Introduction
It’s an irreplaceable American musical form. Developed by African-Americans in the Deep South, the blues conveys sadness and joy, broken//ness and fortitude. Its distinctive rhythm incorporates drawn-out, aching melodies and heartfelt lyrics that get to the core of experiences. The blues is rooted in both the melancholic spirituals and the rhythms of work songs. It’s a music of stories. And it helped shape the framework of so much else in the great musical forms of American culture. The blues set the precedent for jazz, rock and R B. It lies at the heart of almost every modern genre.
You can’t fully understand American history without a grasp of the blues. Indeed, one argue that it encapsulates the hopes and aspirations, the rocks and the rapids, the life and death, and the grief and joy of the African American experience – and the universal human experience – as it has been lived throughout generations. Blues has changed the way we express ourselves artistically, inform the way we write and paint and draw, and has also become the code-talkers of our popular culture, our symbol of identification.
The aim of this blog post is to show the origins of the blues. We will see how it started and developed. Key figures and historical contexts will also be discovered to track down the blues in its prejudiced development. How about recovering it by seeing exactly what social disorders the core themes and styles of music relied on? Let’s see how it developed and spread out of the Southern United States.
In scrutinizing the origins of the blues, I came instead to appreciate more deeply what its legacy has endured. I came to appreciate its deep influence. I came to have a fuller understanding of the genre. I encourage you to do the same
African Roots of the Blues
Musically speaking, the roots of the blues lie in African traditions, where one finds polyrhythm, intricate melodies, and call-and-response structures. Musical life in Africa was situated at the heart of daily activity, where rhythm was perhaps used to propel camels, melodies expressed the drama of stories, and the speaking voice was captured and molded by hollowed-out log drums. The banjo, the kora, and the drum: Many African people depend on these instruments.
But the transatlantic slave trade from Africa to the Americas ripped apart the social fabric of African societies. Millions of African people were uprooted and sent to the Americas as enslaved labour, only to survive in conditions that reaped the greatest human toll from the modern world’s most merciless trade. African cultural forms, especially musical ones, survived the journey. African music’s fundamental rhythms and scales survived, as well as an expressive spirit that remnants of Africans managed to take with them to the Americas. European music mixed with these African elements churned out popular forms of music that are still listened to today.
African rhythms were more often polyrhythmic, with multiple rhythms played at the same time – and this partial rhythmic foundation came to underpin the syncopation of blues music. Pentatonic scales, durably common in African music, also became a recurring feature of the blues. This global backstory is important. Five-note scales sound distinctive. If you string together a few notes of a cramped blues scale – say, from F to A to C to E flat to F – that series of notes will strike you as typically bluesy.
A second African tradition was the concept of call-and-response, which, too, entered the blues. The give-and-take between leader and group informed the vocal and instrumental dynamics of the blues. The influence of African instruments is clear in early blues, too: the banjo, modelled on African designs, was adopted by enslaved people.
The blues was born with the blending of African musical elements and the travails of daily life in the Americas. It was the musical building blocks of African musical traditions that gave the blues its soul, its groove, and its blues. But, the African-American fusion of the blues also influenced the styles of music that came after it, transforming it over time into virtually all American musical genres. As a defining strand of African-American history and keeping spirit intact, the blues has survived to this day.
Work Songs and Spirituals
Everyday life for enslaved people revolved around music: work songs and spirituals offered consolation and a sense of agency; and hollers, also called field hollers, were individual spontaneous and expressive solo shouts, functioning as expressions of individual feelings while at work; work songs, by contrast, were used as coordinated group work, their simplicity and repetitiveness ensuring efficiency while setting the pace of labour; and bringing the workers together in their task. Lastly, spirituals also contributed to daily life, brimming piety, leaning on the narratives of the Christian faith, and expressing the hope for emancipation and redemption.
These songs served a variety of purposes within the enslaved community: they were vehicles of code and solidarity, suffering was written clearly in their lyrics, the songs narrated the everyday realities of enslavement and oppression, the songs explored the theme of hope, and resistance was central to many of the songs. Stories of escape were subtly incorporated into some of the spiritual songs.
Musically, the songs had distinctive characteristics. They were often call-and-response, as common in African traditions. They were often ‘full of blue notes’, tempered with emotional affect. They were often syncopated, ever-shifting rhythms that invited the listener in and kept the dance step moving upward, a quality interpreted by white Americans as a ‘good time’, a ‘tonal effect’. They were improvised, and that openness invited a sing-along quality that drew out private emotional stories and made allusions to political corruption in an engaging and personal way. The delivery was often a droning or repetitive sound. Songs ‘chopped in and out on a single tune’, garnering the title of ‘gin tunes’ because drinkers were encouraged to call out for more of the singers’ stories. Skilled singers used pentatonic scales common to African music traditions.
These musical practices provided the foundation for the blues. While the blues differed from them in significant ways, it inherited their emotional intensity, utilising the same scales, rhythms and the same strategies for conveying emotional expression. Not only did the blues intimate many of the same hardships and use the resilience to survive them, it adopted the twelve-bar format from these songs. It also imported and persevered the personal expression and emotional narratives of early songs.
Thus, it’s not difficult to see that work songs and spirituals were driving American musical development. They were art and they were also tools to survive; their echoes reverberate in modern musical genres today. Work songs and spirituals are the foundational elements of American musical heritage that led to jazz, gospel, and more.
Post-Emancipation Era and the Birth of the Blues
The Post-Emancipation Era was a transformative period in Southern US history. The liberations of African Americans opened up huge potential for empowerment for freedmen and women. But times were also hard. The destruction of the American Civil War left the South in bygone and deeply impoverished circumstances: war damage was everywhere. Plantations were gone.
Sharecropping became common amongst former slaves and poor whites as a way of splitting labour and power – farmers rented out plots of land to workers and provided supplies at high rates, splitting the proceeds. Sharecropping brought with it many traps, including working into debt and even deeper poverty. Farmers tended to charge outrageous prices, and today, these relationships are often still seen as an affront to workers’ rights.
But it was also a hard era socially. Racial prejudices far from disappeared and, as the new civil rights seeped in, society held on to deep-seated trauma and animosity. The KKK apparatus was extensively active in harassment and intimidation, while the Ku Klux Klan and others terrorized Black communities.
State-led and social crackdowns served as an array of structures to uphold White supremacy. Laws and codes were put into place to depress Black voting rights under the guise of social ordering, like black codes and Jim Crow laws; such laws enforced segregation and ordered places, including public transport and housing, through racially distinguishing cases.
The violent era of reconstruction and its splintering meant that a significant percentage of freed African Americans left the South in pursuit of better opportunities. In essence, it was a time of high social and economic flux, a movement of people across the Southern region, and a venture into newfound freedoms.
The struggle intensified in the aftermath of the end of slavery. Many chose to move, particularly in the Mississippi Delta area, where its rich soil offered incredible agricultural opportunities.
New towns and communities soon grew. Labor in the Delta cotton plantations was a desirable possibility. And from this, a form of music took on a new name and a sense of relevancy. At its most profound, the music defined the experience of Black life.
To Black Americans, this new genre was known as ‘The Blues’. Performed by troubadours, this captivating new form of music has gone on to define American music forever. It is the wellspring of jazz, rock and soul music. Featuring scratchy guitars and powerful harmonicas, music was performed amid troubling times.
Blues played a role in political expression as well. The wailing notes of the guitar and the haunting melancholy of the harmonica demonstrated both social critique and protests against the inequalities of the world. Field hollers of the slaves and the holiest of hymns seeped into blues lyrics with call-and-response patterns.
These music hybrids were ingenious. From the guitars, fiddles, and accordions to the harmonicas, variants of instruments from Lovers Rock formed an American identity. Thus, this period can be dubbed the ‘Post-Emancipation Era’
Early Blues Musicians and Musical Styles
Early blues, first recorded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is a blues form that emerged from African American communities in the Southern United States, involving pioneers like W C Handy, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, and others.
One of the most important figures in disseminating blues music to a wider, more general public was W C Handy – sometimes called the ‘Father of the Blues’. Handy was a classically trained musician who adapted his compositions to be influenced by the bluesy sounds he heard in Mississippi. His publication of songs like ‘Memphis Blues’ and ‘St Louis Blues’ standardised the form to make it more accessible to black and white audiences across the US.
Robert Johnson of Delta Blues fame drew on the very best of folk music, developing his singing and guitar-playing style into something more in his own very gifted hands. Johnson recorded just 29 songs before his death, but his work set the standard of what would become electric blues music and also served as a main source of inspiration for the granddaddy of all-electric rock music, Chuck Berry.
Johnson was a pioneer of ‘slide’ guitar and blues-folk composition, and it’s believed that he wrote the lyrics for many songs that have endured throughout music history, including ones we know and sing ourselves from time to time, like ‘Cross Road Blues’ and ‘Sweet Home Chicago’.
He developed an intensely identifiable fingerpicking style and a trademark vocal performance that was and still remains very close to our inflections of speech. The story of the man adds to the mystique of his music – that is, according to the tales of his contemporaries, Johnson sold his soul to the devil in play like a maestro
As a professional female blues artist, Ma Rainey was a pioneer, nicknamed the ‘Mother of the Blues’ and leading a group of amazing male musicians. With a loud and authoritative voice that dominated the stage, she recorded more than 100 songs throughout her career, including the ‘See See Rider Blues’ (1924-25) and ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’
When we listen to Rainey’s work, we get a sense of the authentic female blues experience, as well as the wide range of feelings and emotions of a woman singing about her life and the turmoil of her times. Her songs have inspired and paved the way for many other women artists in their quest to carve out a niche in blues.
Regional differences created different styles. Delta Blues of the Mississippi Delta features bare emotion, slide guitars, and simplicity, characterized by an untrained vocalist singing of difficulties and yearning over humble instrumentation and delta blues formats.
Blues in the Southeastern US (Piedmont Blues) is fingerpicked guitar licks and rhythms influenced by ragtime and country string bands.
In other regional styles, Chicago Blues, influenced by the ‘windy city’ includes overdriving the blues using all-electric guitars, amplifiers, and harps, ad blues guitar with slide inflection. Delta Blues (12-bar blues shape)The Texas Blues (here featuring a stylistic marvel, Blind Lemon Jefferson) infuses jazz and swing. Texas Blues (blues in d minor, aka 12-bar blues)In a way, blues from all over creates both regional uniqueness and a unifying and coherent ethnic element: African migration and expression.
Blues evolved through instruments and techniques that reflected its flexibility. Guitarists soloed on acoustic guitar, sometimes moved to fretted harmonica and some improvised simple stringed or woodwind instruments through the 1920s, century’s beginning. The electromagnetic pickup and amplifier that developed in the 1930s and ’40s changed the sound and instrumentation with greater volume and expressive tonality with bent strings, vibrato, and bottleneck slides. These styles and instruments in blues paved the way too for rock and roll and later modern music.
The Greqat Migration and Urban Blues
The Great Migration changed the demographics and culture of the US. Black people emigrated north from the South, looking for opportunities to earn more, and getting away from Jim Crow in the South. It began in 1916, and so many people moved, peak, between 1941 and 1950, and continued to 1970 when it ended. Six million people moved in this time. The population of Chicago, Detroit and New York went up a lot.
It emerged from the soil of southern rural America, where black Americans born in slavery sang work songs, spirituals, and field hollers and cultivated it from the seeds of their adapting voices. Travelling north on the railway lines running through the backwoods, people and sounds followed the same trajectory. But in urban America, the blues changed radically. City life seeped into music, giving rise to new themes, instruments, and influences. Musicians thrummed to the new industrial clatter of urban life.
These same clubs needed amplification to be heard over the din. Thus was born the early electric blues of the 1940s. Chicago served as a nerve center of this new electrified feel. The electric guitars (and harmonicas) became one of the major hallmarks of this Chicago blues style. Artists like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were pioneers of the electric blues, influencing the likes of rock ’n’ roll, R&B, and a lot of the rest of contemporary music. The electric blues made its way out of the confines of older racially segregated blues clubs, reaching to much broader audiences. A style that played a major role in the development of modern music around the world had begun.
This is why the Great Migration helped transform American culture so deeply: urban blues recorded the experiences of African Americans in the city. It articulated the African American urbanites’ struggles, aspirations, and hopes in song. Blues had never been more powerful. The traditional form of the blues fused with urban life. Electric blues inspired many musicians and bands. Its influence lives on in the music today. For example, British rock bands like The Rolling Stones modeled their sound after Chicago blues. The changes in the blues reflected the changes in American society. The music spoke for the migrant communities. The aspects of the Great Migration and urban blues also come together in history. African Americans’ experiences during the Great Migration led to new blues styles.
The Blues Revival and Preservation Efforts
The blues revival sparked renewed interest in traditional blues music. In the 1960s, America and Europe embraced blues artists anew. Young musicians rediscovered blues, influencing rock and roll. The British blues scene grew, impacting global music. Modern efforts focus on preserving blues heritage. Festivals celebrate blues music and its cultural impact. Museums showcase blues history and significant artifacts. Preservation efforts document blues traditions for future generations. Festivals like the Chicago Blues Festival draw large audiences. The Blues Hall of Fame honors influential blues musicians. Educational programs teach blues history and techniques. Recording projects aim to archive rare blues performances. Organizations work to support aging blues artists. Blues societies promote local blues scenes and events. Digital archives help preserve blues recordings and stories. The Delta Blues Museum preserves the legacy of Mississippi blues artists. Blues festivals occur worldwide, fostering appreciation for the genre. Initiatives digitize old blues recordings for accessibility. Blues education programs inspire new generations of musicians. Overall, the blues revival and preservation guarantee the genre’s legacy.
Conclusion
The stylings of the blues come from the very heart of African American tradition in the Deep South – a traditional expression of Black emotion through spirituals and work songs. Nonetheless, it is now a recurring aspect of countless music genres across the world and continues to be the backbone of modern music scenes across the world. This is because it expresses universal human experiences, from love and loss, to struggle and survival. It reaches the very heart of felt emotion and the way humans convey our human experience to each other. You can listen to classic blues artists below, and click here to find out more about the history of the blues.