The origins of blues are not unlike the origins of life.
For many years it was recorded only by memory, and relayed only live, and in
person. The Blues were born in the North Mississippi Delta following the Civil
War. Influenced by African roots, 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.
From the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49, and the
platform of the Clarksdale Railway Station, the blues headed north to Beale
Street in Memphis. The blues have strongly influenced almost all popular music
including jazz, country, and rock and roll and continues to help shape music
worldwide
The Blues... it's 12-bar, bent-note melody is the anthem
of a race, bonding itself together with cries of shared self victimization. Bad
luck and trouble are always present in the Blues, and always the result of
others, pressing upon unfortunate and down trodden poor souls, yearning to be
free from life's' troubles. Relentless rhythms repeat the chants of sorrow, and
the pity of a lost soul many times over. This is the Blues.
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. During
the twenties, the blues became a national craze. Mamie Smith recorded the first
vocal blues song, 'Crazy Blues' in 1920. The Blues influence on jazz brought it
into the mainstream and made possible the records of blues singers like Bessie
Smith and later, in the thirties, Billie Holiday
The Blues are the essence of the African American
laborer, whose spirit is wed to these songs, reflecting his inner soul to all
who will listen. Rhythm and Blues, is the cornerstone of all forms of African
American music.
Many of Memphis' best Blues artists left the city at the
time, when Mayor "Boss" Crump shut down Beale Street to stop the
prostitution, gambling, and cocaine trades, effectively eliminating the
musicians, and entertainers' jobs, as these businesses closed their doors. The
Blues migrated to Chicago, where it became electrified, and Detroit.
In 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.
Meanwhile, back in Memphis, B.B. King invented the
concept of lead guitar, now standard in today's Rock bands. Bukka White (cousin
to B.B. King), Leadbelly, and Son House, left Country Blues to create the
sounds most of us think of today as traditional unamplified Blues.
Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, Wyonnie Harris, and
Big Mama Thorton wrote and preformed the songs that would make a young Elvis
Presley world renown.
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, has drawn a new
generation listeners to the blues.
