Introduction
Blues ruled all contemporary music, addressing sentimental souls worldwide.
But it was also an expression of Black American pain.
It arrived in the late 19th century and laid the foundations for rock, jazz and R & B.
Forgotten founders: Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Thornton sang with rapacity and was a shaggy, uncontrollable presence on the stage.
Tharpe’s guitar and gospel baggage shaped early rock and roll.
Blind Lemon Jefferson’s guitar technique also left a very distinct mark.
Scores of emulators listened to his slippery, complex finger-picking over the coming decades.
Perhaps the most innovative of these was Lonnie Johnson who mixed blues and jazz.
Their ongoing experimenting with the form allowed blues to become local and mainstream music.
Those creators and their ilk matter for how blues came to be.
They are key to how a uniquely Southern working-class, African-American music genre acquired wider appeal and gained cultural standing.
The Origins of Blues Music
Blues music dates back to the late 19th century.
It originated in the African American communities in the Deep South.
Sharecroppers and plantation workers sang about hardship using this form of music.
Blues tunes were European in structure, but the rhythms and melodies came straight from African musical forms.
The prevalence of call-and-response follows a similar pattern.
Some work songs and spirituals also became blues songs, whose lyrics often spoke of grief and hope.
Within the blues, simple chord progressions and rhythms existed in the form of repetitive patterns.
The guitar, harmonica, and piano – now familiar blues instruments – became relevant in this decade.
W C Handy and Robert Johnson were also essential figures, ushering in an age of mass exposure across America.
Blues music narrated stories that happened in ordinary people’s daily lives.
Various themes covered love, loss, and race struggle in different poems.
The lyrics often demonstrated a private or intimate life happened.
Through the Great Migration, blues music moved north into urban cities.
Chicago and Detroit became blues hotbeds.
Blues music went on to inform many styles, from jazz to rock ’n’ roll.
The enduring legacy of the blues speaks to creativity and ingenuity in the toughest of circumstances.
It is a genre that refuses to die.
The Pioneers of Blues
Blues music is a fixture of African-American culture and history.
W C Handy, known as the ‘Father’ of the Blues, wrote and played blues music rules that became mainstream.
His ‘St Louis Blues’ is one of the most famous blues songs.
‘The Mother of the Blues’(Ma Rainey) was one of the first female blues singers.
She was also among the first to show the blues for the masses.
Many have been inspired by her. Her voice, her physicality – re-invented the blues.
Bessie Smith, the ‘Empress of the Blues’, was another.
Her recordings from the 1920s and ’30s opened blues to more people.
She was one of the highest-paid black musicians of her generation.
All those pioneers created an artistic language that sang the struggles and celebrations of black existence.
Many blues songs focus on love, whether smitten or broken.
The music also speaks of struggle and hard work.
W C Handy’s songs inscribed the blues form.
Ma Rainey’s performances captured its raw emotion.
Bessie Smith’s recordings enabled it to transfer to the forefront of popular music.
Together they gave birth to generations of blues artists who would then leave a mark on later music.
Brutal, visceral blues emerged from men like Beale Street Sheiks, Peetie Wheatstraw, and Big Joe Williams.
The list goes on and on.
This style found incarnation in Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B B King, and continues today.
These roughnecks nurtured blues in the US, and grew it into an important American genre.
Blues Instrumentalists
Blues instrumentalists are integral to the blues effect, atmosphere, and shape, and so they are very important.
The guitarists really bring in the genuine blues.
The blues harp, or harmonicas, also contributes significantly.
With a bit of fanfare, the piano adds its unique sound.
This is the most widely used instrument in blues.
The guitarist is the glue of it all.
They give the rhythm, melody, and blues riff that make everything come together.
One of the only instruments as agile as it is expressive with rhythm as it is with soul solos.
Great guitar players like Robert Johnson are recorded in the dusty juke-joints of the blues.
They use layers of fingerpicking and two-handed slide.
This technique truly communicates to the audience what a song means.
‘Cross Road Blues’ and ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ show a grim portrait.
Many of Johnson’s songs show a man absorbed in the demonic souls of Satan inhabiting his blues-filled world.
The harmonica produces a rasping shriek.
It is often set in beautiful, dissonant counterpoint with the cries of the human voice.
The solo instrument is inscrutably simple in its fine-grained aluminum build.
Still, it is demanding to learn.
The pioneers of its playing, from Sonny Boy Williamson II to Little Walter, introduced new genres of bending and amplifying.
They developed techniques that orchestrated the instrument’s sound in blues bands.
The piano is favored it because of its marbled quality.
The wider range and opportunity for complex harmonies means that the piano makes space for fancy and complicated patting.
Big Bill Broonzy was a pioneer here.
He was a guitarist who particularly imprinted when he stuck pieces of piano language into his last recordings.
He seems a first contact point between the history of piano blues and that of the electric guitar.
The ‘pure’ shape survived in Otis Spann.
His Chicago blues relied on piano, not guitar.
He was a key figure for his bandmaster, Muddy Waters.
Bottom line: Blues musicians—and especially progressive instrumentalists (guitarists, harmonica players, pianists)—are key to the signature sound.
Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy, old-time heroes, created a musical legacy that continues to reverberate to this day.
The Role of Women in Blues
For the history of blues, legions of women played a major role in its advent.
Their critical contribution is mainly gone into the background.
Their achievements are often subsumed by their men.
Memphis Minnie was one of the first female singers and guitarists in the blues.
She was Lizzie Douglas.
She was born in 1897 and recorded over 200 songs.
This was during a career from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Minnie was an experimental guitarist; others would say she had inspired their own playing.
The New York Times wrote of her when she died in 1973.
They noted she ‘probably influenced and inspired country blues more than any other woman musician’.
Many of her songs were about women’s independence and strength.
Another singer/guitarist of note was sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Because of her use of gospel, blues, and jazz, she was dubbed ‘the Godmother of Rock and Roll. ‘
She gave concerts a certain spark and gave rockers of the future a new form of electric guitar.
Thorpe had a circle of peers, then mostly male.
And so did Memphis Minnie.
Both were talented women and so imaginative.
They overcame great odds. And they were both fierce.
Memphis Minnie’s ‘Me and My Chauffeur Blues’ (1929) is something like a railway song about a love song.
She gets her grittiness on with the genre once again..
Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s gospel-blues collaboration ‘Strange Things Happening Every Day’ (1956) was one of the earliest gospel albums.
It made it to secular charts.
She recorded with Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington.
Both were mentors and muses to the next generations of musicians.
They gave future female blues players a template and shattered stereotypes.
They changed the musical course in the millennium because they couldn’t be suppressed and denied.
They still lie at the heart of how the blues evolved today.
On their behalf, we honor the work of women in the blues.
We celebrate their music.
We acknowledge the agency of difference and inclusion in the song.
The Producers and Promoters of the Blues
Blues music needs producers and promoters.
And its top impresario was John Hammond, who found Billie Holiday and Robert Johnson, among others.
Hammond’s work at Columbia Records was pivotal.
Another important one was Leonard Chess, the founder and his brother Philip, of Chicago’s Chess Records.
Chess sought blues artists, mostly. He signed Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and others. These records made Chicago a major blues destination.
Then there was Sam Phillips.
He almost by himself established Sun Records in Memphis.
He discovered, recorded, and released B B King, Howlin’ Wolf, and others.
His record-making skills altered the landscape of blues recording.
But another venerable promoter was Don Robey.
(Do not confuse him with the Australian singer/songwriter Donovan.)
He set up Duke and Peacock Records in Houston.
The label signed Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland and Junior Parker.
This brought blues into the mainstream.
The first of these was Ralph Peer, who field-recorded in the 1920s.
Peer recorded blues like Mamie Smith and Blind Lemon Jefferson.
The tapes helped create a link between the blues of the countryside and urban bazaars.
We never have had blues history without Bob Koester.
He was the blues history keeper.
He created Delmark Records in Chicago.
It was a label for traditional and contemporary blues.
He also ran Jazz Record Mart.
This was the all-too-important gathering point of klepto-blues fans.
Without their contribution, plucking occurred.
Recording and marketing happened as well.
The ‘American’ side of the blues equation would scarcely be called anything at all.
These producers and promoters are vital.
They form another ring in our jigsaw.
They worked to find and record blues boys and girls.
They helped them get out of Delta swamps and honkytonk clubs.
They moved into the business of sound.
Their work lives on, too
The Impact of Blues on Other Genres
Blues has been one of the most important influences on many forms of US music, including jazz, rock, and R‘&’B.
Blues had far-reaching and specific influences on jazz, creating an expressive musical language with improvisational techniques.
The 12-bar blues progression made a permanent home in jazz.
This resulted from the shift from folk to urban source material.
Greats like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington incorporated the blues vocabulary, which deepened the underlying emotional content of jazz.
Rock music was born in the 1950s.
It developed out of the blues.
The latter’s uncensored emotionality and characteristic licks became rock’s backbone.
Chuck Berry, who started the rock phenomenon in the US, borrowed heavily from it.
Elvis Presley did as well.
Then the British Invasion spread blues-infected innovations worldwide.
Bands like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were contemporaries.
Rhythm and Blues is so called because it descends directly from blues.
Its rhythms and vocal styles shaped the new genre.
It influenced both the sound and the artistic spirit of R&B.
This music bridged the gap between blues, gospel, and jazz.
Soul, later funk and later still hip-hop took many themes, and techniques from this R&B.
Blues exists as a style and as an emotional expression.
It is a collection of musical forms and a set of urban stories.
Above all, blues is a musical tradition full of innovative insights and extraordinary originality.
It was at the root of jazz, rock, and R&B.
The origins of American popular music lie in the South and in the blues.
They bear the mark of the African American experience.
The blues shaped many of our most important native musical forms.
It also captured the soul of our most famous export.
And those forms continue to be influenced by the blues to this day.
Blues is still with us.
Modern Unsung Heroes of the Blues
As millennial unsung blues heroes, keepers of the flame churn the old into cathartically new tunes.
They are hugely influential but very rarely celebrated.
There is a heat to his slide guitar and a soul to his voice.
It’s the Delta blues modernized.
His songwriting expresses his social awareness, which sets him free on stage.
Selwyn Birchwood and the band.
Samantha Fish brings a little rock to her bouncy, heartfelt blues.
Her guitar prowess and air-punching live shows prove that she’s an influence.
And her fans show her as a road warrior too.
Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram was a young blues singer.
He revived the art of blues with guitar magic.
Inside his hyperkinetic two-handed virtuoso swirl, there was a whiff of old masters, but he sounded already like himself.
And so the blues lives.
Handing the baton of extraordinary ability on to the next generation.
Ingram has become the best of the blues, and is barely in his 20s.
Even young gunslinger Jontavious Willis is masterful.
He is in love with the blues past.
He borrows some of the same modern elements artists of the past introduced to the blues.
Willis’s gravelly vocals and good guitar work makes him a standout.
And then there is this: Sugaray Rayford is one tough dummy of a crooner.
Rayford’s is greasy-chitlin-circuit soul-blues that was just raw and honest; it’d be idiotic to steer it to something modern.
And yet his music is evidence of just how much the blues has endured in Americana..
Tas Cru’s squeak comes through best in his description of his narrative lyrics.
His fire and sag guitar sounds stand out, and the scuffs on his fingers show for it.
It’s clear in his technical commitment to his gritty blues premise and manly commitment to keep the blues fresh.
For the best part, though only a fraction, these artists are changing the blues.
They’re fringe, but they’re what keep the tradition alive, and the blues moving’ on.
Today’s blues musicians feed and nourish the purity and virtuosity of this tradition.
They are re-opening the doors.
They pass on the blues spirit to others.
The blues will be changed and reinvigorated.
The Global Influence of Blues
‘Blues is a late-19th-century American form of music that is deeply African American.
It went far beyond the US. Blues music influenced pretty much all forms of popular music on earth at some time.
The blues from the early 20th century reached European circulation.
This was especially true in Britain, because collectors hunted down and issued historical records.
These records documented music that followed the diaspora of the Southern African world.
And in the Second World War, US troops sent the blues everywhere.
Blues’s gut-busting power captured listeners in Europe.
British groups in the 1960s started breaking into the blues.
They put together bands like The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds.
These bands created the blues-rock style (blues/rock/roll).
This style led to some of the greatest rock guitarists of all time, including Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page.
Blues also penetrated jazz.
It spread across the globe to listeners in Europe and Japan.
Jazz players adopted the blues scale and improvisatory techniques in their own sets.
Blues hit Africa during the 1960s and ’70s.
Musicians, including Ali Farka Touré, the ‘father of African blues,’ created a vibrant fusion by merging it with African music.
African blues still has the sound of a lost art, but also a blues edge.
But not only did blues influence rock, country and hip-hop.
Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and others were all based on the blues.
Singers from the country scene borrowed its narrative format and lyrics.
The blues tracks were taken up by hip-hop musicians who themselves took the emotions from it.
Contemporary blues matured in Japan.
It had its own fan club there, with mainstream players of American idioms like Shun Kikuta.
The scene included rising Australian and Canadian influences.
These influences are not uncommon in the cross-fertilizing of culture coming out of cities like London. New York and Paris.
Blues tradition was also part of the 1960s ‘primitivism’ cult.
It contributed to the growth of a festival culture that perpetuated the past of the genre.
Blues music is known the world over.
It originates from fields and juke joints.
It motivates people to step beyond their crises and sing their hearts out.
Conclusion
Too many blues heroes get too little credit.
These musicians laid the groundwork for the genres we know today.
Without that first tap on rhythmic chords, rock, jazz and soul wouldn’t be what they are today.
If they get their due, we will truly appreciate their deep roots.
Their contributions are vested deeply in the history of our human culture.
We extract music’s past when we add some frank, city-dwelling, streetwise elements like blues.
This allows us to hear some of the last-heard artists.
They are usually on the same beats at the same time but now with new ears.
And we too can keep the blues going.
So, if you know someone who loves music, encourage them to catch live blues.
Remind them to appreciate people of any stripe and open their wallets for music when they hear it raw.
Buy their CDs and pass on their story and songs to others.
You’ll keep the people who make beauty ticking over.
And wouldn’t that mean something,
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