Blues, genre of African-American folk and popular music, predominantly in 4/4 time. Blues lyrics are typically cast in a three-line stanza consisting of an initial line, its repetition, and a new third line (A A B). Blues music is generally 12 bars long, falling into three phrases of four bars each (one phrase for each line of text). The most typical chord pattern for these phrases is based on the first (I), fourth (IV), and fifth (V) notes of the scale: phrase 1—I I I I; phrase 2—IV IV I I; phrase 3—V V (or IV) I I. Each phrase of sung text is normally followed by instrumental improvisation, creating a call- and-response pattern. Blues music uses a scale in which the third, fifth, and seventh notes are freely “bent,” or microtonally flattened in comparison with the standard major scale. Blues lyrics tend to deal with the hardships of life and the vicissitudes of love.
The Blues were born in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta where cotton choppers and pickers sang to help the work go easier. They were influenced by African tribal songs, work chants, and "hollers." On Saturday nights, Issaquena Avenue and 4th Street in downtown Clarksdale were packed as sharecroppers came to town to shop, socialize, and party to their music played in "juke joints." On Sunday, wonderful spiritual and gospel music echoed from the many churches scattered across the county.
Clarksdale and Coahoma county were home to many famous bluesmen including W.C. Handy, Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and many others whose music continues to entertain and inspire millions of people around the world. From the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49, and from the platform of the Clarksdale Railway Station, the blues headed north to Beale Street in Memphis and then on to Chicago.The blues have strongly influenced almost all popular music including jazz, country, and rock and roll and continues to help shape music worldwide.
Blues singing, rooted in various forms of black
American slave song, was widespread in the southern U.S. by the late 19th
century. “Archaic” or “country” blues differed widely in their lyric and
musical form; singers typically accompanied themselves on guitar or harmonica.
Later singers in this style include Blind Lemon Jefferson and Leadbelly (Huddie
Ledbetter). In 1912, with the publication of “Memphis Blues” by W. C. Handy,
blues entered the arena of popular song. Classic “city” blues evolved in the
1920s and 1930s in the singing of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and others. Lyric and
musical forms became largely standardized, and singers often worked with jazz
band or piano. Adapted to solo piano, blues gave rise to boogie- woogie piano
playing.
In Deep Blues, Robert Palmer writes:
The slaves who toiled in Southern fields came from every part of Africa that was touched by the slave trade. Through singing to themselves, hollering at each other across the fields, and singing together while working and worshipping, they developed a hybridized musical language that distilled the very essence of innumerable African vocal traditions. In parts of Senegal, Upper Volta, Ghana, and the Cameroons, and undoubtedly in other areas where few field recordings have been made, African singing has many of the characteristics of this American hybrid.
Most frequently, however, the blues singer has been compared to the griots of Senegambia -- -a social caste that sang praises (or insults) of the powerful and wealthy members of their society. Like the original blues artists of the Delta, griots were both admired for their "reputations and amass of wealth, and despised, for they were thought to consort with evil spirits." The American blues, however, is more than a hybridized form of African musical traditions. It is also a distinctive and creative expression of the experiences of the suffering and pain of African slave descendants who toiled and labored as sharecroppers in the deep south, particularly the Mississippi Delta. In Deep Blues, Robert Palmer notes:
...Blues in the Delta, which may or may not have been the first blues anywhere but is certainly the first blues we know much about, was created not just by black people but by the poorest, most marginal black people. Most of the men and women who sang and played it could neither read nor write. They owned almost nothing and lived in virtual serfdom. They were not considered respectable enough to work as house servants for the whites or to hold respectable positions within their own communities.
The style and emotion of the Delta blues has been a defining and integral aspect of African American culture in this region for more than 150 years. The blues developed out of the fabric of black Delta life itself -- the work songs, love songs, slow drags and spirituals. It was not only an emotional outlet but an affirmation of a people's enduring humanity in the midst of a historically brutal and demeaning social and economic experience. It uncannily inspired hope by dwelling on the themes of hopelessness, it created a sense of structure and permanence in the lives of persons seemingly disconnected from white and black society, and it gave testament to a form of human ingenuity -- in this sense, sustaining a race of people until they could find new direction and hope during the dawn of the civil rights era.
According to William Ferris in his book, Blues from the Delta, "For at least eighty years, Delta towns like Tutwiler, Moorhead, and Louise have produced a steady flow of blues singers whose music is now internationally known." He continues, "If we 'map' the blues in Mississippi, the Delta clearly has the greatest concentration of towns in which singers were either born or lived for extended periods." (p. 8) Again, referring to Palmer's Deep Blues, the impact of blues has been so deep and profound that it has played a defining role in the development of modern American music:
The significance of Delta blues is often thought to be synonymous with its worldwide impact. According to this line of reasoning, the music is important because some of the world's most popular musicians -- the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton -- learned to sing and play by imitating it and still revere the recorded works of the Delta masters. It's important because rock guitarists everywhere play with a metal or glass slider on their fingers, a homage, acknowledged or not, to Delta musicians like Muddy Waters and Elmore James.
It's important because Delta guitarists were the first on records to deliberately explore the uses of feedback and distortion. It's important because almost everyone who picks up a harmonica, in America or England or France or Scandinavia, will at some stage in his {or her] development emulate either Little Walter or a Little Walter imitator. It's important because bass patterns, guitar riffs, and piano boogies invented in the Delta course through a broad spectrum of Western popular music, from hard rock to singer-songwriter pop to disco to jazz to movie soundtracks. It's important because Delta blues men like Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson have become icons, larger-than-life figures who seem to have articulated some of contemporary America's highest aspirations and darkest secrets with incomparable immediacy in music they made thirty or forty years ago.
These are all good reasons for listening to and learning about Delta blues, but they're neither the only reasons nor the best reasons. The music has never needed interpreters or populizers: it's always been strong enough to stand on its own. It's story, from the earliest shadowy beginnings to the Chicago migration to the present worldwide popularity of Muddy Waters and some younger Delta-born blues men, is an epic as noble and as essentially American as any in our history. It's the story of a small and deprived group of people who created, against tremendous odds, something that has enriched us all.
Blues and jazz overlapped, sometimes almost indistinguishably, and blues was considered a nurturing form for early jazz, but blues also developed independently. In the 1940s singers such as T-Bone Walker and Louis Jordan performed with big bands or with ensembles based on electric guitar, acoustic string bass, drums, and saxophones; the electric organ also came into use about this time. After 1950 B. B. King, Ray Charles, and others used improved electric guitars (allowing manipulation of sustained tones) and louder, electric basses; brass instruments often replaced saxophones. Record companies applied the terms rhythm and blues and, later, soul to blues and nonblues music in these “urban” blues styles.