Meanwhile, something not entirely else had been percolating: the blues, a uniquely American music concocted by African‑Americans, melding African‑ and European‑American folk musics. It arose in the South around the turn of the century, around the same time as ragtime, jazz, gospel, and barbershop harmony, all of which can be seen as part of a period of struggle for dignity and expression in the face of Jim Crow, the official project for thwarting the dream of the end of White domination.[i]
In the southern countryside, especially in the area around the Mississippi Delta and Memphis, White sharecroppers would come from miles around to Black parties to marvel at the syncopated sounds. The hills around the delta preserved in isolation some old West African musical forms, and you can hear them peeking through in those blues renditions from before recording technology, and the standardization of the form that came with it.
Blues music was characterized by the “blue note,” a slight flatting of the 3rd, 7th, and sometimes 5th notes. Or sometimes not a single note, but a slurring or wavering that demonstrates an effort to square a circle. Musicologists argue: these flatted notes are either an attempt to fit a larger West African scale (including “microtones”) into the cracks in the Europeans’ diatonic scale, or an effort to square their traditional five-note scale with the new seven-based universe. And not only is the blue note African American, it’s southern: it didn’t show up in the early music of Blacks in the northeast. Blacks there were further from West Africa culturally and were trying to put more distance between themselves and the old South, which they didn’t miss much, “Dixie” notwithstanding.
The blues also feature a vocal style usually described as “sung speech.” This music, and jazz as well, reflect the melodic quality of some West African languages, in which different pitch and intonation lend different meanings to the same words, as occurs in Chinese. Call and response, typical of so much African music, is embedded partly through the three-line form, in which the first line is repeated once, then followed by a third line that answers or completes the thought, and rhymes. Meanwhile: falsetto breaks (reminiscent of African tradition), syncopation, improvisation, some variant of blues scale, verses floating around the tradition from one song to another, and other aspects worthy of the many books on the subject.
Blues are commonly understood to hew to a three-chord pattern, but sometimes there are only two or even one (check out John Lee Hooker), and on the other extreme there are sometimes passing chords, more common with jazz bands playing blues numbers, and later on generally across blues genres. The blues form is not so different from that of the western European ballads African Americans heard in the South, except that the vocal lines are shorter, leaving room for the instrument or band to talk back.
The blues may have taken its name from a 16th century British expression, “blue devils,” meaning melancholy.[ii] Or not, depending on your source. In any case, it evolved from slavery-era field hollers—work songs that persisted later in penitentiary chain gangs,[1] and from similar patterns used in church services. It was carried on by levee workers hauling dirt uphill to hold back the Mississippi River. It evolved from the wrenching social life of Blacks: they were at the bottom of the labor ladder and as such were often forced to travel in search of work. This didn’t do much for their family life, as any blues singer will tell you, in a song.[iii]
[1] Check out Roots of the Blues (discography).
And don’t let’s forget that blues evolved in tandem with religious singing. Same singers—or sometimes different people from the same families. Gospel absorbed blues and vice versa. Much as some people would like to keep Saturday night separate from Sunday morning—keep the world out of the church—people are people.
The Dockery Plantation near Tutwiler, Mississippi was the place where folks would come to hear the earliest blues musicians we know of today. Charley Patton came to Dockery’s in 1897; many bluesmen learned from and played with him. He in turn learned from Henry Sloan, an older resident at Dockery who has been credited by some as “inventing” the blues. He was never recorded. From the surrounding Delta came Son House, Bukka (Booker) White, Skip James, Robert Johnson, and Johnny Shines. Later additions to the circle included Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Honeyboy Edwards, and Pops Staples.
The blues developed early in east Texas too, and found there a more open field for the interplay of different musics. Texas gave us Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb. Blacks, Cajuns, Mexicans, Anglos, Germans and others mixed waltzes, polkas, ragtime, blues, and jazz, and have continued to breed diverse musical variants. White Texans may have first heard the blues when Black musicians played at White country dances in the nineteenth century.[iv]
The Southeast incubated its own variant of the blues, with artists like Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller, and later Reverend Gary Davis, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGee, incorporating some ragtime as well as Appalachian musical characteristics.[v]
The blues developed both in the countryside—generally sung solo by a man with a guitar–and in traveling vaudeville troupes in which women sang a similar style but with backup by piano or a band. Ma Rainey sang blues in a minstrel show in 1902 and was the first to record “See See Rider,” already an old tune. She encouraged Bessie Smith, who became the first blues star. Other luminaries were Alberta Hunter, Victoria Spivey and Sippie Wallace; they mixed the blues in with a variety of showbiz styles.
But before there were stars, there were “jook joints”—the places where southern Blacks gathered to dance, drink and listen to the early blues. There were jooks[2] in the country towns and the bigger cities, and they were the next step over the levee in the Black community’s musical development. So my teenage informant wasn’t far off after all: rock and roll did come through a juke box, which was named after a house where the blues blew through.
Boogie-woogie was a blues variant played on piano that came out of Kansas City and the Texas honky-tonks in the thirties. Its near relative from southern lumber camps was called barrelhouse—the bar next to the piano being held up by whiskey barrels.[3] Some say players developed a hyperactive left hand style (Beat me Daddy, Eight to the Bar) so their right could reach for the bottle. The style included some rough ragtime feel—rougher than the more formal, polite boogie that would soon become popular mainly among White folks. It rode to Chicago and hit it big in the forties. Chief exponents were Jimmy Yancey, Meade Lux Lewis, Pete Johnson, and Albert Ammons. Boogie-woogie was widely played at “rent parties,” as was skiffle, or jug band music. Jug band, more a type of instrumentation than a type of music, can be found widely on old records because the records were cheap to make, the musicians often being paid a jug—of gin.[vi]
3] My own first enthusiasm for playing music came from a teacher who suckered me into piano lessons by playing a bit of boogie. But by then, at ten, I had already been listening to top 40 records that were, unbeknownst to me, by Black artists – notably Lloyd Price’s hoppin’ version of Stagger Lee.
And jazz, as we’ll see.
Memphis, the town where Elvis erupted, has an interesting history: the town was wiped out by yellow fever in 1878 and entirely restocked with poor folks from around the South. Blacks and Whites together made a new town and, eventually, a new music. By day they worked and prayed; by night they strutted and played. Beale Street was the night: it was jazz, swing, and the blues. The blues came in from the cotton fields and took over the streets and gambling houses, mixing with jazz and country music and evolving towards rhythm and blues and rock and roll.
In Memphis, a classically trained Black musician named W.C. Handy synthesized and regularized what he first heard in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903. His formalized version of the blues was the one that society at large came to know. In fact, when Bessie Smith recorded his “St. Louis Blues,” in her only film appearance, Handy was hired as a consultant. The result was a startling bar scene incorporating the influence of the spiritual style, with barflies as choir.[vii]
W.C. Handy wrote his songs down in sheet music and thus developed the formal concept of the “blue note.” He also incorporated the tango rhythm, often said to be a “White” Argentinian contribution without African influence—a myth that rests partly on the relative paucity of Afro-Argentinians, relative to neighboring Uruguay and of course many other Latin American countries. But Robert Farris Thompson traced the African—specifically Kongo Kingdom—influences in great detail, and Argentinian pianist Juan Carlos Cáceres demonstrated them vividly.[viii] Variations on this rhythm are heard in Cuba, Brazil, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in Black America.
Handy’s 1909 composition “The Memphis Blues,” didn’t do so well, so he sold it to a White promoter, who made a mint from it. Years later Handy was denied permission to include it in his anthology.[ix] Having enriched the publishers, Handy went bankrupt.
The first blues recording was made in 1920: Mamie Smith sang “Crazy Blues,” and it sold like crazy. Bessie Smith began recording in 1923, using top musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson. Recording of the rural male blues singers lagged; the influential Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson first recorded in 1926, Charley Patton in 1929, and Robert Johnson (“Crossroads,” etc.) in 1936.
Charles Anderson, who began as a comedian in 1909, was recording as a blues singer in 1923. His assertion that the blues was Black people’s opera was taken up widely in the press, and he became famous for his ability to hold a note for sixty seconds, lending credence to his claim.[x]
The addition of the guitar to the voice melded field hollers with syncopated rhythms. In the late nineteenth century, rural southern Blacks danced to blues—played on a single guitar—in a sensual manner, dare we say erotically, derived from West African tradition. You can see something similar today in the Maypole dances of Belize and in the sambas of Brazil. Today’s rock and roll dancing echoes this sensuality and style, and is conspicuously West African in origin.
♬substitution: Observe, either at a dance concert or on film, the dancing that accompanies folk music from northern and western European countries; compare this to West African, Brazilian, or Haitian dancing. Specifically, compare solo highland dancing from Scotland with solo rock and roll dancing. Note differences and similarities. Try dancing highland style to your favorite style of rock music. Do this when no one is looking.
There’s a blues festival in Helena, Arkansas that features a lot of old-style performers from the Mississippi Delta area. The town is on the tourist map basically for that one day each year. Main Street is closed and merchants rake it in. In summer 2000, the Black merchants called for a boycott of the festival on the grounds that their businesses, off on the side streets, were actually losing money during the fest.
The lead editorial writer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock) objected, saying “Last time I checked, the blues were for everybody.” As a folklorist working in the state at the time, I demurred in print, noting that blues expressed the struggles of the people who originated them, as all cultural expressions express—well, culture. If you want to appreciate other people’s culture, you might stop to appreciate their struggles while you’re there. Especially when it’s right there in your face asking to be noticed.
The next day I was approached by a local accountant, of the White persuasion, who had read my letter; he admonished me: “stop blaming me for slavery—I wasn’t here.” Touched a nerve, I guess. Maybe your granddaddy was here. Anyhow, touchy touchy. And why so? Could it be that one woman’s songs of work and struggle are another man’s source of leisure? Could it be that recognition of the unfairness of certain cultural interactions could open up Pandora’s boxes of guilt? Angela Davis suggests the importance of social context for true music appreciation:
Hope for the hopeless has been conjured within the religious context…Hope for the hopeless has been conjured aesthetically by the blues women and blues men…Like John the Conqueror [Bessie Smith] brought song and laughter as she evoked the harshest and cruelest experiences of Black people in America, and she brought a promise that ‘the sun’s gonna shine in my back door some day.’[xi]
Professor Davis wasn’t there at the time, but Black songwriter-musicians Porter Grainger and Bob Ricketts were, offering blues fans (especially White ones) a 1926 pamphlet called How to Play and Sing the Blues like the Phonograph and Stage Artists, including this gem:
If one can temporarily play the role of the oppressed or the depressed, injecting into his or her rendition a spirit of hopeful prayer, the effect will be more natural and successful…. Without the necessary moan, croon or slur, no blues number is properly sung.[xii]
Within a decade of the rural blues boom, the southern sound would move north, electrify, and join with offshoots of swing bands to create the popular music that would take the world by storm. We’ll get to that several chapters down the road. But while we’re still in the South, let’s check in at the local Black barbershop and see what’s shakin’.
[i] See David Evans, “Blues,” in Burnim and Maultsby, 119-120.
[ii] Lomax 1960, 576.
[iii] Lomax 1960, 558.
[iv] Alan Governor, liner notes for Blues Masters, Vol. 3, Rhino Records, 1992.
[v] Titon, 29.
[vi] Hammond, 58.
[vii] That’s Black Entertainment, Video Communications Inc., 1989.
[viii] Tango Negro: The African Roots of Tango. See Videography.
[ix] Butcher, 71.
[x] Abbott, Lynn, and Seroff, Doug, “America’s Blue Yodel,” Musical Traditions, Late 1993.
[xi] Davis, 157..
[xii] Ogren 1989, 93 . Ogren got the writers’ names a little off, but otherwise the cite was right.