The blues of
our nation began deep down in the Mississippi Delta South. The Mississippi
Delta was fertile ground for the roots of the blues. With its history of
slavery, racial oppression, the Ku Klux Klan,
and Jim Crow laws, plus
baking heat, rampant illiteracy and poverty, the Delta was a cruel place for
many African Americans well into the middle of the 20th century. The blues documented the
experience of southern black better than any other form of cultural expression.
The blues originated on Southern plantations in the 19th Century. Its inventors
were slaves, ex-slaves and the descendants of slaves - African-American
sharecroppers who sang as they toiled in the cotton and vegetable fields. It's
generally accepted that the music evolved from African spirituals, African
chants, work songs, field hollers, rural fife and drum music, revivalist hymns,
and country dance music. It was quoted that Son House was asked where he
thought the blues comes from and he said, “People keep asking me where the blues
started and all I can say is that when I was a boy we always was singing in the
fields. Not real singing, you know, just hollerin’, but we made up songs about
things that was happening to us at the time, and I think that’s where the blues
started.”
The man who
has been self-proclaimed as the father of the blues is Mr. W. C. Handy. He was
the first to include Blues in a song, Memphis Blues in 1912. He once said,
"I've always felt that the blues deal with an epoch in our history, and
coming from the same people that gave us the spiritual, they reflected a
nominal freedom. All the blues that I've written are either historic or
folklore or folksong." In 1903,
W.C. Handy sees a bluesman playing guitar with a knife at a train station in
Mississippi and gets his inspiration. In 1912, his "Memphis Blues",
along with other blues songs are published as sheet music. Many names are remembered from the
beginning of the blues including: Willie Brown, Robert Johnson, Son House,
Tommy Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Charley Patton, Elmore James, Muddy
Waters, Skip James, and Bukka White; even Elvis Presley is regarded as a blues
artist. The blues grew up in the
Mississippi Delta just upriver from New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. Blues
and jazz have always influenced each other, and they still interact in
countless ways today. Generally, most blues music is comprised of 12 bars (or
measures). A specific series of notes is also utilized in the blues. The
individual parts of this scale are known as the blue notes. The blues were usually performed in
dusty juke joints. The first
songs weren't recorded and were only passed down orally until about
the 1930s. Once people like Charley Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson moved
their music to the places like Memphis and Chicago to get it recorded, it
became a boom of music. The Blues laid down the musical workings for the
inspirations for the next generations of music. Once the Delta blues made their way up
the Mississippi to urban areas, the music evolved into electrified Chicago
blues, other regional blues styles, and various jazz-blues hybrids. A decade or
so later the blues gave birth to rhythm 'n blues and rock 'n roll. Muddy Waters
said, “The blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll.”
I love the blues, from the sound,
the meaning, and the cultural aspects of it; the blues is a wonderful way of
speaking your heart. I personally write poetry and I know how hard it is to
speak your soul and heart, but also how exhilarating it is as well and I think
that the blues overlap with it in many ways. Because the blues has African
American roots it does mean a lot to me that my people could make something so
beautifully meaningful and still be socially accepted and be the framework for
other genres to build from. I love all music and to know the root of it all is
very inspiring wonderful knowledge to have. The blues evolved into jazz,
country, hip hop, R & B, etc. I believe that every single genre has pulled
something from blues.
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