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Beginnings of Traditional African Music
Two distinct styles of music emerge in the Sudanic Belt of West Africa: An Arabian-Islamic style and an ancient Nigritic style. The first was brought to Africa via the Saharan trade routes along with the Islamic religion - Islamic prayer call melisma soon became embedded in African music. The second style was characterized by "work rhythms" with off-beat so-called "blue notes" serving to accent the songs. This style pioneered the pentatonic chord progression the blues genre is famous for. -
Africans Forcibly Brought to America
European colonialists in the 17th century began travelling to Africa and enslaving the natives as a less expensive alternative to paying domestic servants to wash, farm, and keep house. In 1619, the ship the White Lion delivered 20 captured Africans to the then-British colony of Virginia - the beginning of slavery in the American South. Naturally, the African people brought their cultural music with them overseas, including the famous pentatonic scale structure. -
The Lives of American Slaves
African-American slaves were bought and sold, with most working on the plantations of large farms owned by wealthy white families. Slaves were forced to tend to crops like tobacco, cotton, sugar, wheat, and rice. To take their minds off their tedious work and the hot sun, slaves created and sang "work songs" and "field hollers". These hollers were usually begun by a solo singer and echoed by others around him or her - communicating a shared oppression and dissatisfaction with daily life. -
The American Civil War
Abolitionists' protests against slavery culminated in the American Civil War, during which Southern states fought to protect their constitutional right to keep, control, and transport slaves. Eventually, the Confederate soldiers lost, and fundamental American legislation was revised. Four million Black slaves were freed. However, that was not the end of anti-Black racism, and former slaves expressed their disappointment through a new genre of music inspired by work songs: the blues. -
Advent of the Blues
The new genre, named so because America's history of injustice towards Africans left former slaves "feeling blue", gained popularity alongside dancing clubs called "juke joints". Newspapers began to write about the blues, and it spread across the U.S., morphing into subcategories (the most famous of which are Delta, Chicago, and Piedmont blues). Many freed slaves found jobs as agricultural workers, and the pattern of enduring discrimination and lamenting after the work day was done continued. -
A Written Record
The first blues sheet music was published in 1908, marking a communal interest in preserving this sense of identity and method of catharsis and healing for Black Americans. -
Ownership
It was this year that composer Hart Wand's piece Dallas Blues became the first blues composition to be copyrighted.
As well, W.C. Handy, leader of a local blues band, published his composition Memphis Blues, which exploded in popularity. It was inspired in part by a genre of folk songs known as "Tin Pan Alley", inspired by a street in New York of the same name. Many voices of oppressed Black Americans joined together to peacefully (musically) protest unfair societal standards and segregation. -
The Harlem Renaissance
After taking time to reclaim their culture (not to mention, their lives), Black Americans entered their own intellectual and artistic Renaissance, lasting approximately 1918-1937. Dramatic arts and visual arts flourished, as well as literature and, perhaps most influential of all, the blues. Author Langston Hughes incorporated blues lyrics into his 1927 book, "Fine Clothes to the Jew". Many Harlem authors considered blues music an "antidote" to Black assimilationism in America. -
Women of the Blues
Despite many blues guitarists being male, women carved a path into the heart of the industry as well, often as soulful vocalists. Female singers were the first to record popular melodies with their original lyrics, which was important for preserving the experiences of their communities and ancestors. Vocalist Mamie Smith was essential to acquiring record deals for Black musicians: Original Race Records was launched the General Phonograph Company after her cover of "Crazy Blues" became a hit. -
The Dawn of Jazz
As blues music and one of its principal influences - ragtime (syncopated piano melody) - gained popularity and societal recognition in Southern states, musicians realized that something else could come out of the blues besides mutual catharsis and comfort - moneymaking. People took their guitars and played for friends, neighbours, or on the street. Encounters with other instruments and genres like big bands led to the development of jazz's classic sound: with brass, saxophone, piano, and bass. -
Evolution
With the invention of the electric guitar, instead of dying out to make way for a new genre of music, blues adapts! Blues musician T-Bone Walker opts for an electric guitar for a re-recording of his classic, "Call it Stormy Monday". -
Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters (real name McKinley Morganfield), called the Father of Chicago Blues, became a guitarist at 17. He attempted to emulate bluesmen Son House and Robert Johnson, embracing traditional sounds but also expanding on both the musical complexity and sentiment/cultural snapshot of Black identity in America that the blues had become. In 1941, he was recorded by a Mr. Alan Lomax as part of the U.S. Library of Congress Musical Archive. -
B.B. King Enters
Another legendary bluesman whose guitar picking style and "bent" notes (notes that began as major thirds but were slurred into minor thirds) would greatly influence many future blues musicians was B.B. King. He worked as a disc jockey in Memphis where he came to be known as Blues Boy (B.B.), but the world didn't know his name until he covered Three O' Clock Blues in the early 1950s. He would spend his life touring the world and collecting 15 Grammy Awards! -
Elvis' Debut
This celebrated musician was extensively inspired by African-American blues. In the late 1940s, singer Arthur Crudup recorded "That's All Right" for his label RCA Victor. Almost ten years later, Elvis made his recorded debut with a cover of this classic for independent label Sun Records (which would later claim to be the "birthplace of rock and roll"). Elvis was praised for transcending barriers of race and giving performances that reflected all the cultures he saw around him. -
The Blues in Britain
By the 1960s, the blues had splintered off into various subgenres arguably more prominent than the original - some of which grew to become other genres entirely. One of these was rock and roll, which began in the 1950s when Chuck Berry began experimenting with faster, more energetic rhythms and distorted guitar. Many bands in England took a liking to the new form of self-expression and artists like Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, and Peter Green rose to fame. The Rolling Stones would follow. -
Emergence of a White Fanbase
As the blues had historically been a means of expressing sorrow, regret, frustration, and empathy among Black Americans who all shared the lived experience of segregation, Jim Crow laws, and public discrimination and shaming in daily life, most whites weren't active listeners of the genre as they couldn't relate (or disagreed with the societal change the blues proposed). However, when Muddy Waters and B.B. King performed in New York, a great majority of ticketholders were white. -
The Blues Foundation
In Memphis, Tennessee, an organization dedicated to preserving the cultural, societal, and artistic legacy of the blues is founded. Awards named after famed blues composer W.C. Handy are presented to a new generation of skilled musicians (who have evolved the genre but also stayed true to the rhythmic patterns and chord progressions at its core) at Orpheum Theatre. -
Modern Blues Artist
Born in 1979, contemporary bluesman Derek Trucks learned to play guitar at the age of nine and gave his first blues-inspired performance at eleven. Derek credits blues icons John Lee Hooker and B.B. King as his slide-guitar influences (he plays guitar using a "slide" or hard object that presses some strings down, creating new vibrations - a classic blues technique). In September of 2012, Derek had the opportunity to play with legend B.B. King at the Hollywood Bowl arena, becoming part of history -
Blues Hall of Fame
Also located in Memphis, the Blues Hall of Fame was created to attribute a great cultural revolution to deserving artists across history. It's undeniable that the blues, its subgenres, its messages, and the records and performances that allowed it to spread are an essential part of American culture to this day, whether people living there are aware of it or not.