The Blues

The Blues

The Blues is a distinctly African-American art form that revolutionized popular music and provided the framework for rock and roll, country, hip hop and R&B. The term “having the blues” dates back to Old England, and connotes feelings of emotional desolation, trouble and worry.

After the Civil War, Southern blacks experienced extreme poverty and racism. Many former slaves became sharecroppers, working long hours under brutal conditions. The music in their daily lives were shaped from the gospel music they sang in churches, as well as their work songs and field hollers. Each of these musical forms employed traditional African musical elements, like polyrhythms and call-and-response vocals. In work songs, a leader calls out a line and the group responds in time with the motion they’re performing, such as chopping or digging. Field Hollers, which were often sad in nature, were slower and more varied, and combined improvisation with common lyrical phrases.

The Delta region of Southern Mississippi is often referred to as “the land where the Blues was born.” The Call-and-response form is prominent in the Delta Blues, where a solo performer uses his guitar to respond to, and sometimes complete, his vocal line. In the late 1920s, the Delta Blues became the first black guitar-dominated music to appear on phonographic records.

Many of the original Blues musicians were farmers by day, and performed at juke joints and roadhouses at night. They generally performed alone, with a harmonica or bottleneck slide guitar for accompaniment. The slide guitar effect could also be made with a knife or steel bar. Charley Patton, Son House, and Mississippi John Hurt developed intricate finger-style guitar techniques for their original Blues songs. They used an A-A-B lyrical structure, and a common 12-bar chord progression to weave tales of poverty, social alienation and romantic love. Their lyrics relied on innuendo and double meanings, which implied different things, depending on who was listening. “Mr. Charlie” was slang for the white man, while “going to Beulah Land” meant leaving the segregated South. “Ramblin’” meant both traveling and searching for work, a home, or spiritual peace.

Some historians say The Blues first emerged in the late 1860s, during a time when vigilante justice ruled, and African-Americans were under the constant threat of lynching. The ethos of the Blues came out of this environment. Many of the legendary Bluesmen were farmers and sharecroppers, including Charley Patton, Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and B.B. King. They sang of cotton bales, boll weevils, juke joints, working on the levee, and mules kicking in stalls.

In the early 1900s, Blues music quickly became popular throughout the United States, thanks to the widespread availability of Blues sheet music. By the 1910s, Blues music was so in demand that many of the songs that were published with “Blues” in the title sounded nothing like the music we recognize as Blues today. In the 1920s, composer and bandleader W.C. Handy became the self-styled Father of the Blues, by combining Blues and ragtime music. In 1902, Handy took a musical tour of Mississippi, absorbing the various styles of the delta Blues musicians he encountered. In his 1941 autobiography, he recounted meeting one man with a face “with the sadness of the ages.”

“As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. … The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.”

Handy incorporated what he’d heard into his own music, and in 1924, released his first hit, “The Memphis Blues.” It was initially written as a campaign song for E.H. Crump, a white politician friendly to black voters. The song was a three-minute-instrumental, but lyrics were later added. The song was published as sheet music in 1912, and became a nationwide hit. It was recorded by many other groups, and became hugely influential on the musicians of the day. “Memphis Blues” launched the Blues craze and made “The Blues” a desirable marketing term.

“Strange Fruit” is another definitive Blues song that doesn’t necessarily sound like part of the genre. The haunting 1939 protest song was made famous by jazz vocalist Billie Holiday, and has been covered by countless artists. It was written by Jewish poet Abel Meeropol, in response to the lynching of two black men in Indiana in 1930. Later he set the lyrics to music. Holiday made the song the closer in her live performances, but her label, Columbia refused to release it. Holiday had to find another record label, Commodore Records, to put the song out. It became a revered classic; Time Magazine named it the best song of the century.

In the 1890s, the “Bad Man” archetype emerged in the lyrics of Blues songs. Author Lamont Pearley Sr. described the “Bad Man” as a “rough and tumble” black man or woman who “stood in open defiance of white supremacy, and were just as hard on their fellow African-Americans.” The characters in these songs, like the oft-recorded “Stagger Lee,” were rebels, folk heroes, and martyrs.

Delta Bluesman Robert Johnson is one of the most legendary figures in all of music. Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil at “the crossroads” in exchange for his otherworldly talents as a guitarist. He recorded only 29 songs over two sessions in 1936 and 1937, including “Love in Vain” an “Terraplane Blues” and “Hellhound on my Trail.” He died at age 27, allegedly from being poisoned after sleeping with another man’s wife. (He is the original member of the infamous “27 Club,” which includes the late Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones and Amy Winehouse). Johnson was a major influence on British guitarists like Jimmy Page, Keith Richards and Eric Clapton.

B.B. King was raised in poverty by his grandparents on a cotton plantation in Itta Bena, Mississippi. He was first exposed to music through gospel singing. His cousin, fellow Bluesman Bukka White, taught him to play guitar. After moving to Memphis in 1946, King began career by busking on Beale Street. He recorded his first big hit, “Three O’Clock Blues,” in 1951. Over his six-decade career, the “Thrill is Gone” singer became the public face of the Blues, winning 15 Grammy Awards, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Medal of Arts. King continued to tour well into his 80s, performing over 250 shows per year.

Revered Blues singer and guitarist Charley Patton was raised on Dockery Farms Plantation, a cotton farm in the Delta region that also employed Johnson, Son House and Howlin’ Wolf. Patton served as mentor to them all. On the farm, Patton penned “Mississippi Boweavil Blues” about the destructive species of beetle which decimated the Southern cotton industry, a driving force in The Great Migration. To say that Patton was a strong influence on Robert Johnson would be an understatement.

Over the years, Dockery Farms earned a reputation for the incredible music being made on its grounds. It attracted Bluesmen, who could make $25 for playing at parties there, stay and work, and travel to nearby towns (taking Highway 61) to perform live.

Nearby, Parchman Prison Farm served as the temporary home of future Blues legends Sonnyboy Williamson and Leadbelly (a compatriot of Woody Guthrie). Formerly the Mississippi State Penitentiary, Parchman Farm was famous for incarcerating black men under false pretenses and leasing them as laborers to private business owners.

In 1939, folk music archivist John Lomax made the first of three trips there to record the prisoners’ songs for the Library of Congress. Among them was Bukka White, a budding recording artist who’d studied under Charley Patton, and favored the resonator guitar. White recorded over 60 minutes of Blues for Lomax, including the autobiographical “Parchman Farm Blues.”

In prison for allegedly shooting a man in self-defense, White was released after two years and returned to recording. He was a central figure in the folk Blues revival of the 1950s and early 60s, performing at numerous festivals for reverent white audiences. In 1973, he earned a Grammy nomination for his final studio album, Big Daddy. He died four years later, at the age of 67.

Many Southern Blues artists, such as Mississippi Fred McDowell, did the punishing work of digging and building levees, which were erected to prevent rivers from flooding. This work has been described as forced labor by both blacks and whites. Memphis Minnie and her husband Kansas Joe added to the long canon of folk and Blues songs mentioning levees with “When The Levee Breaks,” (a song later associated with British hard rock band Led Zeppelin).

In the 1930s, Dirty or Bawdy Blues, featuring obscene lyrics dealing with socially taboo issues like sex and drug use, became widespread. These songs (like Bessie Smith’s “Empty Bed Blues” and Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ‘em Dry”) were banned from radio but were popular on jukeboxes. They used slang terms and double entendres to delight their listeners.

Country Blues is a blanket term for Pre-War, acoustic guitar-driven Blues, made by solo, duo, and string band performers. There are several regional variations and styles, including Delta, Piedmont, Atlanta, Memphis, Texas, Chicago, Delta, ragtime, and folk. The Piedmont Blues was invented by black musicians in the Appalachian foothills, and uses a complex guitar fingerpicking method in which a regular, alternating-thumb bass pattern supports a melody on treble strings. This highly syncopated guitar style, employed by Blind Willie McTell, Blind Boy Fuller and Rev. Gary Davis, is derived from the string-band tradition, and integrates ragtime, Blues, and country dance songs.

The evolution of Blues music was directly influenced by the Great Migration. In 1916, tens of thousands of African-Americans moved to cities like Memphis, Chicago, Detroit, and New York, in search of a better life.The Great Depression spurred even more to leave the farms. As African-American families moved North, they brought their relatives, leading to the formation of black ghettos in Harlem and the south side of Chicago. The music they listened to reflected their new, urban surroundings. Many rejected traditional Blues records, which reminded them of their struggles as farmhands in the segregated South.

Blues legends like Howlin’ Wolf (“Back Door Man”), Willie Dixon (“Hoochie Coochie Man”) made the journey to Chicago and brought the Blues with them. There, they developed the Chicago Blues sound; a souped-up, energetic take on the Delta Blues, played on electric instead of acoustic guitar, and backed with bass, piano, and drums. This was Blues music that you could dance to. The Chicago style would serve as a blueprint for the earliest rock and roll bands.

Delta-transplant Muddy Waters set up shop in Chicago in 1943. He was inspired to pursue a career in music after being recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax two years prior. Waters’ raw, early recordings for Chess Records transformed him into a household name. The Chicago Blues approach Waters embodied showed that you don’t need a big band to pack a powerful punch – you could create the same effect with a group of three or four musicians with amplified instruments. Thanks to the invention of the pickup in 1936 and the popularity of the amplifier, the electric guitar became a vehicle for Blues innovation, and Waters, a bottleneck slide player, was at the forefront.

Waters and other Chicago musicians, like John Lee Hooker, weren’t afraid to integrate their bands; their secret weapon was a white harmonica player named Charlie Musselwhite. In 1962, The Rolling Stones (featuring a young Mick Jagger on harmonica) named themselves for one of Waters’ early songs.

In 1963, another white harmonica player from Chicago, Paul Butterfield, formed the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, featuring two musicians he’d poached from Howlin’ Wolf. After adding guitarist Mike Bloomfield, the band signed to Elektra Records. They performed an impromptu set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where they caught the eye of popular folk singer Bob Dylan. Dylan had recorded an album of half-electric material, and recruited the Butterfield Band to perform with him at the Festival the following day. During their performance, Dylan was booed mercilessly by the restless crowd. Perhaps it was because he’d dared to go electric. However, it was probably because the volume and sound quality was less than what the audience expected.

Kansas City, Missouri was also transformed by the Great Migration. After the Civil War, blacks moved to the region en masse, seeking better living conditions and political freedom. Celebrated Blues artists like Ma Rainey and Big Joe Turner made their living there during the Pre-War era, influencing local jazz artists like Count Basie and Charlie Parker. Early rockers Bill Haley and his Comets leaned into the loose, jumping Kansas City sound when they recorded a cover of Big Joe Turner’s “Shake Rattle and Roll.” Haley’s modified version, which set the stage for “Rock Around the Clock,” was released six months after Turners’ in 1954; Elvis Presley released his own version of the song in 1956.

The Blues revival in the late 50s and early ‘60s, bolstered by Columbia’s release of Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers LP in 1961, changed the course of pop music. With its realistic, stark, emotional subject matter and ability to make listeners feel deeply, Blues music created a lane for songwriters in other genres to explore their own pathos.

In 1953, the radio favored show tunes and novelty songs like “How Much Is That Doggie In the Window.” In 1965, the lyrics in pop songs took a more nuanced turn, from “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” to “Help!” This trickled down to deep laments like Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” in 1988 and Adele’s “Someone Like You” in 2020. Even the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s career-defining pop hit “Born In The USA” read like the Blues: “Born down in a dead man’s town, the first step I took was when I hit the ground…”

The Blues have always been an influential genre. Early jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong incorporated Blues scales, harmonies, and forms into their music. The Blues led to the creation of R&B in the 1940s, as bands began combining Blues forms with upbeat, danceable rhythms.

In the 1950s, rock pioneers like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley drew heavily on the I-IV-V Blues progression to craft catchy songs like “Johnny Be Good” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” leading to the Blues’ massive impact on popular music. Because it is so accessible, the I-IV-V progression forms the backbone of a large swathe of folk and country songs as well.

In the mid-60s, bands like The Rolling Stones, the Animals, and the Yardbirds rode the British Invasion onto American airwaves. Their repertoire consisted primarily of old Blues songs.

Bob Dylan’s first album consisted mostly of Blues covers. The same could be said of The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac. The pentatonic Blues scale is the domain of every great classic rock guitarist, from Jimi Hendrix to Keith Richards to David Gilmour.

In 1994, Nirvana revived interest in Leadbelly when they covered his “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” on MTV Unplugged. In the 2000s, the White Stripes made Blues fashionable again, covering Blind Willie McTell’s “Your Southern Can Is Mine” on their 2000 album De Stijl.

Today, Blues music is recognized for its contributions to global culture, in much the same way that hip-hop has been in the decades since. “I went from picking cotton to picking a guitar in the White House,” Buddy Guy once said. Guy was a major influence on rock guitarists like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Although it is now largely appreciated by purists, the Blues is still reflected in modern music; in the melisma of pop singers, the solos of rock guitarists, the true blue emotion of country singers, and the social protest and self-mythologizing of rappers.

As Jackson C. Frank once put it, “wherever I’ve been and gone, Blues run the game.”