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A
more specific history of the Blues music tradition:
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blues is a musical style created in response to the hardships
endured by generations of African American people. It originated
in the rural Mississippi Delta region at the beginning of the 20th
century. |
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Descended
from earlier work shouts (arhoolies), blues is primarily a vocal
narrative style featuring solo voice with instrumental
accompaniment. Blues has contributed significantly to the
development of jazz, rock music, and country and western music.
Blues Form
By
the 1920s, the blues style had acquired its distinguishing
Characteristics of text, harmonic structure, and melodic shape.
Blues lyrics contain a number of three-line rhymed stanzas in
which each stanza consists of a line of verse which is repeated
and then concluded with a final line. Harmony is based on a
repeating blues chord progression, with a 12-bar pattern using the
three major chords of a scale. Each stanza of text is set to one
12-bar chorus, with the typical blues ranging from four to eight
stanzas in length. Melody is strongly influenced by "blues
notes" that sound like "bent" or flattened third,
fifth, and seventh notes of the major scale. Blues notes have a
bittersweet emotional impact.
Although
vocals are the focus, performers usually improvise instrumental
solos over blues chord progressions. In addition, performers can
also contribute improvised "fills" at the end of a sung
line in a kind of "call and response" style. One musical
innovation was the development of the "bottleneck slide"
style of guitar playing, which consists of scraping a knife or
glass bottleneck up the guitar fingerboard to simulate vocal moans
and slides.
Country
Blues
The
earliest blues, known as country or delta blues, were a product of
the 19th-century Southern rural experience, especially after
emancipation. |
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Itinerant
singer/guitarists (or harmonica players), generally men, traveled
from one community to another singing about love, freedom, sex,
and the sorrows of life. |
Important
early musicians include Charlie Patton, Son House (who developed
the bottleneck slide technique), and Robert Johnson.
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Classic
Blues
As
rural African Americans migrated to urban areas such as Memphis
and New Orleans in search of work, blues gradually became more of
an urban phenomenon. Classic or urban blues featured a male or
female singer usually accompanied by a piano or whole jazz combo.
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Capitalizing
on the increasing popularity of urban blues, the music industry
began publishing and marketing arrangements for blues compositions
such as W. C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues" (1914). These
songs became so successful that many popular songs that were not
actually blues simply added the word blues to the title to ensure
their popularity. |
| New
York vaudeville singer Mamie Smith's 1920 recording of "Crazy
Blues" launched the "race recording" industry,
which targeted blues and jazz directly at the African American
audience. These recordings proved popular with a larger American
public as well, and blues recordings by performers such as Bessie
Smith, "Empress of the Blues," Jelly Roll Morton,
Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, and Louis Armstrong dominated the
musical landscape. |
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Throughout
the country blues could be heard in small dance halls, barrooms,
rent parties, and juke joints, where new styles such as
"barrelhouse" and boogie-woogie were performed by
pianists such as Clarence "Pine Top" Smith.
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Electric
Blues
After
World War II, the center of blues activity moved to cities such as
Chicago, where musicians such as Muddy Waters, Riley "B.
B." King, and Buddy Guy intensified the sound by amplifying
the guitars and adding more emphasis to the drums. |
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During
the 1950s this style was adapted by white musicians as well, and
rhythm and blues hits were often rerecorded ("covered")
by White musicians such as Elvis Presley and Bill Haley,
transforming rhythm and blues into rock and roll. A decade later
British musicians such as the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and
Eric Clapton returned to the blues roots as the source for their
heavily amplified hard rock style.
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Although
much of the energy of blues has been channeled into rock and
rhythm and blues styles, traditional blues musicians such as John
Lee Hooker, |
| Etta
Baker, Junior Wells, and Buddy Guy enjoy successful careers. Blues
has also developed into a major force in contemporary music
through the rock-edged style of Robert Cray, as well as
roots-oriented jazz by musicians associated with |
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Wynton
Marsalis (see Marsalis, family), the zydeco sound, and some rap
groups.
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Bibliography:
Barlow, W., Looking Up at Down (1989); Guralnick, P., Sweet Soul
Music (1986); Lomax, A., The Land Where Blues Began (1993);
Sonnier, A.,A Guide to the Blues (1994).
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