BLUES Blues sheet music was first published in 1908. Blues has evolved from the unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves imported from West Africa and rural blacks into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States. Though blues, as it is now known, can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and the African call-and-response tradition, transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar, the blues form itself bears no resemblance to the melodic styles of the West African griots, and the influences are faint and tenuous. In particular, no specific African musical form can be identified as the single direct ancestor of the blues. However many blues elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa. In jazz and blues, a blue note is a note sung or played at a slightly lower pitch than that of the major scale for expressive purposes. Typically the alteration is a semitone or less, but this varies among performers and genres. The existence of the blue note within African-American music ultimately derives from the fact that the equal temperament utilised in western diatonic harmony is an artifice or compromise originally employed in the eighteenth century to address the problems posed in the creation of keyboard instruments. Hence the blue note is an attempt to correct this artifice by playing a note that is closer to the interval as it exists in the natural harmonic series. Country blues, in particular, features wide variations from the diatonic pitches with emotive blue-notes. Blue notes are often seen as akin to relative pitches found in traditional African work songs. That blue notes pre-date their use in blues and have an African origin is attested by English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylors A Negro Love Song, from his The African Suite for Piano composed in 1898, which contains blue third and seventh notes. The Diddley bow (a homemade one-stringed instrument found in parts of the American South in the early twentieth century) and the banjo are African-derived instruments that may have helped in the transfer of African performance techniques into the early blues instrumental vocabulary. The banjo seems to be directly imported from western African music. It is similar to the musical instrument that griots and other Africans such as the Igbo played (called halam or akonting by African peoples such as the Wolof, Fula and Mandinka). However, in the 1920s, when country blues began to be recorded, the use of the banjo in blues music was quite marginal and limited. Blues music also adopted elements from the Ethiopian airs, minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment. The style also was closely related to ragtime, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved the original melodic patterns of African music. The musical forms and styles that are now considered the blues as well as modern country music arose in the same regions during the 19th century in the southern United States. Recorded blues and country can be found from as far back as the 1920s, when the popular record industry developed and created marketing categories called 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. Though musicologists can now attempt to define the blues narrowly in terms of certain chord structures and lyric strategies 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 the Mississippi Delta. The Mississippi Delta does not refer to the main delta by the city of New Orleans, but rather to a delta-shaped (Δ) region of tributaries to the Mississippi in the northwestern part of the state of Mississippi. 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 the black 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. The origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals. 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 Christian hymns, in particular those of Isaac Watts, which were very popular. Before the blues gained its formal definition in terms of chord progressions, it was defined as the secular counterpart of the spirituals. It was the low-down (immoral) music played by the rural Blacks. Depending on the religious community a musician belonged to, it was more or less considered as a sin to play this low-down music: blues was the devils music. Musicians were therefore segregated into two categories: gospel and blues singers, guitar preachers and songsters. However, at the time rural Black music began to get recorded in the 1920s, both categories of musicians used very similar techniques: call-and-response patterns, blue notes, and slide guitars. Hence, it may not have been the blues style itself, but rather some specific blues lyrics that proved problematic to the Christians. Nevertheless, Gospel music was using musical forms that were compatible with Christian hymns and therefore less marked by the blues form than its secular counterpart. C. W. 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. Hwever, his compositions can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Cuban habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime. Handys signature work was the Saint Louis Blues, composed in 1914. In the 1920s, the blues became a major element of African American and American popular music, reaching white audiences via Handys arrangements and the classic female blues performers. The blues evolved from informal performances in bars to entertainment in both theaters and nightclubs, like the Cotton Club, and juke (dance) joints such as the bars along Beale Street in Memphis. Several record companies, such as the American Record Corporation, Okeh Records, and Paramount Records, began to record African American music. As the recording industry grew, country blues performers like Bo Carter, Jimmie Rodgers (country singer), Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red and Blind Blake became more popular in the African American community. Kentucky-born Sylvester Weaver was in 1923 the first to record the slide guitar style, in which a guitar is fretted with a knife blade or the sawed-off neck of a bottle. The slide guitar became an important part of the Delta blues. 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 U.S. state of Georgia also had an early slide tradition, with Curley Weaver, Tampa Red, Barbecue Bob Hicks and James Arnold as representatives of this style. The lively Memphis blues style, which developed in the 1920s and 1930s, near Memphis, Tennessee, was influenced by jug bands such as the Memphis Jug Band or the Gus Cannons Jug Stompers. Performers such as Frank Stokes, Sleepy John Estes, Robert Wilkins, Joe McCoy, Casey Bill Weldon and Memphis Minnie used a variety of unusual instruments such as washboard, fiddle, kazoo or mandolin. Memphis Minnie was famous for her virtuoso guitar style. Pianist Memphis Slim began his career in Memphis, but his distinct style was smoother and had some swing elements. Many blues musicians based in Memphis moved to Chicago in the late 1930s or early 1940s and became part of the urban blues movement, which blended country music and electric blues.
Posted on: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 00:56:32 +0000
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