Little is known about the exact origin of the music now known as the
blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...
.
[Southern, p. 332] No specific year can be cited as the origin of the blues, largely because the style evolved over a long period and existed in approaching its modern form before the term ''blues'' was introduced and before the style was thoroughly documented.
Ethnomusicologist
Ethnomusicology is the study of music from the cultural and social aspects of the people who make it. It encompasses distinct theoretical and methodical approaches that emphasize cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dim ...
Gerhard Kubik
Gerhard Kubik (born 10 December 1934) is an Austrian music ethnologist from Vienna. He studied ethnology, musicology and African languages at the University of Vienna. He published his doctoral dissertation in 1971 and achieved habilitation in 1 ...
traces the roots of many of the elements that were to develop into the blues back to the
African
African or Africans may refer to:
* Anything from or pertaining to the continent of Africa:
** People who are native to Africa, descendants of natives of Africa, or individuals who trace their ancestry to indigenous inhabitants of Africa
*** Ethn ...
continent, the "cradle of the blues". One important early mention of something closely resembling the blues comes from 1901, when an
archaeologist
Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...
in
Mississippi
Mississippi () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered to the north by Tennessee; to the east by Alabama; to the south by the Gulf of Mexico; to the southwest by Louisiana; and to the northwest by Arkansas. Miss ...
described the songs of
black
Black is a color which results from the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, without hue, like white and grey. It is often used symbolically or figuratively to represent darkness. Black and white have o ...
workers which had lyrical themes and technical elements in common with the blues.
[Southern, p. 334]
African roots
There are few characteristics common to all blues, as the genre takes its shape from the distinctive attributes of each individual performance.
Some characteristics, however, were present prior to the creation of the modern blues, and are common to most styles of
African American music
African-American music is an umbrella term covering a diverse range of music and musical genres largely developed by African Americans and their culture. Their origins are in musical forms that first came to be due to the condition of slaver ...
. The earliest blues-like music was a "functional expression, rendered in a
call-and-response
Call and response is a form of interaction between a speaker and an audience in which the speaker's statements ("calls") are punctuated by responses from the listeners. This form is also used in music, where it falls under the general category of ...
style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure". This pre-blues music was adapted from the field shouts and hollers performed during slave times, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content".
![Gambia kora havard](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Gambia_kora_havard.jpg)
Many of these blues elements, such as the call-and-response format, can be traced back to the
music of Africa
Given the vastness of the African continent, its music is diverse, with regions and nations having many distinct musical traditions. African music includes the genres amapiano, Jùjú, Fuji, Afrobeat, Highlife, Makossa, Kizomba, and others. The ...
. The use of
melisma
Melisma ( grc-gre, μέλισμα, , ; from grc, , melos, song, melody, label=none, plural: ''melismata'') is the singing of a single syllable of text while moving between several different notes in succession. Music sung in this style is referr ...
and a wavy, nasal intonation also suggests a connection between the music of West and Central Africa and the blues. The belief that blues is historically derived from the
West African music
The music of West Africa has a significant history, and its varied sounds reflect the wide range of influences from the area's regions and historical periods.
Traditional West African music varies due to the regional separation of West Africa, y ...
including from
Mali
Mali (; ), officially the Republic of Mali,, , ff, 𞤈𞤫𞤲𞥆𞤣𞤢𞥄𞤲𞤣𞤭 𞤃𞤢𞥄𞤤𞤭, Renndaandi Maali, italics=no, ar, جمهورية مالي, Jumhūriyyāt Mālī is a landlocked country in West Africa. Mali ...
is reflected in
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese ( , ; born November 17, 1942) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter and actor. Scorsese emerged as one of the major figures of the New Hollywood era. He is the recipient of List of awards and nominatio ...
’s often quoted characterization of
Ali Farka Touré
Ali Ibrahim "Ali Farka" Touré (31 October 1939 – 6 March 2006) was a Malian singer and multi-instrumentalist, and one of the African continent's most internationally renowned musicians. His music blends traditional Malian music and its deriv ...
’s tradition as constituting "the DNA of the blues".
Perhaps the most compelling African instrument that is a predecessor to an African-American instrument is the "
Akonting
The ''akonting'' (, or ''ekonting'' in French transliteration) is the folk lute of the Jola people, found in Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau in West Africa. It is a banjo-like instrument with a skin-headed gourd body, two long melody strings ...
", a folk lute of the
Jola tribe of
Senegambia
The Senegambia (other names: Senegambia region or Senegambian zone,Barry, Boubacar, ''Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade'', (Editors: David Anderson, Carolyn Brown; trans. Ayi Kwei Armah; contributors: David Anderson, American Council of Le ...
. It is a clear predecessor to the American
banjo
The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, and usually made of plastic, or occasionally animal skin. Early forms of the instrument were fashi ...
in its playing style, the construction of the instrument itself and in its social role as a folk instrument. The
Kora is played by a professional caste of praise singers for the rich and aristocracy (called
griot
A griot (; ; Manding: jali or jeli (in N'Ko: , ''djeli'' or ''djéli'' in French spelling); Serer: kevel or kewel / okawul; Wolof: gewel) is a West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, and/or musician.
The griot is a repos ...
s or jalis) and is not considered folk music.
Jola music may not have been influenced much by
North African
North Africa, or Northern Africa is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region, and it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of Mauritania in ...
/
Middle Eastern music
The various nations of the region include the Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East, the Iranian traditions of Persia, the Jewish music of Israel and the diaspora, Armenian music, Kurdish music, Azeri Music, the varied traditions of Cypriot ...
, which may point to African American music not being, according to
Sam Charters
Sam, SAM or variants may refer to:
Places
* Sam, Benin
* Sam, Boulkiemdé, Burkina Faso
* Sam, Bourzanga, Burkina Faso
* Sam, Kongoussi, Burkina Faso
* Sam, Iran
* Sam, Teton County, Idaho, United States, a populated place
People and fictio ...
, related to kora music. The music of the Akonting and that played by on the banjo by elder African-American banjo players, even into the mid 20th century is easily identified as being very similar. The akonting is perhaps the most important and concrete link that exists between African and African-American music.
While the findings of Kubik and others clearly attest to the essential Africanness of many essential aspects of blues expression, studies by
Willie Ruff
Willie Henry Ruff Jr. (born September 1, 1931) is an American jazz musician, specializing in the French horn and double bass, and a music scholar and educator, primarily as a Yale professor from 1971 to 2017.
Personal life
He was born in Sheffi ...
and others have situated the origin of "black" spiritual music inside enslaved peoples' exposure to their masters'
Hebridean
The Hebrides (; gd, Innse Gall, ; non, Suðreyjar, "southern isles") are an archipelago off the west coast of the Scottish mainland. The islands fall into two main groups, based on their proximity to the mainland: the Inner Hebrides, Inner a ...
-originated gospels. African-American economist and historian
Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell (; born June 30, 1930) is an American author, economist, political commentator and academic who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV and radio—he becam ...
also notes that the southern, black, ex-slave population was acculturated to a considerable degree by and among their Scots-Irish "
redneck
''Redneck'' is a derogatory term chiefly, but not exclusively, applied to white Americans perceived to be crass and unsophisticated, closely associated with rural whites of the Southern United States.Harold Wentworth, and Stuart Berg Flexner, '' ...
" neighbors. Additionally, there are theories that the four-beats-per-measure structure of the blues might share its origins with the Native American tradition of
pow wow
A powwow (also pow wow or pow-wow) is a gathering with dances held by many Native American and First Nations communities. Powwows today allow Indigenous people to socialize, dance, sing, and honor their cultures. Powwows may be private or pu ...
drumming.
Other African influence
The historian
Sylviane Diouf
Sylviane Anna Diouf is a historian and curator of the African diaspora. She is a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University and a member of the Scientific Committee of the International Coalition of Site ...
and
ethnomusicologist
Ethnomusicology is the study of music from the cultural and social aspects of the people who make it. It encompasses distinct theoretical and methodical approaches that emphasize cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dim ...
Gerhard Kubik
Gerhard Kubik (born 10 December 1934) is an Austrian music ethnologist from Vienna. He studied ethnology, musicology and African languages at the University of Vienna. He published his doctoral dissertation in 1971 and achieved habilitation in 1 ...
identify
Islamic music
Islamic music may refer to religious music, as performed in Islamic public services or private devotions, or more generally to musical traditions of the Muslim world. The heartland of Islam is the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, W ...
as an influence on blues music.
Diouf notes a striking resemblance between the
Islamic call to prayer (originating from
Bilal ibn Rabah, a famous
Abyssinian African Muslim in the early 7th century) and 19th-century
field holler
The field holler or field call is mostly a historical type of vocal work song sung by field slaves in the United States (and later by African American forced laborers accused of violating vagrancy laws) to accompany their tasked work, to communic ...
music, noting that both have similar lyrics praising God, melody, note changes, "words that seem to quiver and shake" in the vocal chords, dramatic changes in
musical scale
In music theory, a scale is any set of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch. A scale ordered by increasing pitch is an ascending scale, and a scale ordered by decreasing pitch is a descending scale.
Often, especially in the ...
s, and nasal
intonation. She attributes the origins of field holler music to
African Muslim slaves who accounted for an estimated 30% of African slaves in America. According to Kubik, "the vocal style of many blues singers using
melisma
Melisma ( grc-gre, μέλισμα, , ; from grc, , melos, song, melody, label=none, plural: ''melismata'') is the singing of a single syllable of text while moving between several different notes in succession. Music sung in this style is referr ...
, wavy intonation, and so forth is a heritage of that large region of
West Africa
West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Maurit ...
that had been in contact with the
Islamic world
The terms Muslim world and Islamic world commonly refer to the Islamic community, which is also known as the Ummah. This consists of all those who adhere to the religious beliefs and laws of Islam or to societies in which Islam is practiced. In ...
via the Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries."
There was particularly a significant trans-Saharan cross-fertilization between the musical traditions of the Maghreb and the
Sahel
The Sahel (; ar, ساحل ' , "coast, shore") is a region in North Africa. It is defined as the ecoclimatic and biogeographic realm of transition between the Sahara to the north and the Sudanian savanna to the south. Having a hot semi-arid c ...
.
There was a difference in the music performed by the predominantly Muslim
Sahelian
The Sahel (; ar, ساحل ' , "coast, shore") is a region in North Africa. It is defined as the ecoclimatic and biogeographic realm of transition between the Sahara to the north and the Sudanian savanna to the south. Having a hot semi-arid cli ...
slaves and the predominantly non-Muslim slaves from coastal West Africa and
Central Africa
Central Africa is a subregion of the African continent comprising various countries according to different definitions. Angola, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, ...
. The Sahelian Muslim slaves generally favoured wind and string instruments and solo singing, whereas the non-Muslim slaves generally favored drums and group chants. Plantation owners who feared revolt outlawed drums and group chants, but allowed the Sahelian slaves to continue singing and playing their wind and string instruments, which the plantation owners found less threatening.
Among the instruments introduced by Muslim African slaves were ancestors of the
banjo
The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, and usually made of plastic, or occasionally animal skin. Early forms of the instrument were fashi ...
.
While many were pressured to convert to Christianity, the Sahelian slaves were allowed to maintain their musical traditions, adapting their skills to instruments such as the
fiddle
A fiddle is a bowed string musical instrument, most often a violin. It is a colloquial term for the violin, used by players in all genres, including classical music. Although in many cases violins and fiddles are essentially synonymous, th ...
and
guitar
The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected stri ...
. Some were also allowed to perform at balls for slave-holders, allowing the migration of their music across the Deep South.
Influence of field hollers
Field holler
The field holler or field call is mostly a historical type of vocal work song sung by field slaves in the United States (and later by African American forced laborers accused of violating vagrancy laws) to accompany their tasked work, to communic ...
music, also known as Levee Camp Holler music, was an early form of
African American music
African-American music is an umbrella term covering a diverse range of music and musical genres largely developed by African Americans and their culture. Their origins are in musical forms that first came to be due to the condition of slaver ...
, described in the 19th century.
Field hollers laid the foundations for the blues,
spirituals
Spirituals (also known as Negro spirituals, African American spirituals, Black spirituals, or spiritual music) is a genre of Christian music that is associated with Black Americans, which merged sub-Saharan African cultural heritage with the e ...
, and eventually
rhythm and blues
Rhythm and blues, frequently abbreviated as R&B or R'n'B, is a genre of popular music that originated in African-American communities in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly ...
.
Field hollers, cries and hollers of the
slaves
Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
and later
sharecropper
Sharecropping is a legal arrangement with regard to agricultural land in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land.
Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range ...
s working in cotton fields, prison
chain gangs
A chain gang or road gang is a group of prisoners chained together to perform menial or physically challenging work as a form of punishment. Such punishment might include repairing buildings, building roads, or clearing land. The system was not ...
, railway gangs (
Gandy dancer
Gandy dancer is a slang term used for early railroad workers in the United States, more formally referred to as "section hands", who laid and maintained railroad tracks in the years before the work was done by machines.
The British equivalents o ...
s) or turpentine camps were the precursor to the
call and response
Call and response is a form of interaction between a speaker and an audience in which the speaker's statements ("calls") are punctuated by responses from the listeners. This form is also used in music, where it falls under the general category of ...
of African American spirituals and
gospel music
Gospel music is a traditional genre of Christian music, and a cornerstone of Christian media. The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of gospel music varies according to culture and social context. Gospel music is com ...
, to
jug bands
A jug band is a band employing a jug player and a mix of conventional and homemade instruments. These homemade instruments are ordinary objects adapted to or modified for making sound, like the washtub bass, washboard, spoons, bones, stovepipe, ...
,
minstrel shows
The minstrel show, also called minstrelsy, was an American form of racist theatrical entertainment developed in the early 19th century.
Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that depicted people spe ...
,
stride piano
Stride jazz piano, often shortened to stride, is a jazz piano style that arose from ragtime players. Prominent stride pianists include James P. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Willie "the Lion" Smith, Fats Waller, Luckey Roberts, Mrs Mills a ...
, and ultimately to the blues,
rhythm and blues
Rhythm and blues, frequently abbreviated as R&B or R'n'B, is a genre of popular music that originated in African-American communities in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly ...
,
jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...
and
African American music
African-American music is an umbrella term covering a diverse range of music and musical genres largely developed by African Americans and their culture. Their origins are in musical forms that first came to be due to the condition of slaver ...
in general.
[ ]Sylviane Diouf
Sylviane Anna Diouf is a historian and curator of the African diaspora. She is a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University and a member of the Scientific Committee of the International Coalition of Site ...
and Gerhard Kubik
Gerhard Kubik (born 10 December 1934) is an Austrian music ethnologist from Vienna. He studied ethnology, musicology and African languages at the University of Vienna. He published his doctoral dissertation in 1971 and achieved habilitation in 1 ...
have traced the origins of field hollers to African Muslim slaves, who were influenced by the Islamic music
Islamic music may refer to religious music, as performed in Islamic public services or private devotions, or more generally to musical traditions of the Muslim world. The heartland of Islam is the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, W ...
al tradition of West Africa (see '' African roots'' above).
Influence of spirituals
The most important American antecedent of the blues was the spiritual, a form of religious song with its roots in the camp meeting
The camp meeting is a form of Protestant Christian religious service originating in England and Scotland as an evangelical event in association with the communion season. It was held for worship, preaching and communion on the American frontier d ...
s of the Great Awakening
Great Awakening refers to a number of periods of religious revival in American Christian history. Historians and theologians identify three, or sometimes four, waves of increased religious enthusiasm between the early 18th century and the late ...
of the early 19th century. Spirituals were a passionate song form, that "convey(ed) to listeners the same feeling of rootlessness and misery" as the blues. Spirituals, however, were less specifically concerning the performer, instead about the general loneliness of mankind, and were more figurative than direct in their lyrics.[Southern, p. 333] Despite these differences, the two forms are similar enough that they can not be easily separated — many spirituals would probably have been called ''blues'' had that word been in wide use at the time.
Social and economic aspects
The social and economic reasons for the appearance of the blues are not fully known. Blues has evolved from an unaccompanied vocal music of poor black laborers into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States. African American work song
A work song is a piece of music closely connected to a form of work, either sung while conducting a task (usually to coordinate timing) or a song linked to a task which might be a connected narrative, description, or protest song.
Definitions and ...
s were an important precursor to the modern blues; these included the songs sung by laborers like stevedores
A stevedore (), also called a longshoreman, a docker or a dockworker, is a waterfront manual laborer who is involved in loading and unloading ships, trucks, trains or airplanes.
After the shipping container revolution of the 1960s, the number o ...
and roustabout
Roustabout (Australia/New Zealand English: rouseabout) is an occupational term. Traditionally, it referred to a worker with broad-based, non-specific skills. In particular, it was used to describe show or circus workers who handled materials ...
s, and the field hollers
The field holler or field call is mostly a historical type of vocal work song sung by field slaves in the United States (and later by African American forced laborers accused of violating vagrancy laws) to accompany their tasked work, to communi ...
and " shouts" of slaves. The first appearance of the blues is not well defined and is often dated between 1870 and 1900, a period that coincides with the emancipation
Emancipation generally means to free a person from a previous restraint or legal disability. More broadly, it is also used for efforts to procure economic and social rights, political rights or equality, often for a specifically disenfranchis ...
of the slaves and the transition from slavery to sharecropping and small-scale agricultural production in the southern United States.
Several scholars characterize the early 1900s development of blues music as a move from group performances to a more individualized style. They argue that the development of the blues is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the slaves. According to Lawrence Levine, "there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the popularity of Booker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to several presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American c ...
's teachings, and the rise of the blues." Levine states that "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."
An important reason for the lack of certain knowledge about the origins of the blues is the earliest blues musicians' tendency to wander through communities, leaving little or no record of precisely what sort of music they played or where it came from. Blues was generally regarded as lower-class music, unfit for documentation, study or enjoyment by the upper- and middle-classes
Blues around 1900
Blue note
In jazz and blues, a blue note is a note that—for expressive purposes—is sung or played at a slightly different pitch from standard. Typically the alteration is between a quartertone and a semitone, but this varies depending on the musical co ...
s pre-date their use in blues. English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 18751 September 1912) was a British composer and conductor.
Of mixed-race birth, Coleridge-Taylor achieved such success that he was referred to by white New York musicians as the "African Mahler" when ...
's "A Negro Love Song", from his ''The African Suite for Piano'' composed in 1898, contains blue third and seventh notes.
African American composer W. C. Handy
William Christopher Handy (November 16, 1873 – March 28, 1958) was an American composer and musician who referred to himself as the Father of the Blues. Handy was one of the most influential songwriters in the United States. One of many musici ...
wrote in his autobiography of the experience of sleeping on a train traveling through (or stopping at the station of) Tutwiler, Mississippi
Tutwiler is a town in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, United States. The population at the 2010 census was 3,550.
History
In 1899, Tom Tutwiler, a civil engineer for a local railroad, made his headquarters seven miles northwest of Sumner. The ...
around 1903, and being awakened by:
... a lean, loose-jointed Negro who had commenced plucking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. ... The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly... The singer repeated the line ("Going' where the Southern cross' the Dog") three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.
Handy had mixed feelings about this music, which he regarded as rather primitive and monotonous, but he used the "Southern cross' the Dog" line in his 1914 " Yellow Dog Rag", which he retitled "Yellow Dog Blues" after the term blues became popular. "Yellow Dog" was the nickname of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad
The Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad (Y&MV) was incorporated in 1882 and was part of the Illinois Central Railroad system (IC). Construction began in Jackson, Mississippi, and continued to Yazoo City, Mississippi. The line was later expanded ...
.
Blues later adopted elements from the "Ethiopian (here, meaning "black
Black is a color which results from the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, without hue, like white and grey. It is often used symbolically or figuratively to represent darkness. Black and white have o ...
") airs" of minstrel show
The minstrel show, also called minstrelsy, was an American form of racist theatrical entertainment developed in the early 19th century.
Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that depicted people spe ...
s and Negro spiritual
Spirituals (also known as Negro spirituals, African American spirituals, Black spirituals, or spiritual music) is a genre of Christian music that is associated with Black Americans, which merged sub-Saharan African cultural heritage with the e ...
s, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment. The style also was closely related to ragtime
Ragtime, also spelled rag-time or rag time, is a musical style that flourished from the 1890s to 1910s. Its cardinal trait is its syncopated or "ragged" rhythm. Ragtime was popularized during the early 20th century by composers such as Scott ...
, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music".
Since the 1890s, the American sheet music
Sheet music is a handwritten or printed form of musical notation that uses List of musical symbols, musical symbols to indicate the pitches, rhythms, or chord (music), chords of a song or instrumental Musical composition, musical piece. Like ...
publishing industry had produced a great deal of ragtime
Ragtime, also spelled rag-time or rag time, is a musical style that flourished from the 1890s to 1910s. Its cardinal trait is its syncopated or "ragged" rhythm. Ragtime was popularized during the early 20th century by composers such as Scott ...
music. The first published ragtime song to include a 12-bar section was "One o' Them Things!" in 1904. Written by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, it was published in St. Louis, Missouri, by Jos. Plachet and Son. Another early rag/blues mix was "I Got the Blues
"I Got the Blues" is a song recorded by the Rolling Stones. Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, it appears on their 1971 album ''Sticky Fingers''. It is a slow-paced, bluesy song featuring languid guitars with heavy blues and soul influen ...
" published in 1908 by Antonio Maggio of New Orleans
In a long interview conducted by Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax (; January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a musician himself, as well as a folklorist, archivist, writer, sch ...
in 1938, Jelly Roll Morton
Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (later Morton; c. September 20, 1890 – July 10, 1941), known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American ragtime and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer. Morton was jazz's first arranger, proving that a gen ...
recalled that the first blues he had heard, probably around 1900, was played by a singer and prostitute, Mamie Desdunes, in Garden District, New Orleans
The Garden District is a Neighborhoods in New Orleans, neighborhood of the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. A subdistrict of the Central City/Garden District Area, its boundaries as defined by the New Orleans City Planning Commiss ...
. Morton sang the blues: "Can’t give me a dollar, give me a lousy dime/ You can’t give me a dollar, give me a lousy dime/ Just to feed that hungry man of mine". The interview was released as ''The Complete Library of Congress Recordings
''Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings'' is a 2005 box set of recordings from jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton. The set spans 128 tracks over eight CDs. It won two Grammy Awards in 2006, Best Historical Album and Best Album ...
''.
Continued development of the blues in the 1910s
In 1912, the sheet music industry published another blues composition—"Dallas Blues
"Dallas Blues", written by Hart Wand, is an early blues song, first published in 1912. It has been called the first true blues tune ever published. However, two other 12-bar blues had been published earlier: Anthony Maggio's "I Got the Blues" in ...
" by Hart A. Wand
Hart Ancker Wand (March 3, 1887 – August 9, 1960), was an American early fiddler and bandleader from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He was of German extraction. In the musical world he is chiefly noted for publishing the " Dallas Blues" in March 1912 ...
of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Oklahoma City (), officially the City of Oklahoma City, and often shortened to OKC, is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The county seat of Oklahoma County, it ranks 20th among United States cities in population, and ...
. Two other blues-like compositions, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley was a collection of music publishers and songwriters in New York City that dominated the popular music of the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It originally referred to a specific place: West 28th Street ...
adoption of blues elements, were also published in 1912: "Baby Seals' Blues" by Baby Franklin Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews
Artie Matthews (November 15, 1888 – October 25, 1958) was an American songwriter, pianist, and ragtime composer.
Artie Matthews was born in Braidwood, Illinois; his family moved to Springfield, Illinois in his youth. He learned to play p ...
) and "Memphis Blues
The Memphis blues is a style of blues music created from the 1910s to the 1930s by musicians in the Memphis area, such as Frank Stokes, Sleepy John Estes, Furry Lewis and Memphis Minnie. The style was popular in vaudeville and medicine shows a ...
", another ragtime arrangement with a single 12-bar section, by W. C. Handy
William Christopher Handy (November 16, 1873 – March 28, 1958) was an American composer and musician who referred to himself as the Father of the Blues. Handy was one of the most influential songwriters in the United States. One of many musici ...
. Also in 1912 (on November 9), another song, "The Blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African- ...
", was copyrighted by LeRoy "Lasses" White, but not actually published until 1913.
Handy was a formally trained musician, composer and arranger who helped to popularize the blues by transcribing and orchestrating blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers. He became a popular and prolific composer, and billed himself as the "Father of the Blues"; however, his compositions can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Afro-Cuban
Afro-Cubans or Black Cubans are Cubans of West African ancestry. The term ''Afro-Cuban'' can also refer to historical or cultural elements in Cuba thought to emanate from this community and the combining of native African and other cultural ele ...
habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime; Handy's signature work was the ''St. Louis Blues
The St. Louis Blues are a professional ice hockey team based in St. Louis. The Blues compete in the National Hockey League (NHL) as a member of the Central Division in the Western Conference. The franchise was founded in 1967 as one of the s ...
''.
Songs from this period had many different structures. A testimony of those times can be found for instance in Henry Thomas
Henry Jackson Thomas Jr. (born September 9, 1971) is an American actor. He began his career as a child actor and had a lead role in the film '' E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial'' (1982), for which he won a Young Artist Award and received Golden Globe ...
's recordings. However, the twelve-, eight-bar, or sixteen-bar structure based on tonic, subdominant
In music, the subdominant is the fourth tonal degree () of the diatonic scale. It is so called because it is the same distance ''below'' the tonic as the dominant is ''above'' the tonicin other words, the tonic is the dominant of the subdomina ...
and dominant chord
In music, the dominant is the fifth scale degree () of the diatonic scale. It is called the ''dominant'' because it is second in importance to the first scale degree, the tonic. In the movable do solfège system, the dominant note is sung as "So ...
s became the most common. Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the lowered third and dominant seventh
In music theory, a dominant seventh chord, or major minor seventh chord, is a seventh chord, usually built on the fifth degree of the major scale, and composed of a root, major third, perfect fifth, and minor seventh. Thus it is a major triad tog ...
(so-called blue note
In jazz and blues, a blue note is a note that—for expressive purposes—is sung or played at a slightly different pitch from standard. Typically the alteration is between a quartertone and a semitone, but this varies depending on the musical co ...
s) of the associated major scale
The major scale (or Ionian mode) is one of the most commonly used musical scales, especially in Western music. It is one of the diatonic scales. Like many musical scales, it is made up of seven notes: the eighth duplicates the first at double i ...
. The standard 12-bar blues form is noted in uncorroborated oral histories
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people wh ...
as appearing communities throughout the region along the lower Mississippi River
The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it f ...
during the decade of the 1900s (and performed in at least since 1908). One of these early sites of blues evolution was along Beale Street
Beale Street is a street in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, which runs from the Mississippi River to East Street, a distance of approximately . It is a significant location in the city's history, as well as in the history of blues music. Today, th ...
in Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis is a city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the seat of Shelby County in the southwest part of the state; it is situated along the Mississippi River. With a population of 633,104 at the 2020 U.S. census, Memphis is the second-mos ...
. However, author Eileen Southern
Eileen Jackson Southern (February 19, 1920 – October 13, 2002) was an American musicologist, researcher, author, and teacher. Southern's research focused on black American musical styles, musicians, and composers; she also published on ea ...
has pointed out several contrasting statements by old-time musicians. She cites Eubie Blake
James Hubert "Eubie" Blake (February 7, 1887 – February 12, 1983) was an American pianist and composer of ragtime, jazz, and popular music. In 1921, he and his long-time collaborator Noble Sissle wrote ''Shuffle Along'', one of the first Bro ...
as saying "Blues in Baltimore? Why, Baltimore is the blues!" and Bunk Johnson
Willie Gary "Bunk" Johnson (December 27, 1879 – July 7, 1949) was an American prominent jazz trumpeter in New Orleans. Johnson gave the year of his birth as 1879, although there is speculation that he may have been younger by as much as a dec ...
as claiming that the blues was around in his childhood, in the 1880s.
Growth of the blues (1920s onward)
One of the first professional blues singers was Gertrude "Ma" Rainey
Gertrude "Ma" Rainey ( Pridgett; April 26, 1886 – December 22, 1939) was an American blues singer and influential early blues recording artist. Dubbed the "Mother of the Blues", she bridged earlier vaudeville and the authentic expression of ...
, who claimed to have coined the term ''blues''. Classic female urban or vaudeville
Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition ...
blues singers were popular in the 1920s, among them Mamie Smith
Mamie Smith (née Robinson; May 26, 1891 – September 16, 1946) was an American vaudeville singer, dancer, pianist, and actress. As a vaudeville singer she performed in multiple styles, including jazz and blues. In 1920, she entered blues histor ...
, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith (April 15, 1894 – September 26, 1937) was an American blues singer widely renowned during the Jazz Age. Nicknamed the " Empress of the Blues", she was the most popular female blues singer of the 1930s. Inducted into the Rock and ...
, and Victoria Spivey
Victoria Regina Spivey (October 15, 1906 – October 3, 1976), sometimes known as Queen Victoria, was an American blues singer and songwriter. During a recording career that spanned 40 years, from 1926 to the mid-1960s, she worked with Louis A ...
. Mamie Smith, more a vaudeville performer than a blues artist, was the first African-American to record a blues in 1920; her "Crazy Blues" sold over 75,000 copies in its first month.
The musical forms and styles that are now considered the "blues" as well as modern "country music
Country (also called country and western) is a genre of popular music that originated in the Southern and Southwestern United States in the early 1920s. It primarily derives from blues, church music such as Southern gospel and spirituals, ...
" arose in the same regions 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
African-American music is an umbrella term covering a diverse range of music and musical genres largely developed by African Americans and their culture. Their origins are in musical forms that first came to be due to the condition of slaver ...
" and "hillbilly music
Hillbilly is a term (often derogatory) for people who dwell in rural, mountainous areas in the United States, primarily in southern Appalachia and the Ozarks. The term was later used to refer to people from other rural and mountainous areas west ...
" to sell music by blacks for blacks and by whites for 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, pp. 44-47 ''As marketing categories, designations like race and ]hillbilly
Hillbilly is a term (often derogatory) for people who dwell in rural, mountainous areas in the United States, primarily in southern Appalachia and the Ozarks. The term was later used to refer to people from other rural and mountainous areas west ...
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 claims that ''artists were sometimes listed in the wrong racial category in record company catalogues.''
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Origins Of The Blues
Blues
Blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...