Louis blues, the Memphis blues, the Louisiana blues, etc. When the country blues moved to the cities and other locales, it took on various regional characteristics. Early jug bands variously featured jugs, guitars, mandolins, banjos, kazoos, stringed basses, harmonicas, fiddles, washboards and other everyday appliances converted into crude instruments. Jug band music was popular in the South until the 1930s. Blues bands may have evolved from early jazz bands, gospel choirs and jug bands. Occasionally they teamed up with one or more fellow bluesmen to perform in the plantation camps, rural juke joints, and rambling shacks of the Deep South. Well-known blues pioneers from the 1920s such as Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly, Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson usually performed solo with just a guitar. The individual parts of this scale are known as the blue notes. A specific series of notes is also utilized in the blues. Without getting too technical, most blues music is comprised of 12 bars (or measures). Many of the earliest blues musicians incorporated the blues into a wider repertoire that included traditional folk songs, vaudeville music, and minstrel tunes. This music is not very far removed from the field hollers and work songs of the slaves and sharecroppers. But the legacy of these earliest blues pioneers can still be heard in 1920s and ’30s recordings from Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Georgia and other Southern states. Unfortunately, much of this original music followed these sharecroppers to their graves. Handy insisted that the blues were revealed to him in 1903 by an itinerant street guitarist at a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi.ĭuring the middle to late 1800s, the Deep South was home to hundreds of seminal bluesmen who helped to shape the music. For instance, minstrel show bandleader W.C. No single person invented the blues, but many people claimed to have discovered the genre. A decade or so later the blues gave birth to rhythm ‘n blues and rock ‘n roll. Once the Delta blues made their way up the Mississippi to urban areas, the music evolved into electrified Chicago blues, other regional blues styles, and various jazz-blues hybrids. Unlike jazz, the blues didn’t spread out significantly from the South to the Midwest until the 1930s and ’40s. Blues and jazz have always influenced each other, and they still interact in countless ways today. The blues grew up in the Mississippi Delta just upriver from New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. It’s generally accepted that the music evolved from African spirituals, African chants, work songs, field hollers, rural fife and drum music, revivalist hymns, and country dance music. Its inventors were slaves, ex-slaves and the descendants of slaves-African-American sharecroppers who sang as they toiled in the cotton and vegetable fields. The blues originated on Southern plantations in the 19th Century. The blues has deep roots in American history, particularly African-American history. From unbridled joy to deep sadness, no form of music communicates more genuine emotion. The best blues is visceral, cathartic, and starkly emotional. The blues is also about overcoming hard luck, saying what you feel, ridding yourself of frustration, letting your hair down, and simply having fun. While blues lyrics often deal with personal adversity, the music itself goes far beyond self-pity. Your mate falls out of love with you, you get the blues. When you think of the blues, you think about misfortune, betrayal and regret. Content Provided By ED KOPP – All About Jazz
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