Blues
The
blues is a
vocal and instrumental form of
music based on the full twelve note chromatic scale plus the microtonal intervals and a characteristic
twelve-bar chord progression. The form evolved in the
United States in the communities of former African
slaves from
spirituals, praise songs, field hollers, shouts, and
chants. The use of
blue notes and the prominence of
call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics are indicative of the blues'
West African pedigree. The blues has been a major influence on later American and Western
popular music, finding expression in
ragtime,
jazz,
bluegrass,
rhythm and blues,
rock and roll,
hip-hop, and
country music, as well as conventional
pop songs.
The phrase
the blues is a synonym for having a fit of
the blue devils, meaning down spirits, depression and sadness. An early reference to this can be found in
George Colman's farce Blue devils, a farce in one act (1798). Later during the 19th century, the phrase was used as a
euphemism for
delirium tremens and the
police. Though usage of the phrase in
African American music may be older, it has been attested to since 1912 in
Memphis, Tennessee with
W. C. Handy's "
Memphis Blues".
[The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition, 1989) gives Handy as the earliest attestation of "Blues."][Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 2002, Routledge (UK), ISBN 0415291895] In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood.
[Tony Bolden, Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture, 2004, University of Illinois Press, ISBN 0252028740]Origins
There are few characteristics common to all blues, because the genre takes its shape from the idiosyncrasies of individual performances.
[Southern, pg. 333] However, some characteristics have been present since before the creation of the modern blues and are common to most styles of
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."
[Garofalo, pg. 44] This pre-blues music was adapted from slave field shouts and hollers, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content".
[Ferris, pg. 229] The blues, as it is now known, can be seen as a musical style based on both European
harmonic structure and the West African call-and-response tradition, transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar.
[Morales, pg 276 Morales attributes this claim to John Storm Roberts in Black Music of Two Worlds, beginning his discussion with a quote from Roberts There does not seem to be the same African quality in blues forms as there clearly is in much Caribbean music.]Many blues elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the
music of Africa. Sylviane Diouf has pointed to several specific traitsâ€"such as the use of
melisma and a wavy, nasal intonationâ€"that suggest a connection between the music of West and Central Africa and blues
[SFGate].
Ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik may have been the first to contend that certain elements of the blues have roots in the
Islamic music of West and Central Africa.
Stringed instruments (which were favored by slaves from Muslim regions of Africa…), were generally allowed because slave owners considered them akin to European instruments like the violin. So slaves who managed to cobble together a banjo or other instrument…could play more widely in public. This solo-oriented slave music featured elements of an Arabic-Islamic song style that had been imprinted by centuries of Islam's presence in West Africa, says Gerhard Kubik, an ethnomusicology professor at the University of Mainz in Germany who has written the most comprehensive book on Africa's connection to blues music (Africa and the Blues).[1]
Kubik also pointed out that the Mississippi technique of playing the guitar using a knife blade, recorded by
W.C. Handy in his autobiography, is common to West and Central Africa cultures where the
kora, a guitar-like instrument, is often the stringed instrument of choice. This technique consists of pressing a knife against the strings of the guitar, and is a possible antecedent of the
slide guitar technique.
Blues music later adopted elements from the "
Ethiopian airs",
minstrel shows and
Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment.
[Garofalo, pg. 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".] 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".
[Schuller, cited in Garofalo, pg. 27] Songs from this early period had many different structures. Examples can be found in
Leadbelly's or
Henry Thomas's recordings. However, the
twelve-,
eight-, or
sixteen-bar structure based on
tonic,
subdominant and
dominant chords became the most common.
[Garofalo, pgs. 46-47] What is now recognizable as the standard 12-bar blues form is documented from
oral history and
sheet music appearing in African American communities throughout the region along the lower
Mississippi River during the first decade of the 1900s (and performed by white bands in
New Orleans at least since 1908). One of these early sites of blues evolution was along
Beale Street located in
Memphis, Tennessee.
Lyrics
Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often with the singer voicing his or her "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, hard times".
[Ewen, pgs. 142-143] Many of the oldest blues records contain gritty, realistic lyrics, in contrast to much of the music being recorded at the time. One of the more extreme examples, "
Down in the Alley" by
Memphis Minnie, is about a
prostitute having sex with men in an alley. Music such as this was called "gut-bucket" blues. The term refers to a type of homemade bass instrument made from a metal bucket used to clean pig intestines for
chitterlings, a
soul food dish associated with slavery and deprivation. "Gut-bucket" described blues that was "low-down" and earthy, that dealt with often rocky or steamy man-woman relationships, hard luck and hard times. Gut-bucket blues and the rowdy juke-joint venues where it often was played, earned blues music an unsavory reputation. Upstanding church-going people shunned it, and some preachers railed against it as sinful. And because it often treated the hardships and injustices of life, the blues gained an association in some quarters with misery and oppression. But the blues was about more than hard times; it could be humorous and raunchy as well:
Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,:Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,:It may be sending you baby, but it's worrying the hell out of me.
Author Ed Morales has claimed that
Yoruba mythology played a part in early blues, citing
Robert Johnson's "
Cross Road Blues" as a "thinly veiled reference to
Eleggua, the
orisha in charge of the crossroads".
[Morales, pg. 277] However, many seminal blues artists such as
Joshua White,
Son House,
Skip James, or
Reverend Gary Davis were influenced by
Christianity.
The original lyrical form of the blues was probably a single line, repeated three times. It was only later that the current, most common structureâ€"a line, repeated once and then followed by a single line conclusionâ€"became standard.
[Ferris, pg. 230]Musical style
Though during the first decades of the twentieth century blues music was not clearly defined in terms of chords progression, the twelve-bar blues became standard in the '30s. However, in addition to the conventional twelve-bar blues, there are many blues in
8-bar form, such as "How Long Blues", "Trouble in Mind", and
Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway". There are also
16 bar blues, as in
Ray Charles's instrumental "Sweet 16 Bars". More idiosyncratic numbers of bars are also encountered occasionally, as with the 9 bar progression in
Howlin' Wolf's "Sitting on top of the World". The basic twelve-bar lyric framework of a blues composition is reflected by a standard
harmonic progression of twelve bars, in 4/4 or (rarely) 2/4 time. Slow blues are often played in 12/8 (4 beats per measure with 3 subdivisions per beat). The blues
chords associated to a
twelve-bar blues are typically a set of three different chords played over a twelve-bar scheme:
| I | I or IV | I | I | | IV | IV | I | I |
| V | IV | I | I or V |
where the
Roman numbers refer to the
degrees of the progression. That would mean, if played in the
tonality of F, the chords would be as follows:
| F | F or Bb | F | F | | Bb | Bb | F | F |
| C | Bb | F | F or C |
In this example, F is the
tonic chord, Bb the
subdominant. Note that much of the time, every chord is played in the
dominant seventh (7th) form. Frequently, the last chord is the dominant (V or in this case C)
turnaround making the transition to the beginning of the next progression.
The lyrics generally end on the last beat of the tenth bar or the first beat of the eleventh bar, and the final two bars are given to the instrumentalist as a break; the harmony of this two-bar break, the
turnaround, can be extremely complex, sometimes consisting of single notes that defy analysis in terms of chords. The final beat, however, is almost always strongly grounded in the dominant seventh (V7), to provide tension for the next verse. Musicians sometimes refer to twelve-bar blues as "B-flat" blues because it is the traditional pitch of the tenor sax, trumpet/cornet, clarinet and trombone.
Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the
flatted
third,
fifth and
seventh (the so-called
blue or bent notes) of the associated
major scale.
[Ewen, pg. 143] While the twelve-bar harmonic progression had been intermittently used for centuries, the revolutionary aspect of blues was the frequent use of the flatted third, flatted seventh, and even flatted fifth in the melody, together with
crushingâ€"playing directly adjacent notes at the same time, i.e., diminished secondâ€"and
slidingâ€"similar to using
grace notes.
[Grace notes were common in the Baroque and Classical periods, but they acted as ornamentation rather than as part of the harmonic structure. Mozart comes very close in the slow movement of his Piano Concerto No. 21, holding a flatted fifth in the dominant for a full quarter-note. But this was a technique for building unbearable tension for resolution into the major fifth, while a blues melody could sustain the flatted fifth indefinitely as part of the scale. In other words both a blues musician and Mozart could slide from a flatted mi to a major mi over a dominant chord, but the blues musician could also use the flatted mi as a harmonic resolution in a major key.] Where a classical musician will generally play a grace note distinctly, a blues singer or harmonica player will
glissando; a pianist or guitarist might crush the two notes and then release the grace note. Blues harmonies also use the subdominant major chord with and added minor seventh (IV 7) and the tonic major triad with an added minor seventh (I 7) in place of the tonic. Blues is occasionally played in a
minor key. The scale differs little from the traditional minor, except for the occasional use of a flatted fifth in the tonic, often crushed by the singer or lead instrument with the
perfect fifth in the harmony.
Janis Joplin's rendition of "Ball and Chain", accompanied by
Big Brother and the Holding Company, provides an example of this technique. Also, minor-key blues is most often structured in sixteen bars rather than twelveâ€"e.g., "
St. James Infirmary Blues" and
Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me"â€"and was often influenced by evangelical religious music.
Blues
shuffles are also typical of the style. Their use reinforces the rhythm and call-and-response trance, the
groove. Their simplest version commonly used in many postwar
electric blues,
rock-and-rolls, or early
bebops is a basic three-note
riff on the bass strings of the guitar. Played in time with the bass and the drums, this technique, similar to the
walking bass, produces the groove feel characteristic of the blues. The last bar of the chord progression is usually accompanied by a
turnaround making the transition to the beginning next progression.
Shuffle rhythm is often vocalized as
"dow, da
dow, da
dow, da" or
"dump, da
dump, da
dump, da"
[David Hamburger, Acoustic Guitar Slide Basics, 2001, ISBN 1890490385.] as it consists of uneven eight notes. On a guitar this may be done as a simple steady bass or may add to that stepwise quarter note motion from the fifth to the seventh of the chord and back. An example is provided by the following
tablature for the first four bars of a blues progression in E:
[ ][Wilbur M. Savidge, Randy L. Vradenburg, Everything About Playing the Blues, 2002, Music Sales Distributed, ISBN 1884848095, pg. 35] E7 A7 E7 E7
E |-|-|
B |-|-|
G |-|-|
D |2-42-4-|---|
A |24-24|00-00|24-24|24-24|
E |00-00|0-00-00-00-0--0|
Origins
Blues has evolved from the spare music of poor black laborers into a wide variety of complex styles and subgenres, spawning regional variations across the United States and, later, Europe, Africa and elsewhere. What is now considered "blues" as well as modern "
country music" arose at approximately the same time and place during the nineteenth century in the southern United States. Recorded blues and country can be found from as far back as the 1920s, when the popular record industry developed and created marketing categories called "
race music" and "
hillbilly music" to sell music by and for blacks and 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.
[Garofalo, pgs. 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 goes on to later claim that artists were sometimes listed in the wrong racial category in record company catalogues.] While blues emerged from the culture of African-Americans, blues musicians have since emerged world-wide. Studies have situated the origin of "black" spiritual music inside slaves' exposure to their masters'
Hebridean-originated gospels. African-American economist and historian
Thomas Sowell also notes that the southern, black, ex-slave population was acculturated to a considerable degree by and among their Scots-Irish "
redneck" neighbours. However, the findings of Kubik and others also clearly attest to the essential Africanness of many essential aspects of blues expression.
Much has been speculated about the social and economic reasons for the appearance of the blues.
[Philip V. Bohlman, "Immigrant, folk, and regional music in the twentieth century", in The Cambridge History of American Music, ed. David Nicholls, 1999, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521454298, pg. 285] The first appearance of the blues is not well defined and is often dated between 1870 and 1900. This period 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 development, which appeared at the turn of the century, as a move from group performances to a more individualized style. They argue that the development of the blues is strongly related to the newly acquired freedom of the slaves. According to
Lawrence Levine,
[Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, Oxford University Press, 1977, ISBN 0195023749, pg. 223 ] "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. 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."
Prewar blues
Flush with the success of appropriating the
ragtime craze for commercial gain, the American
sheet music publishing industry wasted no time in pursuing similar commercial success with the blues. In 1912, three popular blues-like compositions were published, precipitating the
Tin Pan Alley adoption of blues elements: "Baby Seals' Blues" by
"Baby" F. Seals (arranged by
Artie Matthews), "Dallas Blues" by
Hart Wand and "
Memphis Blues" by
W. C. Handy [Garofalo, pg. 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 acks, who wasted little time in turning out a deluge of imitations. {parentheticals in Garofalo)]. Handy, a formally trained musician, composer and arranger was a key popularizer of blues. Handy was one of the first to transcribe and then orchestrate blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers. He went on to become a very popular composer, and billed himself as the "Father of the Blues", though it can be debated whether his compositions are blues at all;
[Garofalo, pg. 27] they can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Latin habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime.
[Morales, pg. 277] Extremely prolific over his long life, Handy's signature work was the
St. Louis Blues.
 |
Blind Blake was an influential blues singer and guitarist known as the "King of Ragtime Guitar". |
In the 1920s, the blues became a major element of African American and American popular music in general, reaching "white" audience via Handy's work and the classic female blues performers. It evolved from informal performances to entertainment in theaters, for instance within the
Theater Owners Bookers Association, in
nightclubs, such as the
Cotton Club, and
juke joints, for example along
Beale Street in Memphis. This evolution led to a notable diversification of the styles and to a clearer cut between blues and jazz. Several record companies, such as the
American Record Corporation,
Okeh Records, and
Paramount Records, began to record African American music. As the recording industry grew, so did, in the African American community, the popularity of country blues performers like
Charlie Patton,
Leadbelly,
Blind Lemon Jefferson,
Lonnie Johnson,
Son House and
Blind Blake. Jefferson was one of the few country blues performers to record widely, and may have been the first to record the
slide guitar style, in which a guitar is fretted with a knife blade, the sawed-off neck of a liquor bottle, or other implement. The slide guitar went on to become an important part of the
Delta blues.
[Clarke, pg. 138] When blues recordings were first made, in the 1920s, there were two major divisions: a traditional, rural
country blues, and a diverse set of more polished city or urban blues.
Country blues performers were often unaccompanied, or performed with only a banjo or guitar, and were often improvised. There were many regional styles of country blues in the early 20th century, a few especially important. The (Mississippi) Delta blues was a rootsy style, accompanied by
slide guitar, and characterized by a spare style and passionate vocals. The most influential performer of this style is usually said to be
Robert Johnson,
[Clarke, pg. 141] who was little recorded but combined elements of both urban and rural blues in a unique manner. Along with Robert Johnson, major artists of this style were his predecessors
Charley Patton and
Son House. The southeastern "delicate and lyrical"
Piedmont blues tradition, based on an elaborated
fingerpicking guitar technique, was represented by singers like
Blind Willie McTell and
Blind Boy Fuller. Georgia also had a early slide tradition.
[Clarke, pg. 139] The lively
Memphis blues style, which developed in the '20s and '30s around
Memphis, Tennessee, was mostly influenced by
jug bands, such as the
Memphis Jug Band or the
Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers. They used a large variety of unusual instruments such as
washboard,
fiddle,
kazoo or
mandolin. Representative artists in this style include
Frank Stokes,
Sleepy John Estes,
Robert Wilkins,
Joe McCoy and
Memphis Minnie. Memphis Minnie was a major female blues artist of this time. She was famous for her virtuoso guitar style. The pianist
Memphis Slim also began his career in Memphis, but his quite distinct style was smoother and contained some swing elements. Many blues musicians based in Memphis moved to Chicago in the late thirties or early forties and participated in the urban blues movement, straddling the border between the country and electric blues.
City blues was much more codified and elaborate.
[Garofalo, pg. 47] Classic female urban or
vaudeville blues singers were extremely popular in the 1920s, among them
Mamie Smith,
Gertrude "Ma" Rainey,
Bessie Smith, and
Victoria Spivey. Though more a vaudeville performer than a blues artist, Mamie Smith was the first African- American to record a blues in 1920. Her success was such that 75,000 copies of "Crazy Blues" sold in its first month.
[Hawkeye Herman, General background on African American Music, Blues Foundation, Essays: What is the blues?http://www.blues.org/blues/essays.php4?Id=3] Ma Rainey, was called the "Mother of Blues." According to Clarke,
[Clarke, pg. 137] both Rainey and Bessie Smith used a "method of singing each song around centre tones, perhaps in order to project her voice more easily to the back of a room" and Smith "would also choose to sing a song in an unusual key, and her artistry in bending and stretching notes with her beautiful, powerful contralto to accommodate her own interpretation was unsurpassed". Urban male performers included some of the most popular black musicians of the era, such
Tampa Red,
Big Bill Broonzy and
Leroy Carr. Before WWII, Tampa Red was sometimes referred to as "The Guitar Wizard." Carr made the unusual choice to accompany himself on the piano.
[Clarke, pg. 138] |
A typical boogie-woogie bassline |
Another important style of 1930s and early '40s urban blues was
boogie-woogie. Though most often piano based, it was not strictly a solo piano style, and was also used to accompany singers and, as a solo part, in bands and small combos. Boogie-Woogie was a style characterized by a regular bass figure, an
ostinato or
riff. It was featured by the most familiar example of
shifts of level, in the left hand which elaborates on each chord, and trills and decorations from the right hand. Boogie-woogie was pioneered by the Chicago-based
Jimmy Yancey and the Boogie-Woogie Trio (
Albert Ammons,
Pete Johnson and
Meade Lux Lewis). Chicago also produced other musicians in the style, like
Clarence "Pine Top" Smith and
Earl Hines, who "linked the propulsive left-hand rhythms of the ragtime pianists with melodic figures similar to those of Armstrong's trumpet in the right hand".
[Garofalo, pg. 47]One kind of early 1940s urban blues was the
jump blues, a style heavily influenced by
big band music and characterized by the use of the guitar in the rhythm section, a jazzy, up-tempo sound, declamatory vocals and the use of the
saxophone or other
brass instruments. The jump blues of people like
Louis Jordan and
Big Joe Turner, based in
Kansas City, Missouri, later became the primary basis for
rock and roll and
rhythm and blues.
[Garofalo, pg. 76] Also straddling the border between classic rhythm and blues and blues is the very smooth Louisiana style, whose main representatives are
Professor Longhair and, more recently,
Doctor John.
Early postwar blues
|
Muddy Waters at a young age. |
After
World War II and in the 1950s, increased urbanization and the use of amplification led to new styles of
electric blues music, popular in cities such as
Chicago,
Detroit and
Kansas City.
Chicago became a blues center in the early fifties. The
Chicago blues is influenced to a large extent by the
Mississippi blues style, because most artists of this period were migrants from the
Mississippi region:
Howlin' Wolf,
Muddy Waters,
Willie Dixon, and
Jimmy Reed were all born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago during the
Great Migration. Their style is characterized by the use of electric guitar, sometimes slide guitar,
harmonica, traditional bass and drums. Nevertheless, some musicians of the same artistic movement, as for example
J. T. Brown who played in
Elmore James' or
J. B. Lenoir's bands, also used saxophones but more as a rhythm support than as solo instruments. Though
Little Walter and
Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) are the best known harp musicians of the early Chicago blues scene, others such as
Big Walter Horton and
Sonny Boy Williamson, who had already begun their careers before the war, also had tremendous influence. Muddy Waters and Elmore James were known for their innovative use of slide electric guitar. However,
B. B. King and
Freddy King did not use slide guitars and were perhaps the most influential guitarists of the Chicago blues style. Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters were famous for their deep voices. Howlin' Wolf is particularly acknowledged for distorting his voice with a special use of the microphone. Willie Dixon played a major role on the Chicago scene. He was a bassist, but his fame came from his composing and writing of most
standard blues numbers of the period. He wrote "Hoochie Coochie Man" and "I Just Want to Make Love to You" for Muddy Waters, "Wang Dang Doodle" for
Koko Taylor, and "Back Door Man" for Howlin' Wolf, and many others. Most artists of this style recorded for the Chicago-based
Chess Records label.
The influence of blues on mainstream American popular music was huge in the fifties. In the mid-1950s, musicians like
Bo Diddley and
Chuck Berry emerged. Directly influenced by the Chicago blues, their enthusiastic playing departed from the melancholy aspects of blues and is often acknowledged as the
transition from the blues to rock 'n' roll.
Elvis Presley and
Bill Haley, mostly influenced by the jump blues and boogie-woogie, popularized rock and roll within the white segment of the population. The influence of the Chicago blues was also very important in
Louisiana's
zydeco music.
Clifton Chenier and others introduced many blues accents in this style, such as the use of electric solo guitars and
cajun arrangements of blues standards. However, other artists popular at this time, such as
T-Bone Walker and
John Lee Hooker, showed up different influences which are not directly related to the Chicago style.
Dallas-born T-Bone Walker is often associated with the
California blues style. This blues style is smoother than Chicago blues and is a transition between the Chicago blues, the jump blues and
swing with some
jazz-guitar influence. On the other hand, John Lee Hooker's blues is very personal. It is based on Hooker's deep rough voice accompanied by a single electric guitar. Though not directly influenced by boogie woogie, his very groovy style is sometimes called "guitar boogie". His first hit "Boogie Chillen" reached #1 on the R&B charts in 1949.
[Lars Bjorn, Before Motown, 2001, University of Michigan Press, ISBN 0472067656, pg. 175]. Another influential blues style appeared around
Baton Rouge at the end of the fifties: the
swamp blues. This style is characterized by a slower pace and a simpler use of the harmonica than the Chicago blues style as played for example by Little Walter or Muddy Waters. Major artists of this movement are
Slim Harpo,
Sam Myers and
Jerry McCain. Some blues standards are issued of this vague like "Scratch my Back", "She's Tough" and "King Bee".
Blues in the 1960s and 1970s
By the beginning of the 1960s,
African American music like
rock and roll and
soul were parts of mainstream popular music. White performers had brought black music to new audiences, both within the United States and abroad. Though many listeners simply enjoyed the catchy pop tunes of the day, others were inspired to learn more about the roots of rock, soul, R&B and gospel. Especially in the United Kingdom, many young men and women formed bands to emulate blues legends. By the end of the decade, white-performed blues in a number of styles, mostly fusions of blues and rock, had come to dominate popular music across much of the world.
|
Blues legend B.B. King with his guitar "Lucille" |
Blues masters such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters continued to perform to enthusiastic audiences, inspiring new artists steeped in traditional blues, such as New York-born
Taj Mahal. John Lee Hooker was particularly successful in the late sixties in blending his own style with some rock elements, playing together with younger white musicians. The 1971 album
Endless Boogie is a major example of this style.
B.B. King had emerged as a major artist in the fifties and reached his height in the late sixties. His virtuoso guitar technique earned him the eponymous title "king of the blues". In contrast to the Chicago style, King's band used strong brass support (saxophone, trumpet, trombone) instead of slide guitar or harp.
Tennessee-born
Bobby "Blue" Bland is another artist of the time who, like B.B. King, successfully straddled blues and R&B genres.
The music of the
Civil Rights and
Free Speech movements in the U.S. prompted a resurgence of interest in American roots music in general and in early African American music, specifically. Important music festivals such as the
Newport Folk Festival brought traditional blues to a new audience. Prewar acoustic blues was rediscovered along with many forgotten blues heroes including Son House,
Mississippi John Hurt,
Skip James, and
Reverend Gary Davis. Many compilations of classic prewar blues were republished, in particular by the
Yazoo Records company. J. B. Lenoir, an important artist of the Chicago blues movement in the fifties, recorded several outstanding LPs using acoustic guitar, sometimes accompanied by Willie Dixon on the acoustic bass or drums. His work at this time had an unusually direct political content relative to
racism or
Vietnam War issues. As an example, this quotation from
Alabama blues record:
I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me (2x)You know they killed my sister and my brother,and the whole world let them peoples go down there free
In the late sixties, the so-called West Side blues emerged in Chicago with
Magic Sam,
Magic Slim and
Otis Rush. In contrast with the early Chicago style, this style is characterized by a strong rhythm support (a rhythm and a bass electric guitar, and drums). Talented, new musicians like
Albert King,
Freddy King,
Buddy Guy, or
Luther Allison appeared.
However, what made blues really come across to the young white audiences in the early 1960s was the Chicago-based
Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the
British blues movement. The style of
British blues developed in England, when dozens of bands such as
Fleetwood Mac,
John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers,
The Rolling Stones,
The Yardbirds, and
Cream took to covering the classic blues numbers from either the
Delta or
Chicago blues traditions. The British blues musicians of the early 1960s would ultimately inspire a number of American
blues-rock fusion performers, including
Canned Heat,
Janis Joplin,
Johnny Winter,
The J. Geils Band,
Ry Cooder, and others, who at first discovered the form by listening to British performers, but in turn went on to explore the blues tradition on their own. Many of
Led Zeppelin's earlier hits were renditions of traditional blues songs. One blues-rock performer,
Jimi Hendrix, was a rarity in his field at the time: a black man who played
psychedelic blues-rock. Hendrix was a virtuoso guitarist, and a pioneer in the innovative use of
distortion and
feedback in his music.
[Garofalo, pgs. 224-225] Through these artists and others, both earlier and later, blues music has been strongly influential in the development of
rock music.
Blues from the 1980s to the present
Since
1980, blues has continued to thrive in both traditional and new forms through the continuing work of
Taj Mahal,
Ry Cooder and the music of
Robert Cray,
Albert Collins,
Keb' Mo' and others such as
Jessie Mae Hemphill or
Kim Wilson. The
Texas rock-blues style emerged based on an original use of guitars for both solo and rhythms. In contrast with the West Side] blues, the Texas style is strongly influenced by the British rock-blues movement. Major artists of this style are
Stevie Ray Vaughan,
The Fabulous Thunderbirds and
ZZ Top. The '80s also saw a revival of John Lee Hooker's popularity. He collaborated with a diverse array of musicians such as
Carlos Santana,
Miles Davis, Robert Cray and
Bonnie Raitt.
Eric Clapton, who was known for his virtuoso electric guitar within the Blues Breakers and Cream, made a notable comeback in the '90s with his
MTV Unplugged album, in which he played some standard blues numbers on acoustic guitar.
Around this time blues publications such as
Living Blues and
Blues Revue began appearing at newsstands, major cities began forming blues societies and outdoor blues festivals became more common.
[A directory of the most significant blues festivals can be found at http://blues.about.com/od/bluesfestivals/] More
nightclubs and venues emerged.
[A list of important blues venues in the U.S. can be found at http://blues.about.com/cs/venues/] The local nightclub scene in America and abroad has carried the torch for blues music and likely accounts for as much of the resilience of the blues as recorded music. These local joints thrive despite the increase in ultra lounges and dance clubs, cranking out live music every night of the week across the country. In the
1990s and today blues performers are found touching elements from almost every musical genre, as can be seen, for example, from the broad array of nominees of the yearly
Blues Music Awards, previously named
W. C. Handy Awards Contemporary blues music is nurtured by several well-known blues labels such as
Alligator Records,
Blind Pig Records,
Chess Records (
MCA),
Delmark Records, and
Vanguard Records (
Artemis Records).
Some labels are famous for their rediscovering and remastering of blues rarities such as
Delta Groove Music,
Arhoolie Records,
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (heir of
Folkways Records), and
Yazoo Records (
Shanachie Records).
[A complete directory of contemporary blues labels can be found at http://blues.about.com/cs/recordlabels/]There has been a modest resurgence of African-American interest in the blues, particularly around
Jackson, MS and other deep South regions. Often termed "soul blues," the music at the heart of this movement was given new life by the unexpected success of two particular recordings on the Jackson-based
Malaco label:
Z. Z. Hill's "Down Home Blues" (1982) and
Little Milton's "The Blues is Alright" (1984). Contemporary African-American performers who work this vein of the blues, and who enjoy considerable repute with black southern audiences, include
Bobby Rush, Denise LaSalle, Sir Charles Jones,
Bettye LaVette, Marvin Sease, Peggy Scott-Adams, and
Willie Clayton. The American Blues Radio Network, founded by Rip Daniels, a black Mississippian, features soul blues on its playlists and radio personalities such as Duane "DDT" Tanner and Nikki deMarks.
As the origin of the blues scale, the blues has exerted a profound influence on many styles of music. Many jazz, folk or rock performers, such as
Louis Armstrong,
Duke Ellington,
Miles Davis,
Bob Dylan and
Red Hot Chili Peppers, have performed significant blues recordings. The blues scale frequently is found in non-blues musical forms, such as
popular songs like
Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night",
blues ballads like "Since I Fell for You" and "Please Send Me Someone to Love", and even orchestral works like
George Gershwin's "
Rhapsody in Blue" and "Concerto in F". Indeed, the blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music and informs many
modal frames, especially the
ladder of thirds as in "
A Hard Day's Night". Blues forms turn up in some surprising places. The theme to the televised
Batman had a blues structure, as did
teen idol Fabian's first hit, "Turn Me Loose". The first great
country music star
Jimmie Rodgers was a blues performer. Guitarist/vocalist
Tracy Chapman's hit "Give Me One Reason" was a 12-bar blues and has, as a result, become a contemporary blues club standard in Chicago. Blues is sometimes danced as an informal type of
swing dance, with no fixed patterns and a heavy focus on
connection, sensuality and
improvisation, often with
body contact. However, most
blues dance moves are inspired by traditional blues dancing. Although usually done to blues music, it can be done to any slow tempo 4/4 music, including "club" music.
R&B music can be traced back to
spirituals and blues. Spirituals are often cited as the origin of the blues. Musically, spirituals were a descendent of
New England choral traditions, and in particular of
Isaac Watts's
hymns, mixed with African rhythms and call-and-response forms. Spirituals or religious chants in the Afro-American community are much better documented than the "low-down" blues. They developed mostly because the communities could gather more easily during mass or worship gatherings, the so-called
camp meetings. Their popularity was also due to theirâ€"at first glanceâ€"politically correct contents. Most early country bluesmen such as
Skip James or
Charley Patton were able to play as well both genres, which usually basically only differ in the lyrics.
Georgia Tom Dorsey is the perfect example of blues musician and composer straddling the border between country and urban blues, and spirituals. He is often cited as the father of
Gospel music. However, the beginning of Gospel music can be better dated to 1930 and the first successes of the
Golden Gate Quartet. In the fifties,
soul music, best represented by
Sam Cooke,
Ray Charles and
James Brown, overtook many elements of both Gospel and blues music. In the sixties and seventies these genres merged in what is called
soul blues music. Direct heir of soul,
funk music of the seventies can be seen as an antecedent of hip-hop and contemporary R&B and shows the filiation of the blues with most modern R&B music.
Before
World War II, the difference between blues and
jazz was sometimes vague. Usually jazz was more impregnated by harmonic structures stemming from
brass bands. However, the jump blues is a clear example of mix between both styles. After the war, the influence of blues on jazz was tremendous, and most of the
bebop classics, such as
Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time", are based on the extensive use of the pentatonic scale and blue notes. However, this influence was purely formal. Bebop marked a major shift of jazz from pop music for dancing to a high-art, less-accessible, cerebral "musician's music". The audience for both blues and jazz definitively split, and it was at this time that the border between blues and jazz became the most defined. Artists straddling the border between jazz and blues are categorized into the
jazz-blues sub-genre.
The influence of both the twelve-bar structure and the blues scale on
rock-and-roll music was so profound that rock and roll can properly be classified as an outgrowth of blues, or even "blues with a
back beat". Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog", with its unmodified twelve-bar structure (in both harmony and lyrics) and a melody centered on flatted third of the tonic (and flatted seventh of the subdominant), is a blues song transformed to a new genre by rhythm and sheer energy. One can hardly find a major song from rock-and-roll's revolutionary period that is not, at its roots, a blues composition transformed by rhythm: "Johnny B. Goode", "Blue Suede Shoes", "Whole Lotta' Shakin' Going On", "Tutti-Frutti", "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", "What'd I Say", and "Long Tall Sally". The early African American rock musicians retained the frank sexual themes of blues. "Got a gal named Sue, knows just what to do" or "See the girl with the red dress on, she knows how to do it all night long" are hard to mistake. Even the subject matter of "Hound Dog" contains well-hidden sexual double entendre. More sanitized early "white" rock borrowed both the structure and harmonics of blues, although minimizing harmonic creativity and sexual nuance, such as Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock". Many white musicians who covered black rock songs would go so far as to change the words; possibly the most famous example was
Pat Boone's cover of "Tutti Frutti", which originally started "Tutti frutti, loose booty . . . a wop bop a lu bop, a good Goddamn."
Like
jazz,
rock and roll and
hip hop music, blues has been accused of being the "devil's music" and of inciting violence and other poor behavior.
[SFGate] In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable, especially as white audiences began listening to the blues during the 1920s.
[Garofalo, pg. 27] In the early twentieth century,
W.C. Handy was the first to make the blues more respectable to non-black Americans.
Now blues is a major component of the
African American and
American cultural heritage in general. This status is not only mirrored inscholar studies in the field
but also in main stream movies such as
Sounder (1972),
the Blues Brothers (1980 and 1998), and
Crossroads (1986). The
Blues Brothers movies, which mix up almost all kinds of music related to blues such as R&B or
Zydeco, have had a major impact on the image of blues music. They promoted the standard traditional blues "Sweet Home Chicago", whose version by Robert Johnson is probably the best known, to the unofficial status of Chicago's city anthem. More recently, in 2003,
Martin Scorsese made significant efforts to promote the blues to a larger audience. He asked several famous directors such as
Clint Eastwood and
Wim Wenders to participate in a series of films called
The Blues.
He also participated in the rendition of compilations of major blues artists in a series of high quality CDs.
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List of blues musicians*
List of British blues musicians*
Blues in New Zealand*
Blues Matters*
Blues radio stations*
Blues Matters - UK Blues Magazine*
Blues In Britain Magazine*
Blues & Rhythm Magazine*
Blues Foundation*
Blues Progression*
Music from Florida Folklife Collection, available free for public use from the State Archives of
Florida*
A list of terms used in Blues lyrics*
The Music in Poetry —
Smithsonian Institution lesson plan on the blues, for teachers
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New Zealand Blues and Views - Includes music from New Zealand Blues bands and artists, NZ Blues scene and concert reviews
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Mississippi Delta Blues Society of Indianola*
Article About Blues Music - by Dr. Frank Hoffmann*
The Delta Blues Museum's "Uncensored History of the Blues" Podcast and Blog
