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Joseph Machlis says that the blues is a native American musical and
verse form, with no direct European and African antecedents of which we
know. In other words, it is a blending of both traditions.
Something special and entirely different from either of its parent
traditions.
The word \'blue\' has been associated with the idea of melancholia or
depression since the Elizabethan era. The American writer, Washington
Irving is credited with coining the term \'the blues,\' as it is now
defined, in 1807. The earlier history of the blues musical tradition is traced through oral tradition as far back as the 1860s.
When African and European music first began to merge to create what
eventually became the blues, the slaves sang songs filled with words
telling of their extreme suffering and privation. One of the
many responses to their oppressive environment resulted in the field
holler. The field holler gave rise to the spiritual, and the blues,
\"notable among all human works of art for their profound despair . . .
They gave voice to the mood of alienation and anomie that prevailed in
the construction camps of the South,\" for it was in the Mississippi
Delta that blacks were often forcibly conscripted to work on the levee
and land-clearing crews, where they were often abused and then tossed
aside or worked to death.
Alan Lomax states that the blues tradition was considered to be a
masculine discipline (although some of the first blues songs heard by
whites were sung by \'lady\' blues singers like Mamie Smith and Bessie
Smith) and not many black women were to be found singing the blues in
the juke-joints. The Southern prisons also contributed considerably to
the blues tradition through work songs and the songs of death row and
murder, prostitutes, the warden, the hot sun, and a hundred other
privations. The prison road crews and work gangs where were many
bluesmen found their songs, and where many other blacks simply became
familiar with the same songs.
Following the Civil War , the blues arose as \"a distillate of the African music brought over by slaves. Field hollers, ballads, church music
and rhythmic dance tunes called jump-ups evolved into a music for a singer who would engage in call-and-response with his guitar. He
would sing a line, and the guitar would answer it.\"
By the 1890s the blues were sung in many of the rural areas of the South. And by 1910, the word \'blues\' as applied to the musical
tradition was in fairly common use.
Some \'bluesologists\' claim, that the first blues song
that was ever written down was \'Dallas Blues,\' published in 1912 by Hart
Wand, a white violinist from Oklahoma City. The blues form
was first popularized about 1911-14 by the black composer W.C. Handy
(1873-1958). However, the poetic and musical form of the blues first
crystallized around 1910 and gained popularity through the publication
of Handy\'s \"Memphis Blues\" (1912) and \"St. Louis Blues\" (1914). Instrumental blues had been recorded as early as 1913. Mamie Smith
recorded the first vocal blues song, \'Crazy Blues\' in 1920.
Priestly claims that while the widespread popularity of the blues had a
vital influence on subsequent jazz, it was the \"initial popularity of
jazz which had made possible the recording of blues in the first place,
and thus made possible the absorption of blues into both jazz as well as
the mainstream of pop music.\"
American troops brought the blues home with them following the First
World War. They did not, of course, learn them from Europeans, but from
Southern whites who had been exposed to the blues. At this time, the
U.S. Army was still segregated. During the twenties, the blues became a
national craze. Records by leading blues singers like Bessie Smith and
later, in the thirties, Billie Holiday, sold in the millions. The
twenties also saw the blues become a musical form more widely used by
jazz instrumentalists as well as blues singers.
During the decades of the thirties and forties, the blues spread
northward with the migration of many blacks from the South and entered
into the repertoire of big-band jazz. The blues also became electrified
with the introduction of the amplified guitar. In some Northern cities
like Chicago and Detroit, during the later forties and early fifties,
Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Howlin\' Wolf, and Elmore
James among others, played what was basically Mississippi Delta blues,
backed by bass, drums, piano and occasionally harmonica, and began
scoring national hits with blues songs. At about the same time, T-Bone
Walker in Houston and B.B. King in Memphis were pioneering a style of
guitar playing that combined jazz technique with the blues tonality and
repertoire.
In the early nineteen-sixties, the urban bluesmen were \"discovered\" by
young white American and European musicians. Many of these blues-based
bands like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Rolling Stones, the
Yardbirds, John Mayall\'s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Canned Heat, and
Fleetwood Mac, brought the blues to young white audiences, something the
black blues artists had been unable to do in America except through the
purloined white cross-over covers of black rhythm and blues songs. Since
the sixties, rock has undergone several blues revivals. Some rock
guitarists, such as Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, and Eddie
Van Halen have used the blues as a foundation for offshoot styles. While
the originators like John Lee Hooker, Albert Collins and B.B. King - and
their heirs Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, and later Eric Clapton and the late
Roy Buchanan, among many others, continued to make fantastic music in
the blues tradition. The latest generation of blues players
like Robert Cray and the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, among others, as well
as gracing the blues tradition with their incredible technicality, have
drawn a new generation listeners to the blues.
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