Blues music is characterized by itslyrics,bass lines, andinstrumentation. Earlytraditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: theAAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating theracial discrimination and other challenges experienced by African Americans.[4]
Many elements, such as thecall-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to themusic of Africa. The origins of the blues are also closely related to the religious music of the African-American community, thespirituals. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after theending of slavery, with the development ofjuke joints occurring later. It is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century. The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres. Bluessubgenres includecountry blues,Delta blues andPiedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such asChicago blues andWest Coast blues.World War II marked the transition from acoustic toelectric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form calledblues rock developed, which blended blues styles withrock music.
The term 'Blues' may have originated from "blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness. An early use of the term in this sense is inGeorge Colman's one-act farceBlue Devils (1798).[5] The phrase 'blue devils' may also have been derived from a British usage of the 1600s referring to the "intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal".[6] As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils and came to mean a state of agitation or depression. By the 1800s in the United States, the term "blues" was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase 'blue law', which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday.[6]
In 1827, it was in the sense of a sad state of mind thatJohn James Audubon wrote tohis wife that he "had the blues".[7]
InHenry David Thoreau's bookWalden, he mentions "the blues" in the chapter reflecting on his time in solitude. He wrote his account of his personal quest in 1845, although it was not published until 1854.[8]
The phrase "the blues" was written byCharlotte Forten, then aged 25, in her diary on December 14, 1862. She was a free-born black woman from Pennsylvania who was working as a schoolteacher in South Carolina, instructing both slaves and freedmen, and wrote that she "came home with the blues" because she felt lonesome and pitied herself. She overcame her depression and later noted a number of songs, such as "Poor Rosy", that were popular among the slaves. Although she admitted being unable to describe the manner of singing she heard, Forten wrote that the songs "can't be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit", conditions that have inspired countless blues songs.[9]
Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, whenHart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition.[10][11] In lyrics, the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood.[12]
American blues singerMa Rainey (1886–1939), the "Mother of the Blues"
Earlytraditional blues verses often consisted of a single line repeated four times. However, the most common structure of blues lyrics today was established in the first few decades of the 20th century, known as the "AAB" pattern. This structure consists of a line sung over the first four bars, its repetition over the next four, and a longer concluding line over the last bars.[13] This pattern can be heard in some of the first published blues songs, such as "Dallas Blues" (1912) and "Saint Louis Blues" (1914). According toW.C. Handy, the "AAB" pattern was adopted to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times.[14] The lyrics are often sung in a rhythmic talk style rather than a melody, resembling a form oftalking blues.
Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative. African-American singers voiced their "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, [and] hard times".[15] This melancholy has led to the suggestion of anIgbo origin for blues, because of the reputation theIgbo had throughout plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and outlook on life when they were enslaved.[16][17] Other historians have argued that there is little evidence of Sub-Sahelian influence in the blues as "elaborate polyrhythm, percussion on African drums (as opposed to European drums), [and] collective participation" which are characteristic of West-Central African music below the savannah, are conspicuously absent. According to the historianPaul Oliver, "the roots of the blues were not to be found in the coastal and forest regions of Africa. Rather... the blues was rooted in ... the savanna hinterland, from Senegambia through Mali, Burkina Faso, Northern Ghana, Niger, and northern Nigeria". Additionally, ethnomusicologistJohn Storm Roberts has argued that "The parallels between African savanna-belt string-playing and the techniques of many blues guitarists are remarkable. The big kora of Senegal and Guinea are played in a rhythmic-melodic style that uses constantly changing rhythms, often providing a ground bass overlaid with complex treble patterns, while vocal supplies a third rhythmic layer. Similar techniques can be found in hundreds of blues records".[18]
Backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time I said, backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time And I can't get no hearing from that Memphis girl of mine
Although the blues gained an association with misery and oppression, the lyrics could also be humorous and raunchy:[19]
Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me, Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me, It may be sending you baby, but it's worrying the hell out of me.[20]
Hokum blues celebrated both comedic lyrical content and a boisterous,farcical performance style.[21]Tampa Red andGeorgia Tom's "It's Tight Like That" (1928)[22] is a sly wordplay with the double meaning of being "tight" with someone, coupled with a more salacious physical familiarity. Blues songs with sexually explicit lyrics were known asdirty blues. The lyrical content became slightly simpler in postwar blues, which tended to focus on relationship woes or sexual worries. Lyrical themes that frequently appeared in prewar blues, such as economic depression, farming, devils, gambling, magic, floods and drought, were less common in postwar blues.[23]
The writer Ed Morales claimed thatYoruba mythology played a part in early blues, citingRobert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues" as a "thinly veiled reference toEleggua, theorisha in charge of the crossroads".[24] However, the Christian influence was far more obvious.[25] The repertoires of many seminal blues artists, such asCharley Patton andSkip James, included religious songs or spirituals.[26]Reverend Gary Davis[27] andBlind Willie Johnson[28] are examples of artists often categorized as blues musicians for their music, although their lyrics clearly belong to spirituals.
The basic 12-bar lyric framework of many blues compositions is reflected by a standard harmonic progression of 12 bars in a4 4 time signature. The blueschords associated to atwelve-bar blues are typically a set of three different chords played over a 12-bar scheme. They are labeled byRoman numbers referring to thedegrees of the progression. For instance, for a blues in thekey of C, C is thetonic chord (I) and F is thesubdominant (IV).
The last chord is thedominant (V)turnaround, marking the transition to the beginning of the next progression. The lyrics generally end on the last beat of the tenth bar or the first beat of the 11th bar, and the final two bars are given to the instrumentalist as a break; the harmony of this two-bar break, the turnaround, can be extremely complex, sometimes consisting of single notes that defy analysis in terms of chords.
Much of the time, some or all of these chords are played in theharmonic seventh (7th) form. The use of the harmonic seventh interval is characteristic of blues and is popularly called the "blues seven".[31] Blues seven chords add to the harmonic chord a note with a frequency in a 7:4 ratio to the fundamental note. At a 7:4 ratio, it is not close to any interval on the conventional Westerndiatonic scale.[32] For convenience or by necessity it is often approximated by aminor seventh interval or adominant seventh chord.
Bluesshuffles orwalking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and call-and-response, and they form a repetitive effect called agroove. Characteristic of the blues since its Afro-American origins, the shuffles played a central role inswing music.[34] The simplest shuffles, which were the clearest signature of theR&B wave that started in the mid-1940s,[35] were a three-noteriff on the bass strings of the guitar. When this riff was played over the bass and the drums, thegroove "feel" was created. Shuffle rhythm is often vocalized as "dow, dadow, dadow, da" or "dump, dadump, dadump, da":[36] it consists of uneven, or "swung", eighth notes. On a guitar this may be played as a simple steady bass or it may add to that stepwise quarter note motion from the fifth to the sixth of the chord and back. Furthermore, musicians would create "blues notes" to create a whining sound. This was done by bending strings on the guitar or using different blowing methods on the harmonica.[37]
Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" was published in 1912;W.C. Handy's "The Memphis Blues" followed in the same year. The first recording by an African-American singer wasMamie Smith's 1920 rendition ofPerry Bradford's "Crazy Blues". But the origins of the blues were some decades earlier, probably around 1890.[38] This music is poorly documented, partly because of racial discrimination in U.S. society, including academic circles,[39] and partly because of the low rate of literacy among rural African Americans at the time.[40]
Reports of blues music insouthern Texas and theDeep South were written at the dawn of the 20th century. Charles Peabody mentioned the appearance of blues music atClarksdale, Mississippi, and Gate Thomas reported similar songs in southern Texas around 1901–1902. These observations coincide more or less with the recollections ofJelly Roll Morton, who said he first heard blues music inNew Orleans in 1902;Ma Rainey, who remembered first hearing the blues in the same year inMissouri; andW.C. Handy, who first heard the blues inTutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903. The first extensive research in the field was performed byHoward W. Odum, who published ananthology of folk songs fromLafayette County, Mississippi, andNewton County, Georgia, between 1905 and 1908.[41] The first non-commercial recordings of blues music, termedproto-blues byPaul Oliver, were made by Odum for research purposes at the beginning of the 20th century. They are now lost.[42]
Other recordings that are still available were made in 1924 byLawrence Gellert. Later, several recordings were made byRobert W. Gordon, who became head of theArchive of American Folk Songs of theLibrary of Congress. Gordon's successor at the library wasJohn Lomax. In the 1930s, Lomax and his sonAlan made a large number of non-commercial blues recordings that testify to the huge variety of proto-blues styles, such asfield hollers andring shouts.[43] A record of blues music as it existed before 1920 can also be found in the recordings of artists such asLead Belly[44] andHenry Thomas.[45] All these sources show the existence of many different structures distinct fromtwelve-,eight-, orsixteen-bar.[46][47]The social and economic reasons for the appearance of the blues are not fully known.[48] The first appearance of the blues is usually dated after theEmancipation Act of 1863,[39] between 1860s and 1890s,[2] a period that coincides with post-emancipation and later, the establishment ofjuke joints as places where African Americans went to listen to music, dance, or gamble after a hard day's work.[49] This period corresponds to the transition from slavery tosharecropping, small-scale agricultural production, and the expansion of railroads in the southern United States. Several scholars characterize the development of blues music in the early 1900s as a move from group performance to individualized performance. They argue that the development of the blues is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the enslaved people.[50]
According to Lawrence Levine, "there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the popularity ofBooker T. Washington's teachings, and the rise of the blues." Levine stated that "psychologically, socially, and economically, African-Americans 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."[50]
There are few characteristics common to all blues music, because the genre took its shape from the idiosyncrasies of individual performers.[51] However, there are some characteristics that were present long before the creation of the modern blues. Call-and-response shouts were an early form of blues-like music; they were a "functional expression ... style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure".[52] A form of this pre-blues was heard in slavering shouts andfield hollers, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content".[53]
Blues has evolved from the unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves imported from West Africa and Black Americans in rural areas into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States. Although blues (as it is now known) can be seen as a musical style based on both Europeanharmonic structure and the Africancall-and-response tradition that transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar,[54][55] the blues form itself bears no resemblance to the melodic styles of the West Africangriots.[56][57] Additionally, there are theories that the four-beats-per-measure structure of the blues might have its origins in the Native American tradition ofpow wow drumming.[58] Some scholars identify strong influences on the blues from the melodic structures of certain West African musical styles of the savanna and sahel.Lucy Durran finds similarities with the melodies of theBambara people, and to a lesser degree, theSoninke people andWolof people, but not as much of theMandinka people.[59]Gerard Kubik finds similarities to the melodic styles of both the west African savanna and central Africa, both of which were sources of enslaved people.[60]
No specific African musical form can be identified as the single direct ancestor of the blues.[61] However the call-and-response format can be traced back to themusic of Africa. That blue notes predate their use in blues and have an African origin is attested to by "A Negro Love Song", by the English composerSamuel Coleridge-Taylor, from hisAfrican Suite for Piano, written in 1898, which containsblue third andseventh notes.[62]
TheDiddley bow (a homemade one-stringed instrument found in parts of theAmerican South sometimes referred to as ajitterbug or aone-string in the early twentieth century) and thebanjo are African-derived instruments that may have helped in the transfer of African performance techniques into the early blues instrumental vocabulary.[63] The banjo seems to be directly imported from West African music. It is similar to the musical instrument that griots and other Africans such as theIgbo[64] played (calledhalam orakonting by African peoples such as theWolof,Fula andMandinka).[65] However, in the 1920s, when country blues began to be recorded, the use of the banjo in blues music was quite marginal and limited to individuals such asPapa Charlie Jackson and laterGus Cannon.[66]
Blues music also adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs",minstrel shows andNegro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment.[67] The style also was closely related toragtime, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music".[68]
The musical forms and styles that are now considered the blues as well as moderncountry music arose in the same regions of the southern United States during the 19th century. Recorded blues and country music can be found as far back as the 1920s, when the record industry created the marketing categories "race music" and "hillbilly music" 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 ethnicity of the performer, and even that was sometimes documented incorrectly by record companies.[69][70]
Though musicologists can now attempt to define the blues narrowly in terms of certain chord structures and lyric forms thought to have originated in West Africa, audiences originally heard the music in a far more general way: it was simply the music of the rural South, notably theMississippi Delta. Black and white musicians shared the same repertoire and thought of themselves as "songsters" rather than blues musicians. The notion of blues as a separate genre arose during theblack migration from the countryside to urban areas in the 1920s and the simultaneous development of the recording industry.Blues became a code word for a record designed to sell to black listeners.[71]
The origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of Afro-American community, thespirituals. The origins of spirituals go back much further than the blues, usually dating back to the middle of the 18th century, when the slaves were Christianized and began to sing and play Christianhymns, in particular those ofIsaac Watts, which were very popular.[72] Before the blues gained its formal definition in terms of chord progressions, it was defined as the secular counterpart of spirituals. It was the low-down music played by rural blacks.[25]
Depending on the religious community a musician belonged to, it was more or less considered a sin to play this low-down music: blues was the devil's music. Musicians were therefore segregated into two categories: gospel singers and blues singers, guitar preachers and songsters. However, when rural black music began to be recorded in the 1920s, both categories of musicians used similar techniques: call-and-response patterns, blue notes, and slide guitars. Gospel music was nevertheless using musical forms that were compatible with Christianhymns and therefore less marked by the blues form than its secular counterpart.[25]
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 Cubanhabanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime;[24][74] Handy's signature work was the "Saint Louis Blues".
In the 1920s, the blues became a major element of African-American and American popular music, also reaching white audiences via Handy's arrangements and the classic female blues performers. These female performers became perhaps the first African-American "superstars", and their recording sales demonstrated "a huge appetite for records made by and for black people."[75] The blues evolved from informal performances in bars to entertainment in theaters. Blues performances were organized by theTheater Owners Booking Association innightclubs such as theCotton Club andjuke joints such as the bars alongBeale Street in Memphis. Several record companies, such as theAmerican Record Corporation,Okeh Records, andParamount Records, began to record African-American music.
As the recording industry grew,country blues performers likeBo Carter,Jimmie Rodgers,Blind Lemon Jefferson,Lonnie Johnson,Tampa Red, andBlind Blake became more popular in the African-American community. Kentucky-bornSylvester Weaver was in 1923 the first to record theslide guitar style, in which a guitar is fretted with a knife blade or the sawed-off neck of a bottle.[76] The slide guitar became an important part of theDelta blues.[77] The first blues recordings from the 1920s are categorized as a traditional, rural country blues and a more polished city or urban blues.
Country blues performers often improvised, either without accompaniment or with only a banjo or guitar. Regional styles of country blues varied widely in the early 20th century. The (Mississippi) Delta blues was a rootsy sparse style with passionate vocals accompanied by slide guitar. The little-recordedRobert Johnson[78] combined elements of urban and rural blues. In addition to Robert Johnson, influential performers of this style included his predecessorsCharley Patton andSon House. Singers such asBlind Willie McTell andBlind Boy Fuller performed in the southeastern "delicate and lyrical"Piedmont blues tradition, which used an elaborate ragtime-basedfingerpicking guitar technique. Georgia also had an early slide tradition,[79] withCurley Weaver,Tampa Red,"Barbecue Bob" Hicks andJames "Kokomo" Arnold as representatives of this style.[80]
City or urban blues styles were more codified and elaborate, as a performer was no longer within their local, immediate community, and had to adapt to a larger, more varied audience's aesthetic.[83]Classic female urban andvaudeville blues singers were popular in the 1920s, among them "the big three"—Gertrude "Ma" Rainey,Bessie Smith, andLucille Bogan.Mamie Smith, more a vaudeville performer than a blues artist, was the first African American to record a blues song, in 1920; her second record, "Crazy Blues", sold 75,000 copies in its first month.[84]Ma Rainey, the "Mother of Blues", andBessie Smith each "[sang] around center tones, perhaps in order to project her voice more easily to the back of a room". Smith would "sing a song in an unusual key, and her artistry in bending and stretching notes with her beautiful, powerful contralto to accommodate her own interpretation was unsurpassed".[85]
In 1920, the vaudeville singerLucille Hegamin became the second black woman to record blues when she recorded "The Jazz Me Blues",[86] andVictoria Spivey, sometimes called Queen Victoria or Za Zu Girl, had a recording career that began in 1926 and spanned forty years. These recordings were typically labeled "race records" to distinguish them from records sold to white audiences. Nonetheless, the recordings of some of the classic female blues singers were purchased by white buyers as well.[87] These blueswomen's contributions to the genre included "increased improvisation on melodic lines, unusual phrasing which altered the emphasis and impact of the lyrics, and vocal dramatics using shouts, groans, moans, and wails. The blues women thus effected changes in other types of popular singing that had spin-offs in jazz,Broadway musicals,torch songs of the 1930s and 1940s,gospel,rhythm and blues, and eventuallyrock and roll."[88]
Urban male performers included popular black musicians of the era, such asTampa Red,Big Bill Broonzy andLeroy Carr. An important label of this era was the Chicago-basedBluebird Records. Before World War II, Tampa Red was sometimes referred to as "the Guitar Wizard". Carr accompanied himself on the piano withScrapper Blackwell on guitar, a format that continued well into the 1950s with artists such asCharles Brown and evenNat "King" Cole.[77]
Boogie-woogie was another important style of 1930s and early 1940s urban blues. While the style is often associated with solo piano, boogie-woogie was also used to accompany singers and, as a solo part, in bands and small combos. Boogie-woogie style was characterized by a regular bass figure, anostinato orriff andshifts of level in the left hand, elaborating each chord and trills and decorations in the right hand. Boogie-woogie was pioneered by the Chicago-basedJimmy Yancey and the Boogie-Woogie Trio (Albert Ammons,Pete Johnson andMeade Lux Lewis).[89] Chicago boogie-woogie performers includedClarence "Pine Top" Smith andEarl Hines, who "linked the propulsive left-hand rhythms of the ragtime pianists with melodic figures similar to those of Armstrong's trumpet in the right hand".[83] The smooth Louisiana style ofProfessor Longhair and, more recently,Dr. John blends classic rhythm and blues with blues styles.
The transition from country blues to urban blues that began in the 1920s was driven by the successive waves of economic crisis and booms that led many rural blacks to move to urban areas, in a movement known as theGreat Migration. The longboom following World War II induced another massive migration of the African-American population, theSecond Great Migration, which was accompanied by a significant increase of the real income of the urban blacks. The new migrants constituted a new market for the music industry. The termrace record, initially used by themusic industry forAfrican-American music, was replaced by the termrhythm and blues. This rapidly evolving market was mirrored byBillboard magazine'sRhythm & Blues chart. This marketing strategy reinforced trends in urban blues music such as the use of electric instruments andamplification and the generalization of the blues beat, theblues shuffle, which became ubiquitous in rhythm and blues (R&B). This commercial stream had important consequences for blues music, which, together withjazz andgospel music, became a component of R&B.[93]
Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters,Willie Dixon andJimmy Reed were all born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. Their style is characterized by the use of electric guitar, sometimes slide guitar, harmonica, and a rhythm section of bass and drums.[99] The saxophonistJ. T. Brown played in bands led byElmore James and byJ. B. Lenoir, but thesaxophone was used as a backing instrument for rhythmic support more than as a lead instrument.
Little Walter,Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) andSonny Terry are well known harmonica (called "harp" by blues musicians) players of the early Chicago blues scene. Other harp players such asBig Walter Horton were also influential. Muddy Waters and Elmore James were known for their innovative use of slide electric guitar. Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters were known for their deep, "gravelly" voices.
In the 1950s, blues had a huge influence on mainstream Americanpopular music. While popular musicians likeBo Diddley[96] andChuck Berry,[102] both recording for Chess, were influenced by the Chicago blues, their enthusiastic playing styles departed from the melancholy aspects of blues. Chicago blues also influencedLouisiana'szydeco music,[103] withClifton Chenier[104] using blues accents. Zydeco musicians used electric solo guitar andcajun arrangements of blues standards.
In England, electric blues took root there during a much acclaimed Muddy Waters tour in 1958. Waters, unsuspecting of his audience's tendency towardsskiffle, an acoustic, softer brand of blues, turned up his amp and started to play his Chicago brand of electric blues. Although the audience was largely jolted by the performance, the performance influenced local musicians such asAlexis Korner andCyril Davies to emulate this louder style, inspiring theBritish Invasion of theRolling Stones and theYardbirds.[105]
Other blues artists, such asJohn Lee Hooker, had influences not directly related to the Chicago style. John Lee Hooker's blues is more "personal", based on Hooker's deep rough voice accompanied by a single electric guitar. Though not directly influenced by boogie-woogie, his "groovy" style is sometimes called "guitar boogie". His first hit, "Boogie Chillen", reached number 1 on the R&B charts in 1949.[109]
By the beginning of the 1960s, genres influenced byAfrican American music such asrock and roll andsoul were part of mainstream popular music. White performers such asthe Rolling Stones andthe Beatles had brought African-American music to new audiences, within the U.S. and abroad. However, the blues wave that brought artists such as Muddy Waters to the foreground had stopped. Bluesmen such asBig Bill Broonzy andWillie Dixon started looking for new markets in Europe.Dick Waterman and the blues festivals he organized in Europe played a major role in propagating blues music abroad. In the UK, bands emulated U.S. blues legends, and UK blues rock-based bands had an influential role throughout the 1960s.[113]
Blues performers such asJohn Lee Hooker andMuddy Waters continued to perform to enthusiastic audiences, inspiring new artists steeped in traditional blues, such as New York–bornTaj Mahal.John Lee Hooker blended his blues style with rock elements and playing with younger white musicians, creating a musical style that can be heard on the 1971 albumEndless Boogie.B. B. King's singing and virtuoso guitar technique earned him the eponymous title "king of the blues". King introduced a sophisticated style ofguitar soloing based on fluidstring bending and shimmeringvibrato that influenced many later electric blues guitarists.[114] In contrast to the Chicago style, King's band used strong brass support from a saxophone, trumpet, and trombone, instead of using slide guitar or harp.Tennessee-bornBobby "Blue" Bland, like B. B. King, also straddled the blues and R&B genres. During this period,Freddie King andAlbert King often played with rock andsoul musicians (Eric Clapton andBooker T & the MGs) and had a major influence on those styles of music.
I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me, I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me. You know they killed my sister and my brother and the whole world let them peoples go down there free
In 1963,Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, was the first to write a book on the social history of the blues inBlues People: The Negro Music in White America. The British and blues musicians of the early 1960s inspired a number of Americanblues rock performers, includingCanned Heat,Janis Joplin,Johnny Winter,the J. Geils Band,Ry Cooder, and theAllman Brothers Band. One blues rock performer,Jimi Hendrix, was a rarity in his field at the time: a Black man who playedpsychedelic rock. Hendrix was a skilled guitarist, and a pioneer in the innovative use ofdistortion andaudio feedback in his music.[125] Through these artists and others, blues music influenced the development ofrock music. Later in the 1960s, British singerJo Ann Kelly started her recording career. In the US, from the 1970s, female singersBonnie Raitt andPhoebe Snow performed blues.[126]
In the early 1970s, theTexas rock-blues style emerged, which used guitars in both solo and rhythm roles. In contrast with the West Side blues, the Texas style is strongly influenced by the British rock-blues movement. Major artists of the Texas style areJohnny Winter,Stevie Ray Vaughan, theFabulous Thunderbirds (led byharmonica player and singer-songwriterKim Wilson), andZZ Top. These artists all began their musical careers in the 1970s but they did not achieve international success until the next decade.[127]
Italian singerZucchero is credited as the "Father of Italian Blues", and is among the few European blues artists who still enjoy international success.[128]
During the 1980s, blues also continued in both traditional and new forms. In 1986, the albumStrong Persuader announcedRobert Cray as a major blues artist. The firstStevie Ray Vaughan recordingTexas Flood was released in 1983, and the Texas-based guitarist exploded onto the international stage.John Lee Hooker's popularity was revived with the albumThe Healer in 1989.Eric Clapton, known for his performances withthe Blues Breakers andCream, made a comeback in the 1990s with his albumUnplugged, in which he played some standard blues numbers on acoustic guitar.
However, beginning in the 1990s,digital multi-track recording and other technological advances and new marketing strategies, includingvideo clip production, increased costs, challenging the spontaneity and improvisation that are an important component of blues music.[131] In the 1980s and 1990s, blues publications such asLiving Blues andBlues Revue were launched, major cities began forming blues societies, outdoor blues festivals became more common, andTedeschi Trucks Band andGov't Mule released blues rock albums. Female blues singers such asBonnie Raitt,Susan Tedeschi,Sue Foley, andShannon Curfman also recorded albums.
Blues musical styles, forms (12-bar blues), melodies, and the blues scale have influenced many other genres of music, such as rock and roll, jazz, and popular music.[133] Prominent jazz, folk, or rock performers, such asLouis Armstrong,Duke Ellington,Miles Davis, andBob Dylan, have performed significant blues recordings. The blues scale is often used inpopular songs likeHarold Arlen's "Blues in the Night",blues ballads like "Since I Fell for You" and "Please Send Me Someone to Love", and even in orchestral works such asGeorge Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Concerto in F". Gershwin's second "Prelude" for solo piano is an interesting example of a classical blues, maintaining the form with academic strictness. The blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music and informs manymodal frames, especially theladder of thirds used in rock music (for example, in "A Hard Day's Night"). Blues forms are used in the theme to the televisedBatman,teen idolFabian Forte's hit, "Turn Me Loose",country music starJimmie Rodgers' music, and guitarist/vocalistTracy Chapman's hit "Give Me One Reason".
"Blues singing is about emotion. Its influence on popular singing has been so widespread that, at least among males, singing and emoting have become almost identical—it is a matter of projection rather than hitting the notes."[134]
Early country bluesmen such asSkip James,Charley Patton, andGeorgia Tom Dorsey played country and urban blues and had influences from spiritual singing. Dorsey helped to popularizeGospel music.[135] Gospel music developed in the 1930s, with theGolden Gate Quartet. In the 1950s,soul music bySam Cooke,Ray Charles, andJames Brown used gospel and blues music elements. In the 1960s and 1970s, gospel and blues were merged insoul blues music.Funk music of the 1970s was influenced by soul; funk can be seen as an antecedent of hip-hop and contemporary R&B.
R&B music can be traced back tospirituals and blues. Musically, spirituals were a descendant ofNew England choral traditions, and in particular ofIsaac Watts'shymns, mixed with African rhythms and call-and-response forms. Spirituals or religious chants in the African-American community are much better documented than the "low-down" blues. Spiritual singing developed because African-American communities could gather for mass or worship gatherings, which were calledcamp meetings.
Edward P. Comentale has noted how the blues was often used as a medium for art or self-expression, stating: "As heard from Delta shacks to Chicago tenements to Harlem cabarets, the blues proved—despite its pained origins—a remarkably flexible medium and a new arena for the shaping of identity and community."[136]
BeforeWorld War II, the boundaries between blues andjazz were less clear. Usually, jazz had harmonic structures stemming frombrass bands, whereas blues had blues forms such as the 12-bar blues. However, the jump blues of the 1940s mixed both styles. After WWII, blues had a substantial influence on jazz.Bebop classics, such asCharlie Parker's "Now's the Time", used the blues form with the pentatonic scale and blue notes.
Bebop marked a major shift in the role of jazz, from a popular style of music for dancing to a "high-art", less accessible, cerebral "musician's music". The audience for both blues and jazz split, and the border between blues and jazz became more defined.[137][138]
The blues' 12-bar structure and the blues scale was a major influence onrock and roll music. Rock and roll has been called "blues with abackbeat";Carl Perkins calledrockabilly "blues with acountry beat". Rockabillies were also said to be 12-bar blues played with abluegrass beat. "Hound Dog", with its unmodified 12-bar structure (in both harmony and lyrics) and a melody centered on flatted third of the tonic (and flatted seventh of the subdominant), is a blues song transformed into a rock and roll song.Jerry Lee Lewis's style of rock and roll was heavily influenced by the blues and its derivative boogie-woogie. His style of music was not exactly rockabilly but it has been often called real rock and roll (this is a label he shares with several African-American rock and roll performers).[139][140]
Earlycountry music was infused with the blues.[141]Jimmie Rodgers,Moon Mullican,Bob Wills,Bill Monroe, andHank Williams have all described themselves as blues singers and their music has a blues feel that is different, at first glance at least, from the later country-pop of artists likeEddy Arnold. Yet, if one looks back further, Arnold also started out singing bluesy songs like 'I'll Hold You in My Heart'. A lot of the 1970s-era "outlaw" country music byWillie Nelson andWaylon Jennings also borrowed from the blues. WhenJerry Lee Lewis returned to country music after the decline of 1950s style rock and roll, he sang with a blues feel and often included blues standards on his albums.
The music ofTaj Mahal for the 1972 movieSounder marked a revival of interest in acoustic blues.
Like many other genres, blues has been called the "devil's music" or "music of the devil", even of inciting violence and other poor behavior.[142] In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable, especially as white audiences began listening to the blues during the 1920s.[74] The close association with the devil was actually a well-known characteristic of blues lyrics and culture between the 1920s and 1960s. The devil's connection to the blues has faded from popular memory since then for a number of reasons, other than in the narrow sense of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads. A study of the devil's role in the blues was published in 2017, calledBeyond the Crossroads: The Devil & The Blues Tradition.[143]
During the blues revival of the 1960s and 1970s, acoustic blues artistTaj Mahal and Texas bluesmanLightnin' Hopkins wrote and performed music that figured prominently in the critically acclaimed filmSounder (1972). The film earned Mahal aGrammy nomination for Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture and aBAFTA nomination.[citation needed] Almost 30 years later, Mahal wrote blues for, and performed a banjo composition, claw-hammer style, in the 2001 movie releaseSongcatcher, which focused on the story of the preservation of theroots music of Appalachia.
In 2003,Martin Scorsese made significant efforts to promote the blues to a larger audience. He asked several famous directors, such asClint Eastwood andWim Wenders, to participate in a series of documentary films forPBS calledThe Blues.[145] He also participated in the rendition of compilations of major blues artists in a series of high-quality CDs. Blues guitarist and vocalistKeb' Mo' performed his blues rendition of "America, the Beautiful" in 2006 to close out the final season of the television seriesThe West Wing.
A Jazzman Blues by Tyler Perry (2022) is a film that provides a cinematic reflection of the blues, set in the background of the 1940s Deep South. The movie is based on a multi-generational plot of forbidden romance, family values, and issues of self-emancipation, all accompanied by blues music. The music is a mix of original pieces and traditional blues hits, with such performers as Ruth B., Joshua Boone, and Amirah Vann, and it captures the true emotional effect of the moment[147]. The instrumental performance and arrangements make the audience feel the cultural and historical background of the blues with its development as a way of expression that has been created by suffering and survival.
In addition to its music, the movie also focuses on the blues as a narration vehicle, the personal hardships of its characters attached to the social and racial processes of the American South in general. Perry was applauded by critics[148] as presenting the blues as not a form of entertainment, but also a form of cultural as well as emotional expression that conveys messages of love, loss and survival across generations.
The 2025 vampire horror filmSinners explores the blues genre through a supernatural narrative placed in the 1930s Mississippi Delta.[149] Director Ryan Coolger directs Sinners, which weaved togehter both African American musical traditions and Chinese cosmological mythology. This takes place in 1930s in the Mississippi Delta, this film reinvents the origins of the blues in a supernatural fashion during which rhythm, rituas, and myth are interwined. This is shown when Monkey King, Sun Kuwong is introduced. By combing both cultures into the film it produces a cultural conversation between two different worlds where East and West fuse together, not in words but in music that breaks racial, historic and spiritual barriers. Through this sinners presents the blues not simply as a form of artistic expression born out if trails rather than a spirituall gateway that connects people, ancestry and the spirit world.[150][151][152]
^Kunzler's dictionary of jazz provides two separate entries: "blues", and the "blues form", a widespread musical form (p. 131). Kunzler, Martin (1988).Jazz-Lexicon. Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag
^The "Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé" provides this etymology ofblues and cites Colman's farce as the first appearance of the term in the English language; see"Blues" (in French). Centre Nationale de Ressources Textuelles et Lixicales. Archived fromthe original on June 28, 2012. RetrievedOctober 15, 2010.
^Burnim, Mellonee V.; Maultsby, Portia K. (2015).African American music: an introduction (Second ed.). New York, NY Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.ISBN978-0-415-88180-7.
^Bohlman, Philip V. (1999). "Immigrant, Folk, and Regional Music in the Twentieth Century".The Cambridge History of American Music. David Nicholls, ed.Cambridge University Press. p. 285.ISBN978-0-521-45429-2
^Morales, p. 276. Morales attributed this claim toJohn Storm Roberts inBlack Music of Two Worlds, beginning his discussion with a quote from Roberts: "There does not seem to be the same African quality in blues forms as there clearly is in much Caribbean music."
^Scott (2003).From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology. Oxford University Press. p. 182.A blues idiom is hinted at in "A Negro Love-Song", a pentatonic melody with blue third and seventh in Coleridge-Taylor'sAfrican Suite of 1898, before the first blues publications.
^Garofalo, p. 44. "Gradually, instrumental and harmonic accompaniment were added, reflecting increasing cross-cultural contact." Garofalo cited other authors who also mention the "Ethiopian airs" and "Negro spirituals".
^Garofalo, pp. 44–47: "As marketing categories, designations like race andhillbilly 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 claimed that "artists were sometimes listed in the wrong racial category in record company catalogues."
^Wolfe, Charles. InNothing but the Blues. pp. 233–263
^Humphrey, Mark A. InNothing but the Blues. p. 110
^Garofalo, p. 27. Garofalo cited Barlow in "Handy's sudden success demonstrated [the] commercial potential of [the blues], which in turn made the genre attractive to the Tin Pan Alley hacks, who wasted little time in turning out a deluge of imitations." (Parentheticals in Garofalo.)
^The Blues (Documentary, Music), B. B. King, Ike Turner, Pinetop Perkins, Road Movies Filmproduktion, Vulcan Productions, September 28, 2003, retrievedMay 18, 2025{{citation}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
Barlow, William (1993). "Cashing In: 1900-1939". In Dates, Jannette L.; Barlow, William (eds.).Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media (2nd ed.). Howard University Press. p. 31.ISBN978-0-88258-178-1.
Welding, Peter; Brown, Toby, eds. (1991).Bluesland: Portraits of Twelve Major American Blues Masters. New York: Penguin Group. 253 + [2] pp.ISBN0-525-93375-1.
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