Why Is Blues So Popular?

The Blues also became a hit in the 1920s after Mamie Smith recorded “Crazy Blues” and it grew into a huge part of the Jazz Industry. African Americans were given credit for the creation of the Blues industry of music as well. Bessie Smith was known as the “most famous of the 1920s Blues singers.”

This week we learned about many genres of music, some similar some different. The two genres I want to compare and contrast are Rock and Blues. When you hear rock music, you picture electric guitars, amplified sounds, and complex styles of play. But if you take a deeper look you would probably be surprised to learn that rock would not even have existed without simple 12-bar forms, antiphonal textures, or “walking bass lines” used in much blues music. Though Rock and Blues are distinctly different they have a lot of similarities that most likely go unnoticed. Rock and Blues were developed at almost the same exact time around the late 19th century. Blues originated from African American folk music and like Blues, rock music style can also be

How did Blues Influence Rock and Roll? When we think of rock and roll, we think electric guitars, amplified sounds. Blues music is one of the most influential characteristics that gave birth to rock and roll. Beginning in the Mississippi region with African slave work songs and expanding to areas of Chicago and Dallas, blues went on to inspire rock legends such as: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix.

“When first entering in America, British folk music was distinguished by three-chord tunes, sparse instrumentation (with some fiddlers), mostly male performers, improvisation, the singers’ sporadic shouts (Scottish “yips”), Christian themes served up in hundreds of hymns, and a secular collection of songs that told stories, generally about love and lost love, using metaphor and symbol to tell those stories” (Allen 101). By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British music changed and became Americanized. Vocal harmonizing slowly evolved, and fiddlers were accompanied by those who played banjo, an African American opening. “Tambourines and “bones” (tapping out rhythms using pork rib bones) were a minstrel show contribution” (Allen 102). When African Americans were forced into slavery and brought to North America in the 1600s, they brought their own musical traditions and sounds. Slaves who were on the Mississippi River Valley delta soil developed what will later be introduced as blues music. On the plantations, slaves greatly changed British American hymn singing. They took non-religious British American songs and turned it into their own forms of music that followed their culture and taste of music. Blues emerged in the early twentieth century at the same time country music became settled from its folk roots. Blues music talked about the indifferences African American slaves were going through at that time. “The blues voiced human

Blues began in the south and slowly made its way into the great cities of the North. As

Ragtime and Blues are two different styles of music that came together to make what is known as jazz music. Ragtime was more about freedom, fun, and giving the listener an elated feeling while Blue’s intent was to appeal to the listeners emotions and make them feel better about the troubles in their life. The way Jazz came about was the collaboration of these 2 very different styles of music. Due to very influential people in the music world like Jelly Role Morton, Joe Oliver, Louis armstrong, just to name a few, Jazz has flourished into the music known all over the world. Although Jazz and Ragtime have many differences, they also had many similarities and each style is significant to the amercement of jazz.

B.B. King or ‘The King of Blues’ was born in Itta Bena, Mississippi. His young parents unfortunately divorced, and his mother passed away when he was 9 years old which left him to be raised by his grandmother. King attended school until the 10th grade when he dropped out of school and started to work at a cotton gin near his hometown. Despite dropping out of school he continued to teach himself math and different languages well into his later life. He worked at the cotton gin earning a penny a pound and singing gospel music on street corners. His musical career started when he was studying under his cousin Bukka White. King met a woman and was married at 17 years old. “I guess I was looking for love, because I never had anybody I believed truly loved me” (B.B. King). The marriage quickly came to end when they got a divorce months later. “Since my early childhood, I had a problem trying to open up. Please open me up. Look inside!

A single source of blues music cannot be traced, but Ma Rainey is rightfully credited with introducing it to the world. Hence the reason she was dubbed as “The Mother of the Blues”. During an interview in the 1930s, Ma told musicologist John Work, that she heard what would be called blues, for the first time around 1902. She was in a small town in Missouri working a show at the time, and one morning a local girl came into the tent singing about a man whom had left her. This new style of soulful music drew in Ma Rainey so much she later had the girl teach her the song. Rainey performed the song as an encore in a show soon after, earning a special place in the show, and marking the start of her career (Jas Obrecht Archive).

On the other hand, Blues were basically from work songs of African Americans slaves at the time. “It is a native American music, the product of the black man in this country, or, to put it more exactly the way I have come to think about it, blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives”(pp.17), said Jones and Baraka. In Jazz – A History, Frank Tirro wisely analyzes and explains the relationship between the unique background and

Mississippi history is a sad history of slavery and oppression. It is a history of racism and refusal to let go of segregationist ideals. Mississippi history is enough to give many the blues. In fact, the Blues style music originated in Mississippi and gravitated outward from there. .Mississippi history and Blues history are intertwined. Delta Blues is a blues style that originated in the Mississippi Delta and influenced many musicians. Another musical art form, Jazz may be considered an offspring from the Blues and also started in the South. There are many Blues musicians and singers that come from Mississippi or have become linked to Mississippi for various reasons. Bessie Smith, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, and Cassandra Wilson have

The blues is a musical style of feeling, a style about playing what comes from your heart. It came from work songs, field chants, spirituals, field hollers and revivalist hymns from the African American communities. Blues is associated with the sad times

influential in the North as well. Blacks moved from the South to the North and

     The Blues musical move was prominent during the 1920s and '30s, a time known as the Harlem Renaissance. Blues music characteristically told the story of

There are several stylistic characteristics of the blues. The first one is the blue notes, which is the "bent" technique for lowering the pitch of third and seventh scale degrees in the major scale(259). The next one is the blue chorus, which is three-line lyrics, and it contains fill which is the instrument response of the call and response between vocal and instrument. The third feature is the blue progression which is the form of the combination between tonic(I), subdominant(IV), and dominant(V) chords. It is usually arranged as: I- / IV- I- / V- I-. Another characteristic is that the timbre of the vocals in blues have a wide varieties. Every single piece of blue music features a different kind of vocal texture. The rhythm in the blues has a characteristic called "swung" which means the long-short pattern of the rhythm. In all three pieces of music, the blue note and the blue chorus are applied to the composition. The "bent" texture of the pitch and the neat separation of the lyrics can be easily notice in the music. The call and response in vocals and instruments, on the other hand, is not so obvious in "Can 't Help Lovin ' Dat Man," but I think, though subtle, it is still there at the end of each line. The rhythm in the "Muleskinner Blues" is more steady instead of the long- short patterned "swung." The "swung" is not so obvious in "Can 't Help Lovin ' Dat Man," either. Overall, there are some standard blue style in all three pieces of music, but we

Nowadays the blues revolve around the meaning of sadness but doesn’t have a true message of fighting for survival or deprivation of freedom. In the process of searching for the modern day blues, it was discovered that the music is compiled by mostly Caucasian artist compared to the past where it was conceived by blacks to prompt their practices and beliefs.