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Blues is a music genre [3] ... Country blues performers often improvised, either without accompaniment or with only a banjo or guitar. Regional styles of country ...
- Overview
- History and notable musicians
- Influence
The origins of the blues are poorly documented. Blues developed in the southern United States after the American Civil War (1861–65). It was influenced by work songs and field hollers, minstrel show music, ragtime, church music, and the folk and popular music of the white population. Blues derived from and was largely played by Southern Black men, most of whom came from the milieu of agricultural workers. The earliest references to blues date back to the 1890s and early 1900s. In 1912 Black bandleader W.C. Handy’s composition “Memphis Blues” was published. It became very popular, and thereafter many other Tin Pan Alley songs entitled blues began to appear.
The rural blues developed in three principal regions, Georgia and the Carolinas, Texas, and Mississippi. The blues of Georgia and the Carolinas is noted for its clarity of enunciation and regularity of rhythm. Influenced by ragtime and white folk music, it is more melodic than the Texas and Mississippi styles. Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller were representative of this style. The Texas blues is characterized by high, clear singing accompanied by supple guitar lines that consist typically of single-string picked arpeggios rather than strummed chords. Blind Lemon Jefferson was by far the most influential Texas bluesman. Mississippi Delta blues is the most intense of the three styles and has been the most influential. Vocally, it is the most speechlike, and the guitar accompaniment is rhythmic and percussive; a slide or bottleneck is often used. The Mississippi style is represented by Charley Patton, Eddie (“Son”) House, and Robert Johnson, among others.
The first blues recordings were made in the 1920s by Black women, beginning with Mamie Smith. Her version of American composer and pianist Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920 was so successful that the General Phonograph Company’s OKeh label launched a series called “Original Race Records.” It was advertised exclusively to African Americans in Black-owned newspapers. Other white-owned record companies were quick to target the Black market with their own “race record” lines. Blues singers Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Clara Smith recorded for Columbia, while Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, and Alberta Hunter recorded for Paramount, which billed itself as the “Premier Race Label.” Over the next several years, Black musical director Clarence Williams signed and recorded for OKeh many leading blues, jazz, and gospel artists, including Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Lonnie Johnson. The rise of the “race records” industry spread the blues to audiences previously unfamiliar with the form.
The Great Depression and the World Wars caused the geographic dispersal of the blues as millions of Blacks left the South for the cities of the North. The blues became adapted to the more sophisticated urban environment. Lyrics took up urban themes, and the blues ensemble developed as the solo bluesman was joined by a pianist or harmonica player and then by a rhythm section consisting of bass and drums. The electric guitar and the amplified harmonica created a driving sound of great rhythmic and emotional intensity.
The origins of the blues are poorly documented. Blues developed in the southern United States after the American Civil War (1861–65). It was influenced by work songs and field hollers, minstrel show music, ragtime, church music, and the folk and popular music of the white population. Blues derived from and was largely played by Southern Black men, most of whom came from the milieu of agricultural workers. The earliest references to blues date back to the 1890s and early 1900s. In 1912 Black bandleader W.C. Handy’s composition “Memphis Blues” was published. It became very popular, and thereafter many other Tin Pan Alley songs entitled blues began to appear.
The rural blues developed in three principal regions, Georgia and the Carolinas, Texas, and Mississippi. The blues of Georgia and the Carolinas is noted for its clarity of enunciation and regularity of rhythm. Influenced by ragtime and white folk music, it is more melodic than the Texas and Mississippi styles. Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller were representative of this style. The Texas blues is characterized by high, clear singing accompanied by supple guitar lines that consist typically of single-string picked arpeggios rather than strummed chords. Blind Lemon Jefferson was by far the most influential Texas bluesman. Mississippi Delta blues is the most intense of the three styles and has been the most influential. Vocally, it is the most speechlike, and the guitar accompaniment is rhythmic and percussive; a slide or bottleneck is often used. The Mississippi style is represented by Charley Patton, Eddie (“Son”) House, and Robert Johnson, among others.
The first blues recordings were made in the 1920s by Black women, beginning with Mamie Smith. Her version of American composer and pianist Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920 was so successful that the General Phonograph Company’s OKeh label launched a series called “Original Race Records.” It was advertised exclusively to African Americans in Black-owned newspapers. Other white-owned record companies were quick to target the Black market with their own “race record” lines. Blues singers Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Clara Smith recorded for Columbia, while Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, and Alberta Hunter recorded for Paramount, which billed itself as the “Premier Race Label.” Over the next several years, Black musical director Clarence Williams signed and recorded for OKeh many leading blues, jazz, and gospel artists, including Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Lonnie Johnson. The rise of the “race records” industry spread the blues to audiences previously unfamiliar with the form.
The Great Depression and the World Wars caused the geographic dispersal of the blues as millions of Blacks left the South for the cities of the North. The blues became adapted to the more sophisticated urban environment. Lyrics took up urban themes, and the blues ensemble developed as the solo bluesman was joined by a pianist or harmonica player and then by a rhythm section consisting of bass and drums. The electric guitar and the amplified harmonica created a driving sound of great rhythmic and emotional intensity.
The blues have influenced many other musical styles. Blues and jazz are closely related; such seminal jazzmen as Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong employed blues elements in their music. Soul music and rhythm and blues also show obvious blues tonalities and forms. The blues have had their greatest influence on rock music. Early rock singers such as Elvis Presley often used blues material. British rock musicians in the 1960s, especially the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and John Mayall, were strongly influenced by the blues, as were such American rock musicians as Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, and the Allman Brothers Band.
The blues also influenced American literature, especially during the Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918–37). Black writers such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Jean Toomer valued the blues as an indigenous art form of oppressed people, a secular equivalent of the spirituals, and an antidote to bourgeois Black assimilationism. In Hughes’s second book, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), he turned to the blues for a poetic form derived from and answering to the desires, needs, and aesthetic sensibilities of the Black working class.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Feb 24, 2017 · The word “blues” already existed in popular song distribution for sad songs and love songs, so many song titles had “blues” in them long before blues music saw print. To provide an idea of what this early blues sounded like, here is Hattie Ellis singing her own composition, “ Desert Blues ,” in a field recording by John and Ruby Lomax made in Texas in 1939.
Nov 10, 2024 · Blues, secular folk music created by African Americans in the early 20th century, originally in the South. The simple but expressive forms of the blues became by the 1960s one of the most important influences on the development of popular music. Learn more about blues, including notable musicians.
- The blues is a form of secular folk music created by African Americans in the early 20th century, originally in the South. Although instrumental ac...
- In the 19th century the English phrase blue devils referred to the upsetting hallucinations brought on by severe alcohol withdrawal. This was later...
- The origins of the blues are poorly documented, but it is believed that after the American Civil War (1861–65), formerly enslaved African Americans...
- In the early 20th century the blues (among several other popular genres of music) was considered seductive and destructive by parents and clergy wh...
- The blues has a distinct melancholic and somber tone, which is achieved through vocal techniques such as melisma, rhythmic techniques such as synco...
Sep 15, 2020 · Louis Armstrong: West End Blues, by Louis Armstrong. On June 28, 1928, a 26-year-old Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five made one of the most important jazz recordings of the 20 century. Jazz critic Murray Horwitz described the opening bars of West End Blues as “the most important 15 seconds in all of American music.” The trumpet solo is ...
Jazz Origins. The history of jazz music is deeply linked to and embedded with the history of New Orleans. As ragtime and the blues began to circulate, New Orleans incubated music that would come to be called jazz, and the unique social construction of the city provided a cadre of musicians as well as an audience to support and sustain a particular form of musical expression.
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The historian Sylviane Diouf and ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik identify Islamic music as an influence on blues music. [11] [12] 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 music, noting that both have similar lyrics praising God, melody, note ...
