The Birth of the Blues

The Birth of the Blues

The first post in One Tree Many Roots checked the black soul of Jazz and its unique place in modern music, this time we look at the beating heart of all popular modern music, the Blues. It’s a universal musical language for those who can’t read music, and has trained the ears of those who can, to enjoy its liberating simplicity.

So, where did it come from come from? And what did it do next?

Before we begin

Dockery PlantationThe advent of The Blues in the late 1800s was a triumph out of adversity, with the creation of a musical form that sits behind every modern musical genre. Born out of slavery, this Black American phenomenon is a testament to human resilience, ultimately informing the musical landscape of all western influenced cultures, and many beyond. Don’t forget to look at the Playlist links at the end of the post to give you a soundtrack for the original blues.

At the Birth

The fundamental appeal of the Blues is its aching simplicity. Its roots though are complex and speak to a fundamental condition of humankind. We are creatures with many influences, our genes are a mix of traditions, our lives a multitude of motivations. Social media companies try to box us into personas, but the different parts of our lives pull us in many directions and we are often more than the sum of our parts.

The Blues was born out of the slave trade in a new country where European migrants had brought their religious, military and folk traditions. America was a new construction founded on the bitter struggle for survival, that set itself free from the constraints of European control and created the means to take control of its world. Like many powerful new nations it disregarded the original occupants of that world, and enslaved the people of another.

The Blues emerged slowly after the American Civil War from the call and response field holler and the percussive rhythms that originally filled the slave-ships from Africa, but it was forged by long exposure to the folk songs and piano sonatas of Europe, the hymns of the devout (religion being a primary foundation of  new America) and the march of the military band. The fiddle, the banjo, the Diddley Bow, these were instruments that did not require musical knowledge, and accompanied the main instrument imported from the African colonies – the voice. In the Slave states of the US;  Mississippi, Georgia, the Carolinas, Texas and the rest, the African Americans sang from memory, played by ear, vocalised the pain of absence, the loss of family, the longing for relief from endless labor, the grief of a people who had lost their liberty but not their souls. The Blue note, a flattened third, fifth or seventh is a musical expression of that loss, a departure from the grand major and minor keys of classical music in which the European Americans still immersed themselves long after the despatch of the English in the Revolutionary War.

The Impact of slavery

Although slavery was abolished in 1865, the Jim Crow segregation of the Southern States meant that African American communities were forced to develop their own entertainment in a crucible of their own. In 1880s St Louis and New Orleans Rag-Time developed, probably from a combination of Creole influences and the transfer of banjo style rhythms and arpeggios to upright piano playing (instruments had become more widely available, cheaper and the acquisition of a piano lent an air of upward mobility). Playing by ear, a feel for rhythm and dance was essential for the music and it became commercial enough for printed music to be created, and recordings to be made, alongside the music hall songs of popular favour in the 1890s.

This period, in the run up to the early 1900s, saw a slow shift from plantation to city as itinerant songsters and traveling minstrels migrated to cities along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Simple chorded songs, dance pieces and folk hero ballads began to mix in the culture milieu with spiritual ensembles. The simple instruments evolved to include the guitar, but the sentiments of loss and grief continued in the songs, often with the addition of subtle lamentations that criticised the white man for their position in the hierarchy. Often, the music itself was upbeat, designed to lift the spirits rather than dwell in the misery of the condition, and that, combined with the ragtime spirit and the joy of the spirituals contrived to fashion the early identity of the African-American as the driver of a new form of music, The Blues, at the turn into the 1900s.

Early Sheet Music for the Blues

From Ragtime to the Blues

The name itself was perhaps first used in print in 1908 by New Orleans violinist Antonio Maggio’s ‘I Got the Blues.’ But it seems to have been remembered before then by Big Bill Broonzy and Leadbelly as youths in Mississippi and Louisiana of the 1890s. It does seem to be the case that black composers of that period, such as George Walker and Bert Williams, are less well known because their work was sung and recorded by white singers but what we can call folk blues songs such as ‘Make Me A Pallet On The Floor’, ‘Joe Turner Blues’, ‘East St. Louis’, ‘Stack O’ Lee’ and ‘John Henry’ were well established by 1910, with the great W.C. Handy’s ‘St.Louis Blues’ being the most popular early recorded blues song, composed much earlier but realised in 1914, breaking all sales records for sheet music and piano rolls which were the Billboard Charts of the time.

Elements of The Blues

Charley Patton, probably 1929

Charley Patton, 1929. Courtesy Alamy / Flame Tree Publishing

The Early blues flowed into many directions, and for a while around the time of First World War Ragtime, Jazz and The Blues co-mingled with dance hall music. As Rag-time fell away and Jazz emerged as a powerful music force The Blues retained its distinctive simplicity and allowed a virtuosity to emerge in the vocal and instrumental performance of artists such as the ‘Mother of the Blues’ Ma Rainey (her Paramount label recordings of 1923 cemented her reputation as a flamboyant and versatile artist) and the exceptional Delta bluesman Charley Patton who as a mixed Black, White and Indigenous American artist was raised in the Mississippi Dockery Plantation in 1891 and suffered only by being recorded so poorly late in his life in 1929.

Where Did it Go from Here?

That’s a simple question to answer. Without The Blues there would be no Jazz, Country, Rock ’n’ Roll, Rap, Afrobeat and more. The simple chord structure, the repetition, the steady beat and the liberation of musicality over formality has allowed millions of artists to explore and flourish. Picking up where the folk songs of the European past left off, The Blues has liberated music from the elite, while informing and growing from its mutual influence. The work of Miles Davies, Taylor Swift, Sidney Bechet, Carlos Santana, Fela Kuti, James Brown and George Gershwin would be impossible. You can hear the call and response in rap music, the chord structures in rock and roll, the blues notes in the latest album by Adele. The Blues is everywhere, and I haven’t even mentioned the indomitable 12 bar progression!

Afterword on The Blues

The Blues had become an un unspoken language for most western popular musicians, and many beyond, to voice and create. The instinctive musicality of the three chord blues structure allows any community of musicians, with or without music knowledge, beginners and the experienced alike, singers, guitarists, pianists, percussionists, brass and woodwind players, to gather and play together, to create new ideas, to build on foundations and create anew. The language of The Blues has become universal.

Playlists

Links


A version of this post originally appeared in the now defunct music magazine Cool:MusicMag