".[6] 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".[7]

Gambia

Many of these blues elements, such as the call-and-response format, can be traced back to 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".[8]

Perhaps the most compelling African instrument that is a predecessor to an African-American instrument is the "

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

pow wow drumming.[10]

Other African influence

The historian

Islamic world via the Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries."[11][12] There was particularly a significant trans-Saharan cross-fertilization between the musical traditions of the Maghreb and the Sahel.[12]

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.[12] Among the instruments introduced by Muslim African slaves were ancestors of the banjo.[11] 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.[12]

Influence of field hollers

African American music in general.[13] 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).[11]

Influence of spirituals

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.[5] Spirituals, however, were less specifically concerning the performer, instead about the general loneliness of mankind, and were more figurative than direct in their lyrics.[5] 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.[14]

Social and economic aspects

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.

field hollers and "shouts" of slaves.[4][16] 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,[17] "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[18]

Blues around 1900

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.[19]

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,

Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad
.

Blues later adopted elements from the "Ethiopian (here, meaning "

Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment.[22] 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".[23]

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.[24] Another early rag/blues mix was "I Got the Blues" published in 1908 by Antonio Maggio of New Orleans [25]

In a long interview conducted by

The Complete Library of Congress Recordings.[26]

Continued development of the blues in the 1910s

In 1912, the sheet music industry published another blues composition—"

LeRoy "Lasses" White, but not actually published until 1913.[30]

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

habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime;[31][32] Handy's signature work was "Saint Louis Blues
".

Songs from this period had many different structures. A testimony of those times can be found for instance in

dominant seventh (so-called blue notes) of the associated major scale.[35] 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)

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,[36] was the first African-American to record a blues in 1920; her "Crazy Blues" sold over 75,000 copies in its first month.[37]

The musical forms and styles that are now considered the "blues" as well as modern "

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.[38]

Notes

  1. ^ a b Southern, p. 332
  2. ^ Baraka 1999 pg 17
  3. ISBN 1-57806-146-6
  4. ^ a b Southern, p. 334
  5. ^ a b c Southern, p. 333
  6. ^ Garofalo, p. 44
  7. ^ Ferris, p. 229
  8. ^ "Our Homage to a Great Master - Ali Farka Toure | Global South, Sephis e-Magazine". Archived from the original on 2014-10-17. Retrieved 2010-08-14.
  9. ^ Paul Kelbie, "Gospel Truth - Hebrides Invented Church Spirituals", The Independent - UK, 9-19-3
  10. ^ "MUSIC: Exploring Native American influence on the blues". Americanindiannews.org.
  11. ^ a b c d e Curiel, Jonathan (August 15, 2004). "Muslim Roots of the Blues". SFGate. San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on September 5, 2005. Retrieved August 24, 2005.
  12. ^
    ISBN 9781317744023
    .
  13. ^
    ISBN 0-02-061740-2
    .
  14. ^ Southern, p. 333-334
  15. ISBN 0-521-45429-8
    , p. 285
  16. ^ "Volume 2 : African American Music : Chapter 10. McIntosh County Shouters: Slave Shout Songs from the Coast of Georgia". Stg.brown.edu. Retrieved 12 February 2019.
  17. ISBN 0-19-502374-9
    , p. 223
  18. ^ Southern, p. 332-333
  19. ^ Scott, Derek B. From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology. Oxford University Press, (2003) p. 182: "A blues idiom is hinted at in "A Negro Love-Song", a pentatonic melody with blue third and seventh in Coleridge-Taylor's African Suite of 1898, many years before the first blues publications."
  20. ^ Parrish, Tim; Walking Blues: Making Americans from Emerson to Elvis, University of Massachusetts Press (2001), p. 185: "Handy declares their music to be an endless 'monotony,' a 'thump-thump-thump' sound that he associates—with evident distaste—with 'cane rows and levee camps' (77). Nor does he admire the enthusiastic dancing the music elicits."
  21. ^ Wald, Elijah; Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, Harper Collins (2004), p. 283: "When the popular taste for blues asserted itself I took out that old number and changed its name to 'Yellow Dog Blues.' Other than the name, I altered nothing."
  22. ^ Garofalo, p. 44 Gradually, instrumental and harmonic accompaniment were added, reflecting increasing cross-cultural contact. Garofalo goes on to cite others mentioning the "Ethiopian airs" and "Negro spirituals".
  23. ^ Schuller, cited in Garofalo, p. 27
  24. ^ Saffle, Michael, Perspectives on American Music, 1900-1950, Routledge (2000) p. 74: "Chapman and smith's "One O' Those Things" (1904) an earlier blues/rag mix (see Figure 3.2)."
  25. ^ Saffle, Michael, Perspectives on American Music, 1900-1950, Routledge (2000) p. 74: "In Maggio's "I Got the Blues" (1908), a twelve-bar blues in G Major is followed by a section in G minor, ending with a rag riff (see Figure 3.1).
  26. ISBN 978-0465018123
    .
  27. ISBN 0-306-80014-4
    , pages 34-35: "The first was Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues", published in March; the second was Arthur Seals's "Bab Seals' Blues", published in August; Handy finally brought out his blues in September. Both Handy and Arthur Seals were Negroes, but the music that they titled "blues is more or less derived from the standard popular musical styles of the "coon-song" and "cake-walk" type. It is ironic the first published piece in the Negro "blues idiom", Dallas Blues, was by a white man, Hart Wand."
  28. ^ Saffle, Michael, Perspectives on American Music, 1900-1950, Routledge (2000), p. 74: "White's "Original Chicago Blues" (1915) is a later blues/rag almagam, as is "The Memphis Blues."
  29. ^ Garofalo, p. 27; Garofalo cites Barlow in Handy's sudden success demonstrated [the] commercial potential of [the blues], which in turn made the genre attractive to the Tin Pan Alley hacks, who wasted little time in turning out a deluge of imitations. (parentheticals in Garofalo)
  30. ^ Monge, Luigi; David Evans. "New Songs of Blind Lemon Jefferson". Journal of Texas Music History 3:2 (Fall 2003), p. 19: "In fact, in addition to its textual relationship in the first stanza to 'Michigan Water Blues,' Jefferson's 'Light House Blues' is related textually and musically to an even older song, 'The Negro Blues'/'Nigger Blues' by Leroy 'Lasses' White of Dallas. White registered his tune with a set of fifteen three-line stanzas for copyright on November 9, 1912, under the former title. In 1913, a shortened version of the piece was published under the latter infelicitous title, containing only six stanzas, five of which are close variants of stanzas in the longer version and one of which is new."
  31. ^ Garofalo, p. 27
  32. ^ Morales, p. 277
  33. ^ Palmer, p. 35
  34. ^ Garofalo, pp. 46-47
  35. ^ Ewen, p. 143
  36. ^ Palmer, p. 106
  37. ^ Hawkeye Herman, General background on African American Music, Blues Foundation, Essays: What is the blues?"Blues Foundation :: Essays". Archived from the original on December 10, 2008. Retrieved October 15, 2010.
  38. ^ Garofalo, pp. 44-47 As marketing categories, designations like race and hillbilly intentionally separated artists along racial lines and conveyed the impression that their music came from mutually exclusive sources. Nothing could have been further from the truth... In cultural terms, blues and country were more equal than they were separate. Garofalo claims that artists were sometimes listed in the wrong racial category in record company catalogues.

References

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