Blues
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| Blues | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins: | African American spirituals and work songs |
| Cultural origins: | West African music, brought by slaves to 19th century Southern United States, especially the Mississippi Delta |
| Typical instruments: | Guitar - Piano - Harmonica - Bass - Drums - Saxophone - Vocals |
| Mainstream popularity: | In its pure form, very strong; a highly influential music genre |
| Derivative forms: | jazz, R&B, rock, soul, hip hop |
| Subgenres | |
| Classic female blues - Country blues - Delta blues - Jazz blues - Jump blues - Piano blues - Boogie-woogie | |
| Fusion genres | |
| Blues-rock - Soul blues | |
| Regional scenes | |
| African blues - Atlanta blues - British blues - Chicago blues - Detroit blues - East Coast blues - European blues - Kansas City blues - Louisiana blues - Memphis blues - New Orleans blues - Piedmont blues - St. Louis blues - Swamp blues - Texas blues - West Coast blues | |
| Other topics | |
| Genres - Musicians - Origins - Blues scale | |
- For other uses, see blues (disambiguation)
Blues is a vocal and instrumental music form often based on the twelve-bar chord progression. Blues emerged in the African-American community of the United States and evolved from West African spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants and has its earliest stylistic roots in West Africa. The form has been a major influence on later American and Western popular music, finding expression in ragtime, jazz, big bands, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and country music, as well as conventional pop songs and even modern classical music [1].
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Characteristics
There are few characteristics common to all blues, as the style takes its shape from the peculiarities of each individual performance [2]. Some characteristics, however, have been a presence since prior to the creation of the modern blues, and are common to most styles of African American music. The earliest blues-like music was a "functional expression, rendered in a call-and-response style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure" [3]. This pre-blues music was adapted from the field shouts and hollers performed during slave times, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content" [4].
Many of these blues elements, such as the call-and-response format, can be traced back to the music of Africa; author Sylviane Diouf has pointed to several specific traits, like the use of melisma and a wavy, nasal intonation, that suggest a connection between the Muslim music of West Africa and the blues [5]. The blues can be seen as based on European ideas of harmonic structure, with the African call-and-response transformed into the interplay of the singing and the guitar [6].
Blues later adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs" of minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment [7]. The style was also closely related to ragtime, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music" [8].
Songs from this period had many different structures, although the twelve-, eight-bar, or sixteen-bar structure based on tonic, subdominant and dominant chords became the most common [9]. Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the lowered third and dominant seventh (so-called blue notes) of the associated major scale [10]. The use of blue notes, as well as the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics, are indicative of the blues' West African pedigree.
What is now recognizable as the standard 12-bar blues form is documented from oral history and sheet music as appearing in African-American communities throughout the region along the lower Mississippi River during the decade of the 1900s (and performed by white bands in New Orleans at least since 1908). One of these early sites of blues evolution was along Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee.
Lyrics
Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often with the singer voicing his or her "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, hard times" [11]. Many of the oldest blues records contain gritty, realistic lyrics, in contrast to much of the music being recorded at the time. One of the more extreme examples, "Down in the Alley" by Memphis Minnie, is about a prostitute having sex with men in an alley. Music such as this was called gut-bucket blues. The term gut-bucket refers to a type of home-made bass instrument.
Gut-bucket blues and the rowdy juke-joint venues where it often was played earned early blues an unsavory reputation. Proper, church-going people shunned it, and preachers railed against it as sinful. And because it often treated the hardships and injustices of life, the blues gained an association in some quarters with misery and oppression, however it was some of America's first socially aware music. But the blues was about more than hard times; it could be humorous and raunchy as well.
- 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.
Author Ed Morales has claimed that Yoruba mythology played a part in early blues, citing Robert Johnson's "Crossroads" as a "thinly veiled reference to Eleggua, the orisha in charge of the crossroads" [12].
The original lyrical form of the blues was probably a single line, repeated three times. It was only later that the standard stanza of a line, repeated once and then followed by a single line conclusion, became standard. This form was called the twelve-bar blues [13]
- Woke up this morning with the blues all in my bed
- Yes, I woke up this morning with the blues all in my bed
- Fixed my breakfast, the blues was all in my bread
In addition to the conventional twelve-bar blues, there are many blues in 8-bar form, such as "How Long Blues," "Trouble in Mind," and Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway." There are also 16-bar blues, as in Ray Charles's instrumental, "Sweet 16 Bars".
Musical style
The basic twelve-bar lyric framework of a blues composition is reflected by a standard harmonic progression of twelve bars, in 4/4 or 2/4 time:
- Tonic/subdominant/tonic/tonic// subdominant/subdominant/tonic/tonic// dominant/subdominant/tonic/tonic-dominant.
The lyrics generally end on the last beat of the tenth bar or the first beat of the eleventh bar, and the final two bars are given to the instrumentalist as a break; the harmony of this two-bar break can be extremely complex, sometimes consisting of single notes that defy analysis in terms of chords. The final beat, however, is almost always strongly grounded in the dominant seventh (V7), to provide tension for the next verse. Musicians sometimes refer to twelve-bar blues as "B-flat" blues because it is the traditional pitch of the tenor sax, trumpet/cornet, clarinet and trombone.
Even more characteristic of blues is the melodic scale. While the twelve-bar harmonic progression had been intermittently used for centuries, the revolutionary aspect of blues was the frequent use of the flatted third and flatted seventh, and even flatted fifth, in the melody, together with techniques of crushing (playing directly adjacent notes at the same time, i.e. diminished second) and sliding (similar to using grace notes) [14]. A classical musician will generally play a grace note distinctly, however, a blues singer or harmonica player will glissando; a pianist or guitarist might crush the two notes and then release the grace note. Blues harmonies also use the subdominant major-minor seventh, and the tonic major-minor seventh is often used in place of the tonic.
Blues is occasionally played in a minor key. The scale differs little from the traditional minor, except for the occasional use of a flatted fifth in the tonic, often crushed by the singer or lead instrument with the major fifth in the harmony. Janis Joplin's rendition of "Ball and Chain", accompanied by Big Brother and the Holding Company, provides a recent example of this technique. Also, minor-key blues is most often structured in sixteen bars rather than twelve -- e.g "St. James Infirmary Blues" and Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me" -- and was often influenced by evangelical religious music.
The blues chords (also named twelve-bar blues) are typically a set of three differents chords played over a twelve bar scheme:
- I - I - I - I
- IV - IV - I - I
- V - IV - I - I
That would mean, if we're playing in the tonality of F, the chords would be as follow:
- F - F - F - F
- Bb - Bb - F - F
- C - Bb - F - F
Note that most of the time, every chord is played in the dominant seventh (7th) form. Frequently, the last chord
Dance
Blues is sometimes danced as an informal type of swing dancing with no fixed patterns and a heavy focus on connection, sensuality and improvisation, often with body contact. However, most blues dance moves are inspired by traditional blues dancing. Although usually done to blues music, it can be done to any slow tempoed 4/4 music, including "club" music.
History
Blues has evolved from the sparse music of poor black laborers into a wide variety of complex styles and subgenres, spawning regional variations across the United States and, later, Europe, Africa and elsewhere. What is now considered "blues" as well as what is now "country music" both arose at approximately the same time and place. Both recorded blues and country can be traced to the 1920s, when the popular record industry developed and created marketing categories called "race music" and "hillbilly music" to sell music by and for blacks and whites respectively. At the time, there was no clear musical division between "blues" and "country", except for the race of the performer, and even that was sometimes incorrectly documented by the record companies [15].
When the blues was first recorded, there were two major divisions, one being a traditional rural country blues and the other a diverse set of more polished city blues or urban blues. Country blues was often unaccompanied, or performed with only a banjo or guitar, and was highly-improvised, while the city blues was much more codified and ornate [16]. Later, the blues evolved into a bewildering array of styles, some of which had a formative influence on other kinds of American popular music, most importantly including jazz and rock and roll.
Pre-war blues
Flush with the success of appropriating the ragtime craze for commercial gain, the American sheet music publishing industry wasted no time in pursuing similar commercial success with the blues. In 1912, three popular blues-like compositions were published, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley adoption of blues elements: "Baby Seals' Blues" by Arthur Seals, "Dallas Blues" by Hart Wand and Memphis Blues" by W. C. Handy [17]. Handy went on to become a very popular composer, and billed himself as the "Father of the Blues", though his compositions are only debatably blues at all [18]; they can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Latin habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime [19].
In the 1920s, the blues became a major element of American popular music. With the rise of the recording industry, there was increased popularity of country blues singers and guitarists like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Son House and Blind Blake. Jefferson was one of the few country blues performers to widely record, and may have been the first to record the slide guitar style, in which a guitar is fretted with a knife blade, the sawed-off neck of a liquor bottle, or other implement; the slide guitar went on to become an important part of the Delta blues [20].
There were many regional styles of country blues in the early 20th century, of which a few became especially important. The Delta blues was a rootsy style of country blues, accompanied most typically by slide guitar and harmonica, characterized by a sparse style and passionate vocalization. The most influential performer of this style is usually said to be Robert Johnson,[21] who was little recorded but combined elements of both urban and rural blues in a unique manner. Along with Robert Johnson, major artists of this style are Charley Patton and Son House. Aside from the Delta blues, Southeast "delicate and lyrical" Piedmont blues tradition was also important, best represented by people like Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller [22].
Urban male performers included one of the most popular black musicians of the era, Big Bill Broonzy, and Leroy Carr, who made the unusual choice to accompany himself on the piano to some acclaim [23]. However, classic female urban blues singers were extremely popular in the 1920s, among them Mamie Smith, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Victoria Spivey. These women were among the first major musical stars in the country, having begun their recording careers beginning in 1923. Bessie Smith is perhaps the most well-known and respected of these women, and was known as one of the top performers of the day, and was called the "Empress of the Blues" [24]; her mentor, Ma Rainey, was similarly respected and is called the "Mother of Blues". Both performers used a "method of singing each song around centre tones, perhaps in order to project her voice more easily to the back of a room", while Smith "would also choose to 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" [25].
Early post-war blues
After World War II and in the 1950s increased urbanization and the use of amplification led to new styles of electric blues music, popular in cities such as Chicago, Detroit and Kansas City.
One kind of early 1940s urban blues was the jump blues, a style heavily influenced by big band music and characterized by the use of the guitar in the rhythm section, a jazzy, up-tempo sound, declamatory vocals and the use of the saxophone or other brass instruments. The jump blues of people like Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner later became the primary basis for rock and roll and rhythm and blues [26].
Another important style of 1940s urban blues was boogie-woogie, a style characterized by a regular bass figure, an ostinato and the most familiar example of shifts of level, in the left hand which elaborates on each chord and trills and decorations from the right hand. Though most often piano based, it is not strictly a solo piano style, and is also used to accompany singers and as a solo part in bands and small combos. Boogie-woogie was pioneered by the Chicago-based Jimmy Yancey; Chicago also produced other musicians in the style, like Clarence "Pine Top" Smith and Earl 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" [27].
Chicago became in the early fifties the capital of the Blues: Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed are the main representative of the early Chicago blues; they all recorded for the Chess Records company. The Chicago blues of the 1950s is characterized by the use of electric guitar (sometimes slide guitar), harp, traditional bass and drums. Nevertheless, some musicians of the same artistic movement, such as Elmore James or J. B. Lenoir are also using saxophones but more as a rythm support than as solo instruments. The Chicago blues is influenced to a large extent by the Mississippi blues style because most artists of this period were migrants from the Mississippi region. However other artists popular at this time, such as T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker, show up different influences which are not directly related to the Chicago style.
Blues in the 60s and 70s
By the beginning of the 1960s, African American music like rock and roll and soul were parts of mainstream popular music. White performers like Elvis Presley and Bill Haley had brought black music to new audiences, both within the United States and abroad. Though many listeners simply enjoyed the catchy pop tunes of the day, others were inspired to learn more about the roots of rock, soul, R&B and gospel. Especially in the United Kingdom, many young men and women formed bands to emulate blues legends. By the end of the decade, white-performed blues in a number of styles, mostly fusions of blues and rock, had come to dominate popular music across much of the world.
Blues masters such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters continued to perform to enthusiastic audiences, inspiring new artists steeped in traditional blues, such as New York born Taj Mahal. B.B. King was revealed as a major guitarist in the 50s but reached his height in the 60s. His virtuoso guitar technique made him called the king of the blues. In contrast with the chicago style King uses no slide guitar, no harp but a strong brass support (saxophone, trumpet, trombone). King's style sound sometimes like an eternal fight of his guitar vs. the brass band.
In the late sixties, the so-called West Side blues emerged in Chicago with Magic Sam, Magic Slim and Otis Rush. In contrast with the early Chicago style, this style is characterized by a strong rhythm support (a rhythm and a bass electric guitar, and drums), the absence of harp or saxophone and a lesser melodic contain. New talented musicians like Albert King, Buddy Guy, or Luther Allison appeared. Their powerful style is a kind of fusion between the Chicago style and Rock music à la Jimmy Hendrix. They don't use harp but often use strongly amplified electric guitar.
The appeal of blues remained strong in later decades. The music of the Civil Rights and Free Speech movements in the U.S. prompted a resurgence of interest in American roots music in general and in early African-American music, specifically. But what made blues really come across to the young white audiences in the early 1960s was the style of British blues that developed in England, when dozens of bands such as Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, and Cream took to covering the classic blues numbers from either the Delta or Chicago blues traditions. The British blues musicians of the early 1960s would ultimately inspire a number of American blues-rock fusion performers, including Canned Heat, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, The J. Geils Band and others, who at first discovered the form by listening to British performers, but in turn went on to explore the blues tradition on their own. One blues-rock performer, Jimi Hendrix was a rarity in his field at the time, a black man who played psychedelic blues-rock. Hendrix a virtuoso guitarist, a pioneer in the innovative use of distortion and feedback in his music [28]. Through these artists and others, both earlier and later, blues music has been strongly influential in the development of rock music.
- See also: British blues, Blues-rock
Blues from the 1980s to the present
Since 1980, blues has continued to thrive in both traditional and new forms through the continuing work of Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder and the music of Robert Cray, Albert Collins, Keb' Mo', and others. The Texas rock-blues style emerged mostly based on an original use of guitars for both solo and rhythms. In contrast with the West Side blues, the Texas style is strongly influenced by the British rock-blues movement. Major artists in this style are Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and ZZ Top.
Around this time blues publications such as Living Blues and Blues Revue began appearing at newstands, major cities began forming blues societies and outdoor blues festivals became more common. More nightclubs and venues emerged, such as Manny's Car Wash in New York, the Slippery Noodle Inn in Indianapolis, and the Zoo Bar in Lincoln, Nebraska. In the 1990s and today blues performers are found touching elements from almost every musical genre.
Social and musical impact
Like jazz, rock and roll and hip hop music, blues has been accused of being the "devil's music" and of inciting violence and other poor behavior [29]. In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable, the first of many styles of African American music to be thus critcized, especially as white audiences began listening to the blues during the 1920s [30].
As the origin of the blues scale, the blues has exerted a profound influence on many styles of music. The blues scale frequently is found in non-blues musical forms, such as popular songs like Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night", blues ballads like "Since I Fell for You" and "Please Send Me Someone to Love", and even orchestral works like George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Concerto in F." Indeed, the blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music and informs many modal frames, especially the ladder of thirds as in "A Hard Day's Night."
In the early twentieth century, W.C. Handy made the blues more respectable to non-black Americans. The formally trained musician, composer and arranger was a key popularizer of blues. Handy was one of the first to transcribe and then orchestrate blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers. Extremely prolific over his long life, Handy's signature work was the St. Louis Blues.
Blues forms turn up in some surprising places. The theme to the televised Batman had a blues structure, as did teen idol Fabian's first hit, "Turn Me Loose". Likewise, many jazz classics, such as Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time", also use the blues form without lyrics. The first great country music star Jimmie Rodgers was a blues performer. Guitarist/vocalist Tracy Chapman's hit, "Give Me One Reason," was a 12-bar blues and has, as a result, become a contemporary blues club standard in Chicago.
Influence on rock and roll
The influence of both the twelve-bar structure and the blues scale on rock-and-roll music was so profound that rock-and-roll can properly be classified as an outgrowth of blues, or even "blues with a back beat". Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog", with its unmodified twelve-bar structure (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 to a new genre by rhythm and sheer energy. One can hardly find a major song from rock-and-roll's revolutionary period that is not, at its roots, a blues composition transformed by rhythm: "Johnny B. Good", "Blue Suede Shoes", "Whole Lotta' Shakin' Going On", "Tutti-Frutti", "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", "What'd I Say", and "Long Tall Sally".
The early African-American rock musicians retained the frank sexual themes of blues. "Got a gal named Sue, knows just what to do" or "See the girl with the red dress on, she knows how to do it all night long" are hard to mistake. Even the subject matter of "Hound Dog" contains well-hidden sexual double-entendre.
More sanitized early "white" rock borrowed both the structure and harmonics of blues, although minimizing harmonic creativity and sexual nuance, such as Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock". Many white musicians who covered black rock songs would go so far as to change the words; possibly the most famous example was Pat Boone's cover of "Tutti Frutti", which originally started "Tutti frutti, loose booty . . . a wop bop a lu bop, a good Goddamn."
Other influences on rock and roll are often cited, especially country music and R&B. It is more accurate to say, however, from a musical perspective, that artists in these musical subgroups adapted blues structure and harmony to their distinctive styles, accents, and vocabularies.
Music samples
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References
- William Barlow (1993). Cashing In, Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media: 31
- Clarke, Donald (1995). The Rise and Fall of Popular Music, St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312115733
- Ewen, David (1957). Panorama of American Popular Music, Prentice Hall. ISBN 0136483607
- Ferris, Jean (1993). America's Musical Landscape, Brown & Benchmark. ISBN 0697125165
- Garofalo, Reebee (1997). Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the USA, Allyn & Bacon. ISBN 0205137032
- Morales, Ed (2003). The Latin Beat, Da Capo Press. ISBN 0306810182
- Schuller, Gunther (1968). Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195040430
- Southern, Eileen (1997). The Music of Black Americans, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. ISBN 0393038432
- "Muslim Roots of the Blues". SFGate. URL accessed on August 24, 2005.
Notes
- ^ Ferris, pg. 228 Blues has had inestimable influence upon the development of not only jazz but every genre of American music.
- ^ Southern, pg. 333
- ^ Garofalo, pg. 44
- ^ Ferris, pg. 229
- ^ SFGate
- ^ Morales, pg 276 Morales attributes this claim to John Storm Roberts in Black 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.
- ^ Garofalo, pg. 44 Gradually, instrumental and harmonic accompaniment were added, reflecting increasing cross-cultural contact. Garofalo goes on to cite others mentioning the "Ethiopian airs" and "Negro spirituals".
- ^ Schuller, cited in Garofalo, pg. 27
- ^ Garofalo, pgs. 46-47
- ^ Ewen, pg. 143
- ^ Ewen, pgs. 142-143
- ^ Ferris, pg. 230
- ^ Morales, pg. 277
- ^ Garofalo, pgs. 44-47 As marketing categories, designations like race and hillbilly 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 they were separate. Garofalo goes on to later claim that artists were sometimes listed in the wrong racial category in record company catalogues.
- ^ Grace notes were common in the Baroque and Classical periods, but they acted as ornamentation rather than as part of the harmonic structure. Mozart comes very close in the slow movement of his Piano Concerto No. 21, holding a flatted fifth in the dominant for a full quarter-note. But this was a technique for building unbearable tenion for resolution into the major fifth, while a blues melody could sustain the flatted fifth indefinitely as part of the scale. In other words both a blues musician and Mozart could slide from a flatted mi to a major mi over a dominant chord, but the blues musician could also use the flatted mi as a harmonic resolution in a major key.
- ^ Garofalo, pg. 47
- ^ Southern, pg. 332
- ^ Garofalo, pg. 27; Garofalo cites 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 acks, who wasted little time in turning out a deluge of imitations. {parentheticals in Garofalo)
- ^ Garofalo, pg. 27
- ^ Morales, pg. 277
- ^ Clarke, pg. 138
- ^ Clarke, pg. 141
- ^ Clarke, pg. 139
- ^ Clarke, pg. 138
- ^ Ewen, pg. 146
- ^ Clarke, pg. 137
- ^ Garofalo, pg. 76
- ^ Garofalo, pg. 47
- ^ Garofalo, pgs. 224-225
- ^ SFGate
- ^ Garofalo, pg. 27
External links
- The mother of all blueslinks collection
- Blues radio stations
- Blues Foundation
- article on possible connections between Muslim music and the blues
- Music from Florida Folklife Collection, available free for public use from the State Archives of Florida
