Blues touch us in ways that few musical forms do. Americans of all colors and ages relate to the blues in a deeply personal way. A remarkable blend of African and European music and performance style, the blues is one of America's most important musical innovations. The blues draws from and contributes to a range of related musical styles and continues to have enormous impact on popular music in America and elsewhere. Yet while other styles may have similarly personal lyrics, blues singers bring the autobiographical nature of their music into particularly sharp focus.
The blues emerged out of an essentially African musical genre (with distant similarities to related European styles) and became acculturated in the United States. It thus forms a musical bridge that speaks both to and for whites as well as blacks. Understanding the roots of the blues, the contexts in which it developed, and the changing concerns of blues singers and their audiences will help us to better understand the roots and development of American culture.
The blues is more than the root of America's musical tree. Beginning with jazz in the earliest part of this century and continuing with gospel in the 1930s, rock and roll in the 1950s, and 1960s, soul in the 1960s, rock and disco in the 1970s, and heavy metal rock in the 1980s, nearly every American musical style has drawn heavily, if sometimes unconsciously, from the blues. How and where did this unique, yet basic, musical style come into existence? What, indeed, are its roots?
Early Blues Performers
One of the earliest examples of blueslike lyrics, "I got the blues, but too damn mean to cry," was collected by the folklorist Howard Odum sometime between 1906 and 1908 in Georgia. It was published in the journal of American Folklore in 1911. A few years earlier, in 1903, W.C. Handy, the black composer of popular songs who eventually became known as the "father of the blues," collected the line, "Goin' where the Southern cross the Dog." It was a line, the singer explained, that described the place he was heading for. Sung in the middle of the night, at a nearly deserted train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, there was something about the song--perhaps its "autobiographical" nature--that touched Handy deeply. A decade later, Handy, who had been leading one of the most popular black dance bands in the South, began adapting and composing blues songs for popular audiences. By 1917 he told Dorothy Scarborough that "about twenty years ago the desire was all for coon songs. Now the tendency is toward blues."
The vaudeville and medicine show singer Ma Rainey first heard the blues in 1902, while traveling with a black tent show called the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. The show had stopped in a small Missouri town when Rainey noticed a girl hanging around the tent. The girl was singing "a strange and poignant" song about how her man had left her. Rainey worked the song into her own act and received such an overwhelmingly favorable response that she began listening for other examples of the style. Eventually Ma Rainey became known as a blues singer rather than a vaudeville singer (although the distinction between the two styles remained unclear for several decades, especially in women's recordings).
It is possible that the style existed even earlier than the early 1900s. Big Bill Broonzy recalls having heard an
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