A Brief History Of The Blues Essay Example For Students

A Brief History Of The Blues Essay Joseph Machlis says that the blues is a native American musical and verse form, with no direct European and African antecedents of which we know. p. 578 In other words, it is a blending of both traditions. Something special and entirely different from either of its parent traditions. Although Alan Lomax cites some examples of very similar songs having been found in Northwest Africa, particularly among the Wolof and Watusi. p. 233 The word blue has been associated with the idea of melancholia or depression since the Elizabethan era. The American writer, Washington Irving is credited with coining the term the blues, as it is now defined, in 1807. Tanner 40 The earlier almost entirely Negro history of the blues musical tradition is traced through oral tradition as far back as the 1860s. Kennedy 79 When African and European music first began to merge to create what eventually became the blues, the slaves sang songs filled with words telling of their extreme suffering and privation. Tanner 36 One of the many responses to their oppressive environment resulted in the field holler. The field holler gave rise to the spiritual, and the blues, notable among all human works of art for their profound despair . . . They gave voice to the mood of alienation and anomie that prevailed in the construction camps of the South, for it was in the Mississippi Delta that blacks were often forcibly conscripted to work on the levee and land-clearing crews, where they were often abused and then tossed aside or worked to death. Lomax 233 Alan Lomax states that the blues tradition was considered to be a masculine discipline although some of the first blues songs heard by whites were sung by lady blues singers like Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith and not many black women were to be found singing the blues in the juke-joints. The Southern prisons also contributed considerably to the blues tradition through work songs and the songs of death row and murder, prostitutes, the warden, the hot sun, and a hundred other privations. Lomax The prison road crews and work gangs where were many bluesmen found their songs, and where many other blacks simply became familiar with the same songs. Following the Civil War according to Rolling Stone, the blues arose as a distillate of the African music brought over by slaves. Field hollers, ballads, church music and rhythmic dance tunes called jump-ups evolved into a music for a singer who would engage in call-and-response with his guitar. He would sing a line, and the guitar would answer it. RSRRE 53 The guitar did not enjoy widespread popularity with blues musicians until about the turn of the century. Until then, the banjo was the primary blues instrument. By the 1890s the blues were sung in many of the rural areas of the South. Kamien 518 And by 1910, the word blues as applied to the musical tradition was in fairly common use. Tanner 40 Some bluesologists claim rather dubiously, that the first blues song that was ever written down was Dallas Blues, published in 1912 by Hart Wand, a white violinist from Oklahoma City. Tanner 40 The blues form was first popularized about 1911-14 by the black composer W. C. Handy 1873-1958. However, the poetic and musical form of the blues first crystallized around 1910 and gained popularity through the publication of Handys Memphis Blues 1912 and St. Louis Blues 1914. Kamien 518 Instrumental blues had been recorded as early as 1913. Mamie Smith recorded the first vocal blues song, Crazy Blues in 1920. Priestly 9 Priestly claims that while the widespread popularity of the blues had a vital influence on subsequent jazz, it was the initial popularity of jazz which had made possible the recording of blues in the first place, and thus made possible the absorption of blues into both jazz as well as the mainstream of pop music. Priestly 10 American troops brought the blues home with them following the First World War. They did not, of course, learn them from Europeans, but from Southern whites who had been exposed to the blues. At this time, the U. S. Army was still segregated. During the twenties, the blues became a national craze. Records by leading blues singers like Bessie Smith and later, in the thirties, Billie Holiday, sold in the millions. The twenties also saw the blues become a musical form more widely used by jazz instrumentalists as well as blues singers. Kamien 518 During the decades of the thirties and forties, the blues spread northward with the migration of many blacks from the South and entered into the repertoire of big-band jazz. Music Therapy EssayOften the lyrics of a blues song do not seem to fit the music, but a good blues singer will accent certain syllables and eliminate others so that everything falls nicely into place. Tanner 38 The structure of blues lyrics usually consists of several three-line verses. The first line is sung and then repeated to roughly the same melodic phrase perhaps the same phrase played diatonically a perfect fourth away, the third line has a different melodic phrase: Im going to leave baby, aint going to say goodbye. Im going to leave baby, aint going to say goodbye. But Ill write you and tell you the reason why. Kamien 519 Most blues researchers claim that the very early blues were patterned after English ballads and often had eight, ten, or sixteen bars. Tanner 36 The blues now consists of a definite progression of harmonies usually consisting of eight, twelve or sixteen measures, though the twelve bar blues are, by far, the most common. The 12 bar blues harmonic progression the one-four-five is most often agreed to be the following: four bars of tonic, two of subdominant, two of tonic, two of dominant, and two of tonic. Or, alternatively, I,I,I,I,IV,IV,I,I,V,V,I,I. Each roman numeral indicates a chord built on a specific tone in the major scale. Due to the influence of rock and roll, the tenth chord has been changed to IV. This alteration is now considered standard. Tanner 37 In practice, various intermediate chords, and even some substitute chord patterns, have been used in blues progressions, at least since the nineteen-twenties. Machlis 578 Some purists feel that any variations or embellishments of the basic blues pattern changes its quality or validity as a blues song. For instance, if the basic blues chord progression is not used, then the music being played is not the blues. Therefore, these purists maintain that many melodies with the word blues in the title, and which are often spoken of as being the blues, are not the blues because their melodies lack this particular basic blues harmonic construction. Tanner 37 I believe this viewpoint to be a bit wide of the mark, because it places a greater emphasis on blues harmony than melody. The principal blues melodies are, in fact, holler cadences, set to a steady beat and thus turned into dance music and confined to a three-verse rhymed stanza of twelve to sixteen bars. Lomax 275 The singer can either repeat the same basic melody for each stanza or improvise a new melody to reflect the changing mood of the lyrics. Kamien 519 Blues rhythm is also very flexible. Performers often sing around the beat, accenting notes either a little before or behind the beat. Kamien Jazz instrumentalists frequently use the chord progression of the twelve-bar blues as a basis for extended improvisations. The twelve or sixteen bar pattern is repeated while new melodies are improvised over it by the soloists. As with the Baroque bassocontinuo, the repeated chord progression provides a foundation for the free flow of such improvised melodic lines. Kamien 520 One of the problems regarding defining what the blues are is the variety of authoritative opinions. The blues is neither an era in the chronological development of jazz, nor is it actually a particular style of playing or singing jazz. Tanner 35 Some maintain mostly musicologists that the blues are defined by the use of blue notes and on this point they also differ some say that they are simply flatted thirds, fifths, and sevenths applied to a major scale ; some maintain that they are microtones; and some believe that they are the third, or fifth, or seventh tones sounded simultaneously with the flatted third, or fifth, or seventh tones respectively . Others feel that the song form twelve bars, one-four-five is the defining feature of the blues. Some feel that the blues is a way to approach music, a philosophy, in a manner of speaking. And still others hold a much wider sociological view that the blues are an entire musical tradition rooted in the black experience of the post-war South. Whatever one may think of the social implications of the blues, whether expressing the American or black experience in microcosm, it was their strong autobiographical nature, their intense personal passion, chaos and loneliness, executed so vibrantly that it captured the imagination of modern musicians and the general public as well. Shapiro 13