Blues

By: Graham Russell Gao Hodges

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

Blues

The term “blues” may be restricted to songs that use a repetitive sequence of twelve-bar chords with tonal variations known as “blue notes” (the flattened third and seventh notes of the major scale), a description that encompasses thousands of loosely related tunes. Because blues music is a product intended for mass sales, the definition of “blues music” is affected by its commercial appeal. In today's market, the label “blues music” encompasses the range of music lumped together as African American that was created before 1950 and that is not classified as jazz, classical, or gospel. Such titles might include barroom, work, double entendre, and ragtime music. After 1950 the label “blues music” can include any form of black popular music that did not cross over or appeal to white audiences. Paradoxically, in the early twenty-first century, blues enthusiasts are largely white and middle class, whereas African Americans generally eschew the form in favor of such descendants as rhythm and blues and rap.

Blues music has attracted schools of thought that jealously guard its historical meaning. To many, blues was the rural folk music of African Americans in the South in the first part of the twentieth century. Although female “blues queens” were highly popular in the 1920s during the congealing of the music's appeal through recordings, blues is now remembered as a masculine musicology. Regardless of gender or content, blues music evokes a worldly wisdom or a sadness gained from great loss and experience; conversely it also includes party songs that have earthy, sexual gusto. Fundamentally, blues is the secular music of a folk at work and play.

Roots.

Blues has its roots in slavery and in Africa. Nathaniel Uring, a European visiting Angola in 1701, observed young men and women who “often meet together in small companies by moon-light and Sing and Dance most part of the night, which they choose for coolness…. This custom of dancing is kept up in all our American plantations” (quoted in Hodges). As Uring also observed, blacks gathered together on feast days and on Sundays. Among the most popular entertainers were griots, or “good talkers,” who earned good pay and esteem but who were also feared for allegedly consorting with evil spirits or for composing insult songs. Even so, African music was communal and participatory, using call-and-response.

Such traditions traveled with enforced slave migrants to the New World. There slaves conjoined with white sailors, servants, and other members of the motley crew who populated the lower orders of colonial society. Enslaved blacks gathered in taverns and at the homes of free blacks in port cities along the Atlantic Coast during the colonial era. Authorities warned Domingo Angola, a free black man in New York City in the 1670s, to stop entertaining slaves. Blacks in New York gathered for parties in the fields of Brooklyn in the early eighteenth century. Pinkster or Pentecost, a mid-Atlantic holiday, had a distinctly secular cast and featured music. One commentator observed the house servant “tuning his Banger (banjo).” Asked what his intention was, the enslaved man responded that it was a holiday and advised his questioner to follow and “see Ninegar play Banger for true; dance too” (quoted in Hodges). Similar good times occurred in taverns in tidewater Virginia and Charleston, South Carolina. Conspirators in the failed Negro insurrection in New York City in 1741 mixed music, dancing, and drinking with sworn oaths to a conspiracy to overthrow the white government. Later, during the American Revolution, blacks and English officers met at Ethiopian balls where black orchestras played the hurdy-gurdy. Combined spiritual and secular chants called ring shouts were common in both the South and the North.

There is ample evidence of a blues culture after the American Revolution. Charles Dickens was but one of many white tourists who visited interracial bars in the Five Points of New York City to listen to music. Walt Whitman, who attended these regularly as a journalist in the 1840s, prophesied that the sounds of the Five Points “presaged a grand American opera” (quoted in Hodges). Outside in the butcher markets, blacks would “pat juba” using tap-dance methods to suggest drumming. By the mid-nineteenth century, black music was absorbed into white minstrelsy, a format that combined exaggerated, humorous racial characterizations and vaudeville.

Farther south, enslaved blacks created tunes that were termed “the sounds of slavery.” As late as the 1860s, travelers in North Carolina saw black dancers in costumes that included horned headdresses and cow tails while musicians played “gumbo boxes,” which allowed for a percussive beat. By the 1890s, the cultural historian Cecil Brown argues, blacks in Saint Louis constructed the Frankie and Johnny myth about gamblers in blues dens who fought over perceived violations of honor. By the onset of the twentieth century, blacks north and south, east and west, were well acquainted with a vocal vocabulary and blues sensibility characterized by pursuits of pleasure and sexual prowess leavened by an existential understanding of individual limits and memories of past failures at love. As Elijah Wald cogently demonstrates, if much of this music used the twelve-bar chord progression, it also incorporated minstrelsy, cowboy, gospel, and other contemporary music formats.

The archaeologist Charles Peabody, during an excavation of ancient Indian mounds in Coahoma County, Mississippi, in 1901–1902, listened to his black workmen utter rhythmic song lines during a fifteen-mile trek back to the main camp. One strong-voiced man took the lead, improvising short lines that touched on the day's events, female types and girlfriends, and biblical themes, while the others responded with repetitive lines. On other occasions, Peabody heard the men accompany themselves with guitars and with repertoires borrowed from minstrel shows, white country music, and ragtime. Other songs were less derivative and included songs about hard luck, troubles with women, even legal problems. The melancholic laments that Peabody eventually described in his 1904 report on the excavation were the latest in the genealogy of blues songs dating back to the earliest colonial days and were examples of contemporary fusions that blacks fashioned to keep themselves amused and to get through hard work days and lonely nights. Black cotton workers in the South often re-created African whooping or yodeling along with vocal masking or verbal alternations.

W. C. Handy, often called the father of the blues, first encountered this music in 1903. By that time he was a famous orchestra leader traveling by train through the South. During one train delay he heard a black man in ragged clothes play a guitar, pressing a knife against the string to get from the instrument a slurred, moaning sound akin to the human voice. All the while the singer repeated lyrics about “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog,” referring to spots where two famous train lines intersected, as he drew responses out of his guitar. Peabody and Handy were hearing the same kinds of field hollers, work songs, spirituals, country string-bands, and fife-and-drum songs that were precursors of blues music.

Commercial Blues.

Commercial blues music appeared in the fall of 1912 when “Dallas Blues,” “Baby Seal Blues,” and “Memphis Blues (Mr. Crump)” became sheet-music hits. W. C. Handy used the melody he had heard on the train to create a campaign song for E. H. Crump, a mayoral candidate in Memphis, Tennessee, where Handy lived. Handy followed this composition with the “St. Louis Blues,” which Wald describes as his most enduring composition. Soon, every dance or vaudeville orchestra had to include the moaning styles of the blues in its repertoire.

In 1914 the Victory Military Band issued on record a version of Handy's “Memphis Blues”; the composer followed up with his own side the following year. Morton Harvey sang the first blues on record, Handy's “Memphis Blues,” also in 1914. White ethnic impersonators followed suit, combining blues music with Irish and Jewish lyrics. Some of this descended from minstrelsy, but the new twelve-bar format, replete with moans and doleful lyrics, quickly became popular. White and black artists and writers worked together to promote the blues.

Takeoff of the new music came in 1920 when Mamie Smith's “Crazy Blues” sold more than a million copies in six months, largely to an emerging “race” or African American market. Soon other blues queens, including Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, Sara Martin, Ma Rainey, and, the most famous, Bessie Smith, cut hundreds of blues songs. Bessie Smith employed a distinctive blues style but also incorporated vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley songs; like Rainey and Hunter, Smith filled large theaters north and south. Blues queens dressed in elaborate outfits that stimulated their audiences’ fantasies, though they never lost contact with their southern roots. Blues queens regularly drew more interest than their male counterparts did, although that original interest is hardly represented in today's reissues, which are decidedly tilted toward male blues artists.

Papa Charlie Jackson, a veteran minstrel and medicine show artist, became the first big male blues singer, hitting in 1924 with “Salty Dog Blues,” a comic ragtime piece that could easily have fit into the country-and-western venues. Similarly, Albert “Lonnie” Johnson, a major influence on the later blues legend B. B. King, used a suave delivery and was adept at blues and jazz, regularly recording with Duke Ellington. Johnson is cited as being a deeply influential guitarist. Though he was considered a blues singer, Johnson was also comfortable in a cabaret setting.

Closer to the prototype that historians and blues enthusiasts have created of blues musicians was the powerful Blind Lemon Jefferson, a rough-hewn, powerfully intense artist akin to blind musical beggars who appear globally in every rural society. Jefferson's style was, however, no more “authentic” than that of any of the other popular, more urban blues musicians. Jefferson was a professional performer who worked easily with vaudevillians and performed in a number of styles. Other bluesmen such as Charlie Patton, Blind Blake, and Barbecue Bob had more localized appeal and were products of the juke-joint circuit.

Two other performers, Tampa Red and Leroy Carr, had long-lasting influences. Carr was an influential blues singer whose casually assured style and accompaniment by a piano affected the development of Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, David Ruffin of the Temptations, and Jerry Butler, thus extending a method lasting from the late 1920s into the 1970s. The guitarist Tampa Red recorded with the pianist Georgia Tom using a trademark risqué style called “hokum.” The lyrics from their giant hit “It's Tight Like That,” in a call-and-response between Red and the female impersonator Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon, include:

"Red: “Woman, you reading the Lady's Home Journal?”"

"Jaxon (in falsetto): “Yes, Daddy, but I want that Saturday Evening Post.”"

Such double entendres were staples of blues lyrics into the 1980s and beyond and can easily be heard in any rap duet today.

The effect of the Great Depression on blues music was paradoxical. Piano-and-guitar duets, often enlarged by a bass, harmonica, kazoo, or washboard and often recorded by a small group of seasoned professionals, were common. Yet despite the homogeneity of the sound and the perilous economic conditions, blues music, after a brief falter in 1930, sold widely and regained 1920s boom conditions by the middle of the 1930s. Popular appetites for the blues were doubtless conditioned by the hard times. During this era Tampa Red dominated recording, with more than 250 sides, not including his religious songs. Big Bill Broonzy, who often used repetitive methods, was next, followed by such familiar names as Lonnie Johnson, Peetie “the Devil's Son-in-Law” Wheatstraw, and Bessie Smith, who recorded 160 sides before her death in 1933. Memphis Minnie was the other prominent female stylist, with more than 158 songs issued between 1928 and 1941, although her career extended beyond that.

Unrecorded Folk Singers.

Beyond these and other popular singers were often unrecorded folk singers whose broad styles and skills ranged across a number of genres. Descended from songsters of the colonial period, who were expected to know any number of popular melodies for audiences that were often mixed race, such artists of the 1930s played older instruments such as the banjo and fiddle and played in minstrel and other shows that many modern critics consider demeaning.

Other noncommercial music had great long-term effect. John and Alan Lomax, two white musicologists, traveled throughout the South in the 1930s, accompanied on at least one occasion by the black folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston. The Lomaxes specialized in field hollers and work and prison songs. Their great discovery was Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly, who was incarcerated in Angola State Penitentiary, the infamous Louisiana prison. Ledbetter was adept at blues and at children's rhymes sung as field hollers and work songs. The Lomaxes brought him to New York, where he appeared at Carnegie Hall in a memorable concert in 1935. The blues world knew nothing about Leadbelly, but he soon became an icon for the white, liberal intelligentsia. The white blues cult, composed of record collectors, connoisseurs, jazz fans, and the beats, had strict standards of excellence, regarded themselves as marginal as blues singers, and felt a virtuous respect for and solidarity with the downtrodden.

One figure notably important among white blues aficionados but little known to his contemporaries is Robert Johnson, elevated to “King of the Blues” when his small catalog of songs was reissued in the early 1960s. Johnson was born near Hazlehurst or Robbinsville in Copiah County, Mississippi, in 1911 and had a short, troubled life. He married, lost his wife in childbirth, and then abandoned a second wife for a life on the road. He was deeply inspired by the country-music minstrels Charley Patton, Son House, and Willie Brown. A wanderer and a ladies’ man, Johnson drank and smoked excessively and shaped his songs out of his adventures. Initially an inexperienced and crude guitarist, he returned from one trip with exceptional new skills, leading his acquaintances to believe that he had made a contract with the devil. According to an abiding myth—one that proved immensely popular among later American and British rockers—Johnson met Papa Legba, the darkest spirit, at the crossroads at midnight and allowed him to tune his guitar in exchange for his soul. Johnson sang of this experience in his song “Crossroads Blues,” later popularized by the English blues and rock star Eric Clapton.

Johnson had but two recording sessions, one in San Antonio on 23–26 November 1936 and then another in a Dallas warehouse the following June. Shortly after that, a jealous boyfriend poisoned Johnson with strychnine-laced whiskey after the bluesman had flirted with the man's girlfriend. Johnson was dead at age twenty-seven. Johnson's extraordinary intensity, his tortured lyrics, and his verbal gymnastics have fascinated the world ever since. His compositions are now treated as poetry, and his guitar-playing methods, adopted by Clapton, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, Jimmie Page of Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix, have given Johnson global fame. Among African American bluesmen, Johnson influenced Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Johnny Shines, and Robert Junior Lockwood, the master's apprentice.

Later Impacts.

The African American migration to the city, the modernization of American society, and World War II all had powerful impacts on blues music. As millions of American blacks left the southern states with hopes of jobs and better lives in northern cities, they adapted blues music to electrical amplification. As World War II brought fuller employment, blacks had more money to spend and made larger demands on society for equality. Yet blues music became a sound track for the disappointed dreams of millions whose migration earned only a temporary prosperity, while city life produced racial conflict and anomie or rootlessness. Lil Green's masterly World War II blues “Why Don't You Do Right” featured Green sharply reminding her lover of his failures and telling him to “get out of here and bring me some money, too!” Peggy Lee later made Green's hit a standard. As female vocalists moved into jazz- or gospel-influenced pop music, there were fewer female blues singers, though Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton became renowned for her hit “Hound Dog,” later covered by Elvis Presley. Perhaps the best female blues singers were such jazz musicians as Sarah Vaughan and Diana Washington. Blues-inflected rhythms inspired some of the 1950s jazz classics such as Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the duet of Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane.

Urban life, a bit more cash, and electric amplification produced startlingly brilliant blues showmen who combined recollection of their rural roots with an urbane toughness. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed, and the incomparable B. B. King combined ferocious guitar lines with strong, booming voices that fronted full-blues orchestras and superb lyrics first to enchant a generation of black nightclub fans, then to enchant a generation of English rockers, and then, in King's case, to become deified. Still active in the early twenty-first century, King has even received a presidential medal, and his persona is widely admired. An ambassador for the blues, King is largely responsible for its place in the canon of American arts.

Blues Group.The Blues Fuse playing at Smiley's Schooner Saloon north of San Francisco, c. 2001. Berisford “Shep” Shepherd (front left) on both trombone and percussion, Arthur Lee Harris on the Hammond B-3 organ, and Robert Labbe on drums. Photograph by Ilka Hartmann.

© Ilka Hartmann

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King and other urban bluesmen worked consistently through the 1950s and 1960s, even as white enthusiasts were arguing over the purity of Robert Johnson and other long-dead performers. The rock revolution of the 1960s brought notoriety if not income to veteran bluesmen. Hendrix was only the most visible of the guitar-driven bandleaders of the 1960s, many of whom laced their lyrics with allusions to drugs. Such psychedelic was often blues-based, as in the example of Canned Heat, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (itself a terrific example of a mixed-race urban blues group), and the English groups the Yardbirds, Cream, and the Rolling Stones.

Among blacks the rise of soul music seemed to doom traditional blues, although Howard Tate's critically acclaimed, if little-known, album Get It While You Can (1967) showed the power of fusion of the two elements. Similarly, James Brown's Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, which seemed to announce a new style of horn-dominated, orchestral black music, was itself based upon twelve-bar blues. Hokum music made an undeniable reappearance later in the 1970s in George Clinton's Parliament Funkadelic Bands that satirized minstrelsy, blues, and white psychedelic. The internationally famous Jimi Hendrix Trio relied heavily on blues. Younger bluesmen, especially Buddy Guy, Z. Z. Hill, Little Milton, and Latimore, emphasized their urbanity more than the rural roots of the blues. As with audiences who had grown more middle class, the older blues forms favored by white purists were reminders of slavery days and southern oppression, which most of them hoped soon to forget.

By the early twenty-first century, although B. B. King made appearances at the White House and in European capitals, blues music was more a museum piece than a live musicology. Rap musicians may echo hokum songs with their emphasis on high living and rough, criminal personae, but the melancholic quality of blues has largely been sublimated into mainstream music. As with the work of the earliest practitioners who combined blues with other popular styles in their repertoires, blues in the twenty-first century is so completely absorbed into American standards as to become indistinguishable. During times of economic downturns and personal troubles, blues has become virtually an American poetry.

[See also Gospel Music; Jazz; Minstrel Tradition; Music; Oratory and Verbal Arts; Ragtime; Soul Music; Spirituals; Vaudeville, African Americans in; and biographical entries on figures mentioned in this article.]

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