Blues

By: James Sellman

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Blues

African American music originating in the late 1800s that connoted both an emotional state and a musical genre, and became a familiar musical form through its role in rhythm and blues and early rock ‘n’ roll.

The blues is a uniquely African American music and reflects the particular history and culture of black America. It emerged in the South during the troubled times of the post-Reconstruction era, when Southern blacks experienced political disfranchisement, economic subordination, and systematic physical violence. During the twentieth century the blues moved from South to North, accompanying the Great Migration. The music itself shifted from simple rural blues to rhythmic and rollicking urban blues; it also became an important influence in Jazz.

As African Americans rose to prominence in popular culture, the blues reshaped the vernacular music of the United States and the entire world. During the late 1940s the blues became an important element in the black popular music known as rhythm and blues (R&B). In the following decades, it provided the musical structure—though not the emotional depth or state of mind—for much rock ‘n’ roll. In addition, Bop, hard bop, and free jazz musicians introduced new musical complexities to the blues. Today the blues can be heard all over the world—in Norway and England, Japan and Taiwan, Brazil and Africa. But America is its true home.

The Origin of the Blues

The blues developed from, and reflected, the social realities of the American South from the 1880s to the 1910s. The period constituted the nadir of American race relations since emancipation. During this time, the vast majority of blacks lived in the South, where they faced increasing social, political, and economic subordination. There were few safe outlets for their hopes, dreams, and pride, the most important being the black church. But the main secular response was the blues.

There is no way to determine when the blues first appeared. It emerged from two earlier forms, field hollers and ballads. Field hollers were work songs, generally extemporized and unaccompanied, that evolved out of the call-and-response work songs that had set the pace for gang labor on antebellum slave plantations. African American ballads were narrative in form and were not meant to set or mesh with work rhythms. Some ballads employed the four- or eight-line structure typical of white balladry, but another common lyrical form used a couplet and refrain line in a twelve-bar form, similar to the twelve-bar blues—as in the well-known “Stack O'Lee” or “Stagger Lee.”

Musical Characteristics of the Blues

The blues is, above all, a vocalized music. Blues singers and instrumentalists employ a wide range of musical timbres and inflections that are modeled on the nuances of the human voice. The most distinctive of these musical effects are blue notes—notes that are slightly flattened or played lower than their true pitch. The keening, moody dissonance of blue notes gives the blues a distinctive sense of loneliness, longing, or sadness. At the same time, blue notes lift the blues from the realm of resignation to that of dissatisfaction and discontent.

The principal blue notes are the third and seventh notes of the scale, although the fifth note is sometimes played as a blue note, especially during the bop era of the 1940s. More recently, free jazz musicians such as alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman and trumpeter Lester Bowie (b. 1941)—who play with a strong blues sensibility but without traditional blues harmony—have shown that any note can be made a blue note.

The most common form of the blues is the twelve-bar blues—standardized in particular through such W. C. Handy compositions as “Memphis Blues” (1912) and “St. Louis Blues” (1914). The twelve-bar blues uses a single repeated stanza made up of three phrases, each four measures in length. There are also eight-, sixteen-, and twenty-four-bar blues, and early recordings reveal that country bluesmen—generally singers who accompanied themselves on the guitar—commonly employed stanzas of odd and uneven lengths.

Billie Holiday.  A jazz artist by definition, Billie Holiday nevertheless embodied many of the emotional and thematic touchstones of the best blues singers. Her performances of blues standards brought an almost shattering sensitivity to familiar material.

(Library of Congress.)

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The blues encompasses a wide range of chord progressions. Early rural or country blues was rudimentary, utilizing only three chords. On the other hand, bop musicians of the 1940s and 1950s often relied on harmonically advanced blues progressions—for example, “Blues for Alice” (1951) by alto saxophonist Charlie Parker makes use of numerous altered, substitute, and passing chords. But even the most complex blues are direct extensions of the basic blues structure.

Blues Lyrics

The blues also features a simple lyrical structure. A standard twelve-bar blues employs a three-line stanza in which the first two lines are repeated and the final phrase responds to and generally rhymes with the first two. The blues is often regarded as being only a music of sadness. Many blues lyrics indeed convey such feelings:

Well, the blues is a achin' old heart disease …
The blues is a low-down achin' heart disease,
Like consumption, killin' me by degrees.

Robert Johnson, Crossroad Blues (1936–1937)

I'm sittin' here wonderin' will a matchbox hold my clothes,
I'm sittin' here wonderin' will a matchbox hold my clothes,
I ain't got so many matches, but I got so far to go.

Blind Lemon Jefferson, Matchbox Blues (1927)

But the blues is not simply a music of sadness; it encompasses a wide range of emotions, including humor, sometimes salacious and sometimes ironic:

I wouldn't give a blind sow an acorn, wouldn't give a crippled crab a crutch,
Say, I wouldn't give a blind sow an acorn, wouldn't give a crippled crab a crutch,
‘Cause I just found out pretty mama that you ain't so such a much.

Dizzy Gillespie, You Ain't Such a Much (1952).

Although the blues addresses a broad range of subjects, most commonly its lyrics focus on matters of love and its discontents. There are also many topical blues that memorialize significant events or hardships. Blind Lemon Jefferson's “Rising High Water Blues” described the destruction of a 1927 Mississippi River flood, and Charley Patton's” ‘34 Blues” addressed the hard times brought on by the Great Depression. Five days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Big Bill Broonzy gave voice to black hopes of joining America's then-segregated air force in his “In the Army Now” (1941):

I got a letter this mornin' from a dear old uncle [“Uncle Sam”] of mine,
I got a letter this mornin' from a dear old uncle of mine,
Now, boys, I was walkin' today, but tomorrow I may be flyin’.

In effect, blues musicians were informal chroniclers of African American history, and the blues had an organic relationship to black life. Whether a specific blues spoke strictly in personal terms or broached larger social issues, the genre gave voice to black aspirations and experiences.

Early Regional Blues Styles

The blues emerged in three relatively isolated regions heavily populated by African Americans—the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont, and East Texas. Guitarists Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, and Son House exemplified the Delta blues style. The Delta style featured slide guitar playing, in which the musician made use of a hard, smooth object such as a closed pocketknife or long glass bottleneck worn on a finger of the left (chord-playing) hand. By sliding the knife or bottleneck up and down the strings, the guitarist could bend notes and create distinctive, singing phrases.

In the Piedmont, the hilly upland extending from Virginia through the Carolinas all the way to Georgia, blues musicians such as Josh White (1908–1969) developed a sophisticated finger-picking technique that allowed them to play light and lyrical guitar accompaniments to blues vocals. East Texas blues, which also included parts of Louisiana, was rhythmic and driving, as seen in the playing of guitarists Leadbelly and Sam “Lightnin” Hopkins. But New Orleans did not develop into an important blues center until much later, perhaps due to its tradition of marching bands, riverboat bands, and—among the Creole population—formal schooling in music.

The blues also exerted relatively little influence on early New Orleans jazz, which was more a product of Ragtime, minstrel music, and circus and marching bands. Although some early jazz musicians—for example, cornetist Buddy Bolden—were well versed in the blues, they commonly looked down on the roughhewn rural bluesmen. In Aspects of the Blues Tradition (1968), Paul Oliver suggested that another source of the distance between early jazz and blues might lie in the incompatible keys favored by blues guitarists (E or A) and jazz horn players (B-flat).

There was also a strong piano tradition in the blues, emerging during the early twentieth century out of the pine-country timber camps of Georgia and the Carolinas; from countless Jook Joints scattered across Florida, Mississippi, and Texas; and from the rent parties and honky-tonks of Chicago. This style of playing, with its repetitive, rolling bass patterns, was popularized in the 1930s as Boogie-Woogie, but its origins were considerably older.

Itinerant musician Huddie (“Leadbelly”) Ledbetter played from a wide repertoire that centered on the blues but also included folk songs and music from the American West.

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Among the best known boogie-woogie players are Pete Johnson (1904–1967), Albert Ammons (1907–1949), and Meade “Lux” Lewis—who occasionally performed piano trios together—and Jimmy Yancey (1894–1951), a legendary part-time musician who worked for decades as a groundskeeper at the Chicago White Sox's Comiskey Park. Boogie-woogie shaped such subsequent R&B and rock ‘n’ roll pianists as Amos Milburn (1927–1980), Little Richard, and Fats Domino. Memphis Slim, born Peter Chatman (1915–1988), was the most important of the postwar blues pianists who did not move into rock ‘n’ roll.

The Great Migration and the Dissemination of the Blues

Traveling bluesmen spread the blues throughout the black South, but for many years the blues remained little known to the rest of the nation. All that changed in the 1910s and 1920s with the rise of the recording industry and the start of the Great Migration. In the Great Migration, massive numbers of African Americans left the South for the cities of the North and the West Coast. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, the movement rose to a flood.

In making the move, African Americans carried the blues along, and generally speaking, the musical movement followed regional lines. Piedmont blues musicians generally headed up the eastern seaboard with many, like Josh White, ending up in Harlem. East Texas–style players moved west. The so-called blues shouters, Jimmy Rushing and Big Joe Turner (1911–1985), helped create a distinctly blues-rooted jazz style in 1930s Kansas City. Other musicians, including electric guitarists Aaron “T-Bone” Walker and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown (b. 1924), settled in Los Angeles, where they contributed to the city's emergence in the 1940s as a leading center of R&B. But the most important line of movement was that from the Delta to Chicago, a route taken by such musicians as Broonzy and guitarist Muddy Waters.

During the 1920s the recording industry became an important mode of disseminating blues music. Recording companies established “race records” subsidiaries to produce music specifically for an African American audience, often including recordings of rural bluesmen. The recording industry also promoted a new musical tradition of what has been dubbed the classic blues singers.

Unlike their country blues counterparts, who were almost exclusively male, classic blues singers were generally women. A large number of these singers—including Mamie Smith and Alberta Hunter—came out of vaudeville rather than from the blues tradition. But Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith, the most important classic blues singers, had performed the blues extensively throughout the South.

The classic blues era also featured larger ensembles. Rural blues generally involved individual guitarist-singers or very small groups, mainly using the guitar and the harmonica. Classic blues featured full ensembles and included such early jazz musicians as trumpeter Louis Armstrong and clarinetist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet. Over the years, however, jazz gradually moved away from the blues. When big-bands gained national popularity during the swing era of the 1930s, they mainly played dance music and pop tunes rather than the blues, although Count Basie's big-band was one notable exception to this trend.

Since the 1940s, jazz musicians have generally abandoned the raw directness and simplicity of early blues. Bop musicians such as Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and pianist Thelonious Monk often wrote and played blues, but their music—and the overall sound of jazz—was more complex and sophisticated than that of contemporaneous blues performers. Trumpeter Miles Davis's album Kind of Blue (1959) and tenor saxophonist Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961) radically extended the blues tradition. During the 1950s and 1960s, Charles Mingus, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and Cannonball Adderley returned to an earthier form of musical expression, but they were influenced more by bluesy Gospel Music than by the blues itself.

The Blues since World War II: Chicago Blues, the Blues Revival, and Its Decline

Within the blues tradition, the most important development was the rise of Chicago blues. During the 1940s and 1950s, Chicago blues musicians were largely transplants from Mississippi, but they modernized the Delta blues sound by exchanging their acoustic guitars for electrically amplified ones. In Chicago blues, a small combo—consisting of one or two electric guitars, an electric bass, drums, and a piano or organ—replaced the solo performer. Sometimes the group included a small horn section—for example, a trumpet and one or more saxophones.

Bessie Smith (c. 1894–1937), famous for her renditions of “Gimme a Pigfoot” and “St. Louis Blues,” was known as the Empress of the Blues.

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Postwar electric blues relied on the electric guitar's potential for angry and “dirty” playing, in sharp contrast to the pure, clean tone sought by contemporary jazz guitarists. Muddy Waters, with his jagged, edgy guitar lines and his band's driving backbeat, was the first musician to gain fame in the new style. Many others followed, including composer and bassist Willie Dixon; electric guitarists Elmore James (1918–1963), Luther “Guitar Jr.” Johnson (b. 1934), and Luther Allison (1939–1997); harmonica players Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter (1930–1968); and vocalist Koko Taylor.

Chicago blues was a key component of rhythm and blues, particularly as recorded and popularized by Chess and Vee Jay Records. Through the playing of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, Chicago blues had a shaping influence on 1950s rock ‘n’ roll. Numerous other blues-based performers had a powerful impact on the larger pattern of American popular music, including New Orleans pianists Little Richard and Fats Domino; T-Bone Walker; and B. B. King, the most influential blues guitarist of the post–World War II era.

During the 1960s, white rock musicians inspired a blues revival. The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, the Allman Brothers, and others recorded versions of earlier electric blues tunes and toured and recorded with Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, guitarist Albert Collins (1932–1993), and other bluesmen. By the 1980s, however, King, Collins, and other African American blues musicians discovered that their audiences were overwhelmingly white rather than black. As blues writer Paul Oliver noted, the blues had been “absorbed by popular music throughout the world with consequent damage to its identity”; in particular, by drawing upon “the modes of expression of the Church,” the blues was transformed (and diluted) into gospel and Soul Music.

Perhaps even more tellingly, economic and social changes in African American life made the blues less relevant to black culture. During the 1970s the music most popular among inner-city black youth was the rhythmic and danceable music known as Funk. In the 1980s, Rap became the music of choice among young blacks. Some younger blues musicians have continued to bring vitality to the genre. Electric blues guitarist Robert Cray (b. 1953) won a Grammy Award for his hit album Strong Persuader (1986), and the acoustic country blues stylist Keb' Mo' (b. 1951) has enjoyed considerable visibility.

But contemporary blues music has atrophied. Chicago bluesman Willie Dixon was sufficiently concerned over this state of affairs that in 1991 he founded the Blues Heaven Foundation, intended—among its various activities—to underwrite programs in blues education. The blues continues to flourish in backcountry jook joints of the Mississippi Delta, South Side Chicago blues bars, and other places. But throughout much of the United States, it stands in danger of becoming a musical pressed flower, well preserved—in numerous blues festivals and urban nightclubs—but cut off from its living roots.

See also Minstrelsy.

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