Blues

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

For other uses, see Blues (disambiguation).

Blues
Stylistic origins:	African American spirituals and work songs
Cultural origins:	West African music, brought by slaves to southern United States, especially the Mississippi Delta
Typical instruments:	Guitar - Piano - Harmonica - Bass - Drums - Saxophone - Vocals
Mainstream popularity:	The blues chord progressions and blue notes are widely used in most music styles of the 20th century; a highly influential music genre
Derivative forms:	jazz, R&B, rock
Subgenres
Classic female blues - Country blues - Delta blues - Jazz blues - Jump blues - Piano blues - Boogie-woogie
Fusion genres
Blues-rock - Soul blues
Regional scenes
African blues - Atlanta blues - British blues - Chicago blues - Detroit blues - East Coast blues - European blues - Kansas City blues - Louisiana blues - Memphis blues - New Orleans blues - Piedmont blues - St. Louis blues - Swamp blues - Texas blues - West Coast blues
Other topics
Genres - Musicians - Origins - Blues scale

The blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on a pentatonic scale and typically on a characteristic twelve-bar chord progression. The form evolved in the United States from the spirituals of African slaves, along with their work songs, praise songs, field hollers, shouts, and chants. The use of blue notes and the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics are indicative of the blues' West African pedigree. The blues has been a major influence on later American and Western popular music, finding expression in ragtime, jazz, big band, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and country music, as well as conventional pop songs and even modern classical music.^[1]

The words the blues stand for the blue devils, meaning low spirits, depression and sadness from George Colman's farce Blue Devils, a Farce (1798). Later during the 19th century, the words were used also for delirium tremens—in the same sense as pink elephants—as well as for the police. This use in music has been attested in Memphis, Tennessee, since 1912 and W. C. Handy's "Memphis Blues".^[2][3]

Contents 1 Characteristics 1.1 Lyrics 1.2 Musical style 2 History 2.1 Prewar blues 2.2 Early postwar blues 2.3 Blues in the '60s and '70s 2.4 Blues from the 1980s to the present 3 Social and musical impact 4 References 5 Notes 6 External links 7 See also

Characteristics

There are few characteristics common to all blues, because the genre takes its shape from the peculiarities of individual performances.^[4] However, some characteristics have been present since before the creation of the modern blues and are common to most styles of African American music. The earliest blues-like music was a "functional expression, rendered in a call-and-response style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure."^[5] This pre-blues music was adapted from slave field shouts and hollers, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content".^[6] The blues, as it is now known, can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and the West African call-and-response tradition, transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar ^[7].

Many blues elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa. Sylviane Diouf has pointed to several specific traits—such as the use of melisma and a wavy, nasal intonation—that suggest a connection between the Muslim music of West and Central Africa and blues^[8]. Ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik may have been the first to contend that certain elements of the blues have African/Moslem roots. For instance, Kubik pointed out that the Mississippi technique of playing the guitar using a knife blade, recorded by W.C. Handy in his autobiography, is common to West and Central Africa cultures, regions where Islam is strong and where the kora, a guitar-like instrument, is often the stringed instrument of choice. This technique consists of pressing a knife against the strings of the guitar, and is a possible antecedent of the slide guitar technique.

Blues music later adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs"—"Ethiopian" is used here to mean "black"—of minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment.^[9] The style also was closely related to ragtime, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music".^[10] Songs from this early period had many different structures. Examples can be found in Henry Thomas's recordings. However, the twelve-, eight-, or sixteen-bar structure based on tonic, subdominant and dominant chords became the most common.^[11] Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the flatted third, fifth and seventh (the so-called blue notes) of the associated major scale.^[12] What is now recognizable as the standard 12-bar blues form is documented from oral history and sheet music appearing in African American communities throughout the region along the lower Mississippi River during the first decade of the 1900s (and performed by white bands in New Orleans at least since 1908). One of these early sites of blues evolution was along Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee.

Blues is sometimes danced as an informal type of swing dance, with no fixed patterns and a heavy focus on connection, sensuality and improvisation, often with body contact. However, most blues dance moves are inspired by traditional blues dancing. Although usually done to blues music, it can be done to any slow tempo 4/4 music, including "club" music.

Lyrics

Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often with the singer voicing his or her "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, hard times".^[14] Many of the oldest blues records contain gritty, realistic lyrics, in contrast to much of the music being recorded at the time. One of the more extreme examples, "Down in the Alley" by Memphis Minnie, is about a prostitute having sex with men in an alley. Music such as this was called "gut-bucket" blues. The term refers to a type of homemade bass instrument made from a metal bucket used to clean pig intestines for chitterlings, a soul food dish associated with slavery and deprivation. "Gut-bucket" described blues that was "low-down" and earthy, that dealt with often rocky or steamy man-woman relationships, hard luck and hard times. Gut-bucket blues and the rowdy juke-joint venues where it often was played, earned blues music an unsavory reputation. Proper, church-going people shunned it, and preachers railed against it as sinful. And because it often treated the hardships and injustices of life, the blues gained an association in some quarters with misery and oppression. But the blues was about more than hard times; it could be humorous and raunchy as well:

Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,

Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,

It may be sending you baby, but it's worrying the hell out of me.

Author Ed Morales has claimed that Yoruba mythology played a part in early blues, citing Robert Johnson's "Crossroads" as a "thinly veiled reference to Eleggua, the orisha in charge of the crossroads".^[15] However, many seminal blues artists such as Joshua White, Son House, Skip James, or Reverend Gary Davis were Christians, setting religious chants to music.

The original lyrical form of the blues was probably a single line, repeated three times. It was only later that the current, most common structure—a line, repeated once and then followed by a single line conclusion—became standard. This form was called the twelve-bar blues: ^[16]

Woke up this morning with the blues all in my bed

Yes, I woke up this morning with the blues all in my bed

Fixed my breakfast, the blues was all in my bread

In addition to the conventional twelve-bar blues, there are many blues in 8-bar form, such as "How Long Blues", "Trouble in Mind", and Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway". There are also 16-bar blues, as in Ray Charles's instrumental "Sweet 16 Bars".

Musical style

The basic twelve-bar lyric framework of a blues composition is reflected by a standard harmonic progression of twelve bars, in 4/4 or 2/4 time. The blues chords associated to a twelve-bar blues are typically a set of three different chords played over a twelve-bar scheme:

I - I - I - I

IV - IV - I - I

V - IV - I - I

where the Roman numbers refer to the degrees of the progression. That would mean, if played in the tonality of F, the chords would be as follow:

F - F - F - F

Bb - Bb - F - F

C - Bb - F - F

In this example, F is the tonic chord, Bb the subdominant. Note that much of the time, every chord is played in the dominant seventh (7th) form. Frequently, the last chord is the fifth degree (V) or C in this case.

The lyrics generally end on the last beat of the tenth bar or the first beat of the eleventh bar, and the final two bars are given to the instrumentalist as a break; the harmony of this two-bar break, the turnaround, can be extremely complex, sometimes consisting of single notes that defy analysis in terms of chords. The final beat, however, is almost always strongly grounded in the dominant seventh (V7), to provide tension for the next verse. Musicians sometimes refer to twelve-bar blues as "B-flat" blues because it is the traditional pitch of the tenor sax, trumpet/cornet, clarinet and trombone.

Even more characteristic of blues is the melodic scale. While the twelve-bar harmonic progression had been intermittently used for centuries, the revolutionary aspect of blues was the frequent use of the flatted third, flatted seventh, and even flatted fifth in the melody, together with crushing—playing directly adjacent notes at the same time, i.e., diminished second—and sliding—similar to using grace notes.^[17] Where a classical musician will generally play a grace note distinctly, a blues singer or harmonica player will glissando; a pianist or guitarist might crush the two notes and then release the grace note. Blues harmonies also use the subdominant major-minor seventh and the tonic major-minor seventh in place of the tonic.

Blues is occasionally played in a minor key. The scale differs little from the traditional minor, except for the occasional use of a flatted fifth in the tonic, often crushed by the singer or lead instrument with the major fifth in the harmony. Janis Joplin's rendition of "Ball and Chain", accompanied by Big Brother and the Holding Company, provides an example of this technique. Also, minor-key blues is most often structured in sixteen bars rather than twelve—e.g., "St. James Infirmary Blues" and Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me"—and was often influenced by evangelical religious music.

History

Blues has evolved from the sparse music of poor black laborers into a wide variety of complex styles and subgenres, spawning regional variations across the United States and, later, Europe, Africa and elsewhere. What is now considered "blues" as well as modern "country music" arose at approximately the same time and place. Recorded blues and country can be found from as far back as the 1920s, when the popular record industry developed and created marketing categories called "race music" and "hillbilly music" to sell music by and for blacks and whites, respectively. At the time, there was no clear musical division between "blues" and "country" except for the race of the performer, and even that was sometimes incorrectly documented by the record companies.^[18] Popular misconceptions attempt to place blues into these racial categories: studies have situated the origin of "black" spiritual music inside slaves' exposure to their masters' Hebridean-originated gospels. African-American economist and historian Thomas Sowell also notes that the Southern, black, ex-slave population was acculturated to a considerable degree by and among their Scots-Irish "redneck" neighbors. See also: Origins of the blues.

When the blues was first recorded, there were two major divisions, one being a traditional rural country blues and the other a diverse set of more polished city blues or urban blues. Country blues was often unaccompanied, or performed with only a banjo or guitar, and was highly improvised, while the city blues was much more codified and ornate.^[19] Later, the blues evolved into a bewildering array of styles, some of which had a formative influence on other kinds of American popular music, most importantly including soul, jazz, and rock and roll.

Prewar blues

Flush with the success of appropriating the ragtime craze for commercial gain, the American sheet music publishing industry wasted no time in pursuing similar commercial success with the blues. In 1912, three popular blues-like compositions were published, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley adoption of blues elements: "Baby Seals' Blues" by Arthur Seals, "Dallas Blues" by Hart Wand and Memphis Blues" by W. C. Handy ^[20]. Handy went on to become a very popular composer, and billed himself as the "Father of the Blues", though it can be debated whether his compositions are blues at all;^[21] they can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Latin habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime.^[22]

In the 1920s, the blues became a major element of American popular music. With the rise of the recording industry, there was increased popularity of country blues singers and guitarists like Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Son House and Blind Blake. Jefferson was one of the few country blues performers to widely record, and may have been the first to record the slide guitar style, in which a guitar is fretted with a knife blade, the sawed-off neck of a liquor bottle, or other implement; the slide guitar went on to become an important part of the Delta blues.^[23]

There were many regional styles of country blues in the early 20th century, of which a few became especially important. The Delta blues was a rootsy style of country blues, accompanied most typically by slide guitar and harmonica, characterized by a sparse style and passionate vocalization. The most influential performer of this style is usually said to be Robert Johnson,^[24] who was little recorded but combined elements of both urban and rural blues in a unique manner. Along with Robert Johnson, major artists of this style are Charley Patton and Son House. Aside from the Delta blues, Southeast "delicate and lyrical" Piedmont blues tradition based on an elaborated fingerpicking guitar technique was also important, best represented by people like Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller.^[25] Another very lively blues scene also developed in the '20s and '30s around Memphis, Tennessee. The Memphis blues style is mostly influenced by jug bands, such as the Memphis Jug Band or the Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers. They use a large variety of unusual instruments such as washboard, fiddle, kazoo or mandoline. Representative artists in this style are Sleepy John Estes, Robert Wilkins, Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie. Memphis Minnie is a major female blues artist of this time. In contrast with classic female blues, Minnie's blues is less based on her voice than on her virtuoso guitar style sometimes close to Django Reinhardt's. The pianist Memphis Slim began his career in Memphis, too. His style is, however, quite distinct from the Memphis blues style. It is smoother and contains some swing elements. Many blues musicians based in Memphis moved to Chicago in the late thirties or early forties and participated in the urban blues movement, straddling the border between the country and electric blues.

Urban male performers included some of the most popular black musicians of the era, Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy and Leroy Carr. Before WWII, Tampa was sometimes referred to as the king of the slide guitar. Carr made the unusual choice to accompany himself on the piano.^[26] Classic female urban blues singers were extremely popular in the 1920s, among them Mamie Smith, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Victoria Spivey. These women were among the first major musical stars in the country. Bessie Smith is perhaps the most well-known and respected of these women. She was known as one of the top performers of the day, called the "Empress of the Blues".^[27] Her mentor, Ma Rainey, similarly respected, was called the "Mother of Blues". According to Clarke,^[28] both performers used a "method of singing each song around centre tones, perhaps in order to project her voice more easily to the back of a room" and Smith "would also choose to sing a song in an unusual key, and her artistry in bending and stretching notes with her beautiful, powerful contralto to accommodate her own interpretation was unsurpassed".

Another important style of 1930s and early '40s urban blues was boogie-woogie, a style characterized by a regular bass figure, an ostinato or riff and the most familiar example of shifts of level, in the left hand which elaborates on each chord, and trills and decorations from the right hand. Though most often piano based, it is not strictly a solo piano style, and is also used to accompany singers and, as a solo part, in bands and small combos. Boogie-woogie was pioneered by the Chicago-based Jimmy Yancey and the Boogie-Woogie Trio (Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis). Chicago also produced other musicians in the style, like Clarence "Pine Top" Smith and Earl Hines, who "linked the propulsive left-hand rhythms of the ragtime pianists with melodic figures similar to those of Armstrong's trumpet in the right hand".^[29]

One kind of early 1940s urban blues was the jump blues, a style heavily influenced by big band music and characterized by the use of the guitar in the rhythm section, a jazzy, up-tempo sound, declamatory vocals and the use of the saxophone or other brass instruments. The jump blues of people like Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner, based in Kansas City, Missouri, later became the primary basis for rock and roll and rhythm and blues.^[30] Also straddling the border between classic rhythm and blues and blues is the very smooth Louisiana style, whose main representatives are Professor Longhair and, more recently, Doctor John.

Early postwar blues

After World War II and in the 1950s, increased urbanization and the use of amplification led to new styles of electric blues music, popular in cities such as Chicago, Detroit and Kansas City.

Chicago became a blues center in the early fifties: Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, all of the Chess Records label, are the main representatives of the early Chicago blues. Their style is characterized by the use of electric guitar (sometimes slide guitar), blues harp, traditional bass and drums. Nevertheless, some musicians of the same artistic movement, such as Elmore James or J. B. Lenoir, also used saxophones but more as a rhythm support than as solo instruments. The Chicago blues is influenced to a large extent by the Mississippi blues style, because most artists of this period were migrants from the Mississippi region. Though Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) are the best known harp musicians of the early Chicago blues scene, others such as Big Walter Horton and Sonny Boy Williamson, who had already begun their careers before the war, also had tremendous influence. The Chicago blues style is also known for its innovative use of slide electric guitar. The most representative slide guitarists of the period are Muddy Waters and Elmore James. The most influential guitarists of the Chicago blues style that did not use slide guitars were B. B. King and Freddy King. Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters are well known for their deep voice. Howling Wolf is particularly famous for distorting his voice with a special use of the microphone. Willie Dixon played a major role on the Chicago scene. He was a bassist, but his fame came from his composing and writing of most standard blues numbers of the period. He wrote "Hoochie Coochie Man" and "I Just Want to Make Love to You" for Muddy Waters, "Wang Dang Doodle" for Koko Taylor, and "Back Door Man" for Howlin' Wolf, and many others.

The influence of blues on mainstream American popular music was huge in the fifties. In the mid-1950s, musicians like Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry emerged. Directly influenced by the Chicago blues, their enthusiastic playing departed from the melancholy aspects of blues and is often acknowleged as the transition from the blues to rock 'n' roll. Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, mostly influenced by the jump blues and boogie-woogie, popularized rock and roll within the white segment of the population. The influence of the Chicago blues was also very important in Louisiana's zydeco music. Clifton Chenier and others introduced many blues accents in this style, such as the use of electric solo guitars and cajun arrangements of blues standards. However, other artists popular at this time, such as T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker, showed up different influences which are not directly related to the Chicago style. Dallas-born T-Bone Walker is often associated with the California blues style. This blues style is smoother than Chicago blues and is a transition between the Chicago blues, the jump blues and swing with some jazz-guitar influence. On the other hand, John Lee Hooker's blues is very rigorous. It is based on the rhythmic repetition of a single phrase accompanied by a single electric guitar. His very personal style can sound very monotone to some, but many recognize in it a kind of rhythmic trance typical of the Delta blues.

Blues in the '60s and '70s

By the beginning of the 1960s, African American music like rock and roll and soul were parts of mainstream popular music. White performers had brought black music to new audiences, both within the United States and abroad. Though many listeners simply enjoyed the catchy pop tunes of the day, others were inspired to learn more about the roots of rock, soul, R&B and gospel. Especially in the United Kingdom, many young men and women formed bands to emulate blues legends. By the end of the decade, white-performed blues in a number of styles, mostly fusions of blues and rock, had come to dominate popular music across much of the world.

Blues masters such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters continued to perform to enthusiastic audiences, inspiring new artists steeped in traditional blues, such as New York-born Taj Mahal. John Lee Hooker was particularly successful in the late sixties in blending his own style with some rock elements, playing together with younger white musicians. The 1971 album Endless Boogie is a major example of this style. B.B. King had emerged as a major artist in the fifties and reached his height in the late sixties. His virtuoso guitar technique earned him the eponymous title "king of the blues". In contrast to the Chicago style, King's band used strong brass support (saxophone, trumpet, trombone) instead of slide guitar or harp. Tennessee-born Bobby "Blue" Bland" is another artist of the time who, like B.B. King, successfully straddled blues and R&B genres.

The music of the Civil Rights and Free Speech movements in the U.S. prompted a resurgence of interest in American roots music in general and in early African American music, specifically. Traditional acoustic blues was rediscovered along with many forgotten blues heroes including Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and Reverend Gary Davis. Many compilations of classic prewar blues were republished, in particular by the Yazoo Records company. J. B. Lenoir, an important artist of the Chicago blues movement in the fifties, recorded several outstanding LPs using acoustic guitar, sometimes accompanied by Willie Dixon on the acoustic bass or drums. His work at this time had an unusually direct political content relative to racism or Vietnam War issues. As an example, this quotation from Alabama blues record:

I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me (2x)
You know they killed my sister and my brother,
and the whole world let them peoples go down there free

In the late sixties, the so-called West Side blues emerged in Chicago with Magic Sam, Magic Slim and Otis Rush. In contrast with the early Chicago style, this style is characterized by a strong rhythm support (a rhythm and a bass electric guitar, and drums), the absence of harp or saxophone and a lesser melodic contain. Talented, new musicians like Albert King, Buddy Guy, or Luther Allison appeared. Their style was a kind of fusion between the Chicago style and rock à la Jimi Hendrix, using amplified electric guitar.

However, what made blues really come across to the young white audiences in the early 1960s was the style of British blues that developed in England, when dozens of bands such as Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and Cream took to covering the classic blues numbers from either the Delta or Chicago blues traditions. The British blues musicians of the early 1960s would ultimately inspire a number of American blues-rock fusion performers, including Canned Heat, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, The J. Geils Band and others, who at first discovered the form by listening to British performers, but in turn went on to explore the blues tradition on their own. One blues-rock performer, Jimi Hendrix, was a rarity in his field at the time: a black man who played psychedelic blues-rock. Hendrix was a virtuoso guitarist, and a pioneer in the innovative use of distortion and feedback in his music.^[31] Through these artists and others, both earlier and later, blues music has been strongly influential in the development of rock music.

Blues from the 1980s to the present

Since 1980, blues has continued to thrive in both traditional and new forms through the continuing work of Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder and the music of Robert Cray, Albert Collins, Keb' Mo' and others such as Jessie Mae Hemphill or Kim Wilson. The Texas rock-blues style emerged based on an original use of guitars for both solo and rhythms. In contrast with the West Side blues, the Texas style is strongly influenced by the British rock-blues movement. Major artists of this style are Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Fabulous Thunderbirds and ZZ Top. The '80s also saw a revival of John Lee Hooker's popularity. He collaborated with a diverse array of musicians such as Santana, Miles Davis, Robert Cray and Bonnie Raitt. Eric Clapton, who was known for his virtuoso electric guitar within the Blues Breakers and Cream, made a remarked comeback in the '90s with his MTV Unplugged album, in which he played some standard blues numbers on acoustic guitar.

Around this time blues publications such as Living Blues and Blues Revue began appearing at newsstands, major cities began forming blues societies and outdoor blues festivals became more common. More nightclubs and venues emerged, such as Manny's Car Wash in New York, the Slippery Noodle Inn in Indianapolis and the Zoo Bar in Lincoln, Nebraska. In the 1990s and today blues performers are found touching elements from almost every musical genre, as can be seen, for example, from the broad array of nominees of the yearly Blues Music Awards, previously named W. C. Handy Awards.^[32]

Social and musical impact

As the origin of the blues scale, the blues has exerted a profound influence on many styles of music. The blues scale frequently is found in non-blues musical forms, such as popular songs like Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night", blues ballads like "Since I Fell for You" and "Please Send Me Someone to Love", and even orchestral works like George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Concerto in F". Indeed, the blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music and informs many modal frames, especially the ladder of thirds as in "A Hard Day's Night". Blues forms turn up in some surprising places. The theme to the televised Batman had a blues structure, as did teen idol Fabian's first hit, "Turn Me Loose". The first great country music star Jimmie Rodgers was a blues performer. Guitarist/vocalist Tracy Chapman's hit "Give Me One Reason" was a 12-bar blues and has, as a result, become a contemporary blues club standard in Chicago.

Like jazz, rock and roll and hip hop music, blues has been accused of being the "devil's music" and of inciting violence and other poor behavior.^[33] In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable, the first of many styles of African American music to be thus criticized, especially as white audiences began listening to the blues during the 1920s.^[34] In the early twentieth century, W.C. Handy made the blues more respectable to nonblack Americans. The formally trained musician, composer and arranger was a key popularizer of blues. Handy was one of the first to transcribe and then orchestrate blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers. Extremely prolific over his long life, Handy's signature work was the St. Louis Blues.

Spirituals are often cited as the origin of the blues. Musically, spirituals were a descendent of New England choral traditions, and in particular of Isaac Watts's hymns, mixed with African rhythms and call-and-response forms. Spirituals or religious chants in the Afro-American community are much better documented than the "low-down" blues. They emerged mostly because the communities could gather easier during mass or worship gatherings, the so-called camp meetings, and because of their—at first glance—politically correct contents. Most early country bluesmen such as Skip James or Charley Patton were able to play as well both genres, which usually basically only differ in the lyrics. Georgia Tom Dorsey is the perfect example of blues musician and composer straddling the border between country and urban blues, and spirituals. He is often cited as the father of Gospel music. However, the beginning of Gospel music can be better dated to 1930 and the first successes of the Golden Gate Quartet. In the fifties, soul music, best represented by Sam Cooke, Ray Charles and James Brown, overtook many elements of both Gospel and blues music. In the sixties and seventies these genres merged in what is called soul blues music. Direct heir of soul, funk music of the seventies can be seen as an antecedent of hip-hop and contemporary R&B and shows the filiation of the blues with most modern R&B music.

Before World War II, the difference between blues and jazz was sometimes vague. Usually jazz was more impregnated by harmonic structures stemming from brass bands. However, the jump blues is a clear example of mix between both styles. After the war, the influence of blues on jazz was tremendous, and most of the bebop classics, such as Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time", are based on the extensive use of the pentatonic scale and the blue note. However, this influence was purely formal. The bebop marked a major shift of jazz from pop music for dancing to a high-art, less-accessible, cerebral "musician's music". The audience for both blues and jazz definitively split, and it was at this time that the border between blues and jazz became the most unambiguous. Artists straddling the border between jazz and blues are categorized into the jazz-blues sub-genre.

The influence of both the twelve-bar structure and the blues scale on rock-and-roll music was so profound that rock and roll can properly be classified as an outgrowth of blues, or even "blues with a back beat". Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog", with its unmodified twelve-bar structure (both harmony and lyrics) and a melody centered on flatted third of the tonic (and flatted seventh of the subdominant), is a blues song transformed to a new genre by rhythm and sheer energy. One can hardly find a major song from rock-and-roll's revolutionary period that is not, at its roots, a blues composition transformed by rhythm: "Johnny B. Good", "Blue Suede Shoes", "Whole Lotta' Shakin' Going On", "Tutti-Frutti", "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", "What'd I Say", and "Long Tall Sally". The early African American rock musicians retained the frank sexual themes of blues. "Got a gal named Sue, knows just what to do" or "See the girl with the red dress on, she knows how to do it all night long" are hard to mistake. Even the subject matter of "Hound Dog" contains well-hidden sexual double entendre. More sanitized early "white" rock borrowed both the structure and harmonics of blues, although minimizing harmonic creativity and sexual nuance, such as Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock". Many white musicians who covered black rock songs would go so far as to change the words; possibly the most famous example was Pat Boone's cover of "Tutti Frutti", which originally started "Tutti frutti, loose booty . . . a wop bop a lu bop, a good Goddamn."

Now blues, and in particular the most typical Delta and Chicago styles, is one of the most characteristic American myths and clichés. The the Blues Brothers movies (1980 and 2000), which mix up almost all kinds of music related to blues such as R&B or Zydeco, have had a major impact on the image of blues music. They promoted the standard traditional blues "Sweet home Chicago", whose version by Robert Johnson is maybe the best known, to the unofficial status of Chicago's city anthem. The 1986 movie Crossroads also provided a strong promotion to the blues music and in particular to the myth of Robert Johnson meeting the devil at the crossroads. More recently, in 2003, Martin Scorsese made a lot of efforts to promote the blues to a larger audience. He asked several famous directors such as Clint Eastwood and Wim Wenders to participate in a series of short films called The Blues.^[35] He also participated in the reedition of compilations of major blues artists in a series of high quality CDs.

References

• William Barlow (1993). Cashing In, Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media: 31.
• Clarke, Donald (1995). The Rise and Fall of Popular Music, St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312115733.
• Ewen, David (1957). Panorama of American Popular Music, Prentice Hall. ISBN 0136483607.
• Ferris, Jean (1993). America's Musical Landscape, Brown & Benchmark. ISBN 0697125165.
• Garofalo, Reebee (1997). Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the USA, Allyn & Bacon. ISBN 0205137032.
• Morales, Ed (2003). The Latin Beat, Da Capo Press. ISBN 0306810182.
• Schuller, Gunther (1968). Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195040430.
• Southern, Eileen (1997). The Music of Black Americans, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. ISBN 0393038432.
• Muslim Roots of the Blues. SFGate. URL accessed on August 24, 2005.

Notes

External links

• The mother of all blueslinks collection
• Blues radio stations
• Blues Foundation
• article on possible connections between Muslim music and the blues
• Music from Florida Folklife Collection, available free for public use from the State Archives of Florida

See also

• List of blues musicians
• List of British blues musicians