Blues

By: Michelle R. Scott

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Blues

In his collection of essays Shadow and Act, the noted African American author Ralph Ellison commented that “blues [music] speaks to us simultaneously of the tragic and the comic aspects of the human condition and [blues musicians] express a profound sense of life shared by many Negro Americans precisely because their lives have combined these modes.” The blues woman Koko Taylor made Ellison's comments plain in the 2003 PBS series The Blues when she said that the blues is “like therapy…designed to make people look up, get up, smile and feel better about themselves.”

Where do African American women fit in this musical genre that speaks to the ills of the human condition and provides a vehicle for listeners to “get up” and move away from their woes? Often the popular image of a blues performer is that of a world-weary man belting out his mournful tune and playing guitar or harmonica. Yet this popular image is far from representative of the legacy of blues music in the United States or internationally. African American women from Ma Rainey, Lovie Austin, and Bessie Smith to Big Mama Thornton, Etta James, and Shemeika Copeland have performed, composed, and shaped blues music—an authentically African American art form that has influenced jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, country, and gospel music for a century.

Blues music stems from the combination of the black musical genres of spirituals and work songs of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Spirituals were sacred music sung initially by enslaved Africans and later by their freed descendants. They were often sung a cappella—that is, without instrumental accompaniment. Known for their lyric simplicity, spirituals like “Steal Away to Jesus” or “Roll, Jordan, Roll” were sung in harmony and they often recounted biblical tales, expressed a person's faith, discussed a longing for an afterlife, or made a personal plea to God. More than songs about a life hereafter, spirituals were often used by enslaved Africans as a means of coded communication to hide plans for a clandestine prayer meeting, or even for an escape, from overseers and plantation masters.

Work songs differed from spirituals in subject and theme because they were secular songs used to alleviate the monotony of manual labor and to set the pace of an individual task. For example, a laborer might accent the striking of a hammer or the pitching of a shovel by emphasizing the last line of a work song. Railroad workers often chanted to move along the pace of laying railroad ties; street vendors used musical refrains to advertise their products and could create chants about such goods as corn, onions, twine, or tin. Washerwomen murmured tunes to ease the monotony and speed the pace of laundry work.

Blues music was born when musicians intermingled the often mournful musical and narrative quality of spirituals with the rhythmic phrasing and practical function of work songs. With this fusion, the same pleading quality apparent in the lyrics “They treat me so mean here Lord, I wish I never was born” in the spiritual “Lord, How Come We Here” can be transferred to the lyrics “Trouble in mind, I'm blue, I've almost lost my mind, life ain't worthwhile living, feel like I could die” in the blues piece “Trouble in Mind.” Yet blues music also differed from spirituals and work songs in that blues entertainers moved away from group a cappella singing to accompanied and often individual performance. A harmonized longing to “steal away to Jesus” in a spiritual became one woman's discussion about how “her handy man” went away in a blues lyric.

The exact location and moment of the “creation” of blues are difficult to discern, for it was likely that several performers in locations throughout the South in the late nineteenth century experimented with various musical styles that became the precursor to blues music. Nonetheless, the earliest written accounts that mention the fledgling sounds of blues music include interviews with the blues woman Ma Rainey (Gertrude Pridgett), and the autobiography of the blues music composer William Christopher (W. C.) Handy. The lauded blues singer Ma Rainey recalled that the first time she heard the blues it was being sung in 1902 at a Missouri tent show by a young woman who lamented that she had been abandoned by her man. In his autobiography Father of the Blues, W. C. Handy recounted how in 1903 he waited at a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, and witnessed “a lean, loose-jointed Negro” who played the guitar as he sang about riding away on a train; this was the moment that Handy could recall hearing the first strains of blues music.

African American women performed, wrote, and recorded blues music from its inception. In traveling minstrel and vaudeville acts, tent shows, and rural backwoods juke joints they sang tunes of love and sexual desire and belted out tales of broken relationships, poverty, and violence. When the blues grew to national popularity by the mid-1910s, there were two prevailing types of blues—country or down-home blues, and classic or vaudeville blues.

Country Blues and Classic Blues Styles

While the classic vaudeville blues was the first type to be recorded, it was predated by country blues. The country blues was often played on the fiddle, banjo, guitar, jug, washboard, or harmonica. It is probable that Handy heard country blues on his layover in Mississippi, as this type of blues was originally performed by male itinerant musicians who accompanied themselves as they sang. These musicians played and sang songs of their life and travels and focused on themes of love, poverty, loneliness, and escape. Down-home blues was arguably born in the plantations and farms of the Mississippi Delta region in the 1890s and subsequently sprang up in Texas, Tennessee, and the Piedmont region (lower Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia). Soon musicians were playing on street corners, in train stations, and in honky-tonks—wherever the traveling musician could take his individual song.

While women performers of the country blues were not as prevalent as male performers, black women who achieved success in the genre included the incomparable “Mother of the Blues,” Ma Rainey; the bawdy lyricist and singer Lucille Bogan; and the famous guitarist and vocalist Memphis Minnie. These country singers, like other blues singers, were known for their ability to involve the audience in their performances through the use of call and response—a feature present in many genres of black folk song. A single lyric sung by the performer would act as the call, while the cries, cheers, and other comments made by audience members served as the response. Rainey was able to symbolically erase the line between audience and performer by making sharecroppers and domestic servants feel as if she were singing to each and every one of them when she moaned out “Backwater Blues” or “See See Rider.” In general, the country blues was thought to be more blunt and rough-hewn, in both lyric content and phrasing, than the vaudeville blues. First captured on records in the late 1920s, it grew in national popularity throughout the 1930s as it embodied many of the emotions of the Great Depression era.

Though country blues was popular, the classic blues was the earliest recorded form of blues music. Its origins can be traced back to the first composer of written blues music, the noted W. C. Handy, whose piece “St. Louis Blues,” published in 1914, was one of the most frequently performed and recorded blues works of the time. Handy also made a name for himself as a partner in the Pace and Handy publishing company, which opened in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1913 and was one of the first black-owned music publishing companies in the United States.

Classic blues records first appeared in 1920 with a recording by the black vaudevillian Mamie Smith. Prior to 1920 it was very rare for African American voices to be heard on recordings. Although Smith recorded “That Thing Called Love” and “You Can't Keep a Good Man Down” in February 1920 on General Phonograph's Okeh records, it was her “Crazy Blues” recording of August 1920, which sold several thousand copies to a primarily African American market, that ignited the “race record” boom and the classic blues music craze.

When the recording industry realized that a vast number of African Americans (and some whites) were willing to pay to hear recordings of black voices, a number of companies developed catalogs of “race records” consisting of songs by African American vocalists and musicians that were aimed at primarily black consumers. By 1922, several black women including Ethel Waters, Trixie Smith, and Lucille Hegamin followed in Mamie Smith's footsteps and signed contracts at Paramount, Columbia, Okeh, and the black-owned Harry Pace company, Black Swan Records. Soon these classic blues women were joined by Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Victoria Spivey, Ma Rainey (whose style bridged the country and classic styles), and one of the most popular and financially successful blues stars, the “Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith. These women often had some experience performing professionally in black vaudeville or black musical theater and became the musical celebrities of the 1920s and early 1930s, even before their male counterparts in country blues obtained recording contracts.

In terms of chord progression, the classic blues generally featured a 12-bar (a bar being a measured unit of music that had a certain number of musical beats or counts) AAB format, in which the introductory lyrical line was repeated twice and the end of the third lyric line resolved or rhymed with the last word of the “intro” line. It also used call-and-response patterns in which a vocalist would sing a line and the instrumentalist would respond musically. Classic blues often differed from country blues in that a featured vocalist would be backed by an ensemble of guitar, wind instruments, and drums. Jazz combos of piano, drums, guitar, and a cornet or trumpet sometimes supported early classic blues performers. The classic blues entertainer played at theaters, tent shows, and carnivals, and in the small juke joint and honky-tonk as well. Although there were some distinct differences between the down-home blues performer and the vaudeville blues performer, the boundaries were not always rigid: a down-home blues player could play before a paying theater audience, and a vaudeville performer could perform in the intimate juke joints or parties generally serviced by the solo country blues musician.

The popularity of classic blues, and the success of many blues women in the 1920s, was bolstered by the establishment of the Theater Owners Booking Association, or TOBA. Formally founded in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1920, TOBA consisted of both black- and white-managed theaters that contracted various African American entertainers and organized them into a systematic route of performances. By the mid-1920s TOBA included over eighty theaters and extended into such states as Oklahoma, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Among the prominent theaters were the Howard in Washington, DC, the Monogram in Chicago, the Eighty-One in Atlanta, the Booker Washington in St. Louis, and the Koppin in Detroit. TOBA theaters were the training ground for many young African American performers, and featured singers and musicians. Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, Clara Smith, Sara Martin, Lovie Austin, Ma Rainey, and the Whitman Sisters were among the aspiring entertainers, along with the comedians Butterbeans and Susie, Whitney and Tutt, and Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham.

It was TOBA that helped spread classic blues throughout much of nation in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet it was the movement of African Americans from the rural regions of the South to the industrialized regions of the North during the Great Migration of 1915 to 1930 that ensured TOBA's success. The classic blues women, many being migrants themselves from Tennessee, Mississippi, Texas, or Georgia, performed songs for other southerners about despair, confusion, and frustration, but also about joy, a need for amusement and escape, and sexual desires—all emotions that might be intensified for southern migrants in their new homes in the urban North. Many classic blues singers were beloved not only for the skilled vocal ability that drew a listener into their narratives but also for their elaborate dress and sense of style. A domestic servant or laundress might see a blues singer in a beaded gown and colorful head adornment and realize that there was more to life than the role of the subservient laborer in which mainstream society had placed so many African American women. Hence, classic blues stars were more than just entertainers; they were also examples of women who had perhaps survived poverty, violence, or racial oppression and could thus be the voice for all the many African Americans who at one time or another had to deal with these same issues.

Interestingly, as popular as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Alberta Hunter were in migrant neighborhoods, some sections of the African American community thought of the blues as the “devil's music” and saw blues entertainers as challenging traditional views of conventional womanhood. Blues women represented a challenge because they were on the margins of society: they were not necessarily wives or mothers and often were financially independent. Some also danced, drank alcohol, smoked, and engaged in premarital sex, either heterosexual or homosexual—all vices according to the traditional Christian principles held in most black communities at the time. When Bessie Smith sang of how “Hannah Brown got full corn liquor and started breaking 'em down” in her 1933 song “Gimme a Pigfoot,” she was not emblematic of respectable black womanhood for many conservative African Americans. Yet the songs of the classic blues women served as a window into the minds of many black women who lived through poverty, frankly desired love and sex, and wanted to transcend or escape the drudgery of everyday working-class life.

Post–World War II Blues

Ultimately, the popularity of the classic blues genre began to wane as a result of shifting consumer tastes and a decrease in record sales at the onset of the Great Depression of the early 1930s. The blues music that appeared in the 1940s was quite similar in style to its classic and country predecessors, yet this postwar blues was an urban blues that reflected the latest trend in technology, electric amplification, and a change in the instrumentation that backed the vocalist. All of these changes could be found in the blues of northern urban cities, particularly in Chicago. Migrants from the Mississippi Delta adapted their blues to their new surroundings; and when many of these migrants resettled in Chicago, the Chicago blues was born. By the 1960s women like Koko Taylor became skilled in the Chicago style of blues and performed songs along with an ensemble that now could include an amplified bass guitar, a piano, saxophone, drums, and harmonicas. Themes of the urban blues reflected the joys and ills of life not on the plantation or farm, but in the housing project or the city streets. As they had in the 1920s, the lyrics of black women's blues in the post –World War II era dealt with unrequited love, unfaithful spouses, domestic abuse, and frank discussions of sexual desire and skilled partners.

The new urban blues gave way to the development of rhythm and blues, or R&B, a combination of blues, jazz, boogie-woogie, and gospel influences that rose to prominence in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The early R&B stars like Big Maybelle, Etta James, Esther Phillips, LaVern Baker, and Ruth Brown were reminiscent of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey in their popularity and powerful vocal styles. These R&B vocalists concentrated on many of the same subjects as the urban blues, yet with a new amplified rhythmic pulse. Blues-inflected songs like “Candy,” “At Last,” “Roll with Me, Henry,” “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” and “Wang Dang Doodle” made the R&B charts in the 1950s and 1960s. As R&B performers drew heavily on blues influences, so too did vocalists and instrumentalists primarily associated with jazz music like the skilled and renowned Dinah Washington, who earned the title “Queen of the Blues” in the 1950s. Blues was a steady foundation for much of the popular American music of the 1950s and 1960s; and as R&B evolved into the genre of soul music in the late 1960s, blues strains could be heard in Aretha Franklin's recordings of “Respect,” “I've Never Loved a Man,” “Dr. Feelgood,” and many others.

Beulah “Sippie” Wallace (1898–1986) recorded blues in Chicago during the 1920s. She was born in Houston, Texas, and was known as the “Texas nightingale.”

Austin/Thompson Collection

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Not solely vocalists, some urban blues and R&B entertainers were known for their instrumental ability as well. Aretha Franklin was known as a talented pianist as well as for her soulful voice. Sippie Wallace, a classic Texas blues singer and organist who made a comeback in the 1960s; the pianist Katie Webster; and the vocalist, drummer, and guitarist Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton are all included among the skilled female blues instrumentalists. Thornton's powerful phrasing proved so influential in the music industry that when Elvis Presley performed a cover version of her 1953 recording of “Hound Dog,” he helped sparked the craze for rock and roll in mainstream American society. Although Thornton did not receive credit or royalties for this contribution at the time, in the early twenty-first century she is recognized for having helped usher in a genre that redefined American music.

Modern Blues

Between 1970 and the late 1990s, the national popularity of blues music seemed to wane in favor of other types of music like soul, funk, rock, pop, and, later, hip-hop. While legends like Etta James, Ruth Brown, and Koko Taylor continued to perform to large crowds at blues festivals or in venues like the House of Blues restaurants and clubs, young African Americans were far from the majority of spectators in the audiences. The September 1997 issue of Ebony magazine published an article with the headline “Are Whites Taking or Are Blacks Giving Away the Blues?” in reference to the dwindling number of African American blues musicians and black audience members at blues concerts. Blues entertainers speculated that some of the disdain for their music existed because African American youth overlooked the uplifting aspects of the blues and associated it with music that reminded them of the oppression, discrimination, and sadness in the African American past.

“Evening of Jazz & Blues,” a poster for a program in Seattle, Washington, featuring Bea Smith and Melody Jones and sponsored by Radical Women, 1977.

Library of Congress

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Fortunately, by the late 1990s, young black women like Shemeika Copeland, the daughter of the blues legend Johnny Clyde Copeland, began to take a new interest in the genre, while neo-soul artists like Jill Scott, Jaguar Wright, Alicia Keys, and Angie Stone used blues-inflected tones in their repertoire. Additionally, the importance of blues music in American history was officially acknowledge when the Senate designated 2003 the “Year of the Blues.” Congress praised the blues as one of the most influential American art forms, heralded it as a document of twentieth-century African American history, and recognized blues musicians as cultural ambassadors of the United States. None of this praise or acclaim for the blues could have occurred without the artistry and perseverance of African American female composers, musicians, and vocalists who have contributed to blues music in U.S. cultural history for over one hundred years.

See also Hunter, Alberta; James, Etta; Rainey, Ma (Gertrude Pridgett); Smith, Bessie; and Taylor, Koko.

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