, the Father of Black History Month, looked forward to a time when general American History would incorporate Black History.
But,
as it is, we get one month a year to reflect upon and to teach the
history of the contributions of African Americans to American History,
World History and to civilization.
Black History is much more than
a few extraordinary individuals, or a few practices; such as, slavery,
Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement.
.
As Dr MLK has said "We have been able to hew out of the Mountain of Despair a Stone of hope."
Black History did not begin at Plymouth Rock or Jamestown, VA.
Granted,
it took the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and a
lot of struggles in between to secure for African Americans the basic
right to citizenship that other Americans take for granted.
I will not try to paint with such a broad brush today.
Some
where between Centuries of existence in Africa, the trans-Alantic Slave
Trade, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the 1960s
Civil Rights Movement and today... a new Culture was born..
That Culture includes the Religion of the Black Church, Music, Literature, Sports, Dance, language, television, and film.
.
.
Music is the most widely acknowledged African American contribution to American and World Culture.
Black American Music is recognized and cherished all over the world.
Enslaved
Africans mixed their traditional musical styles and influences with the
harsh realities of their new surroundings and created Blues, Jazz,
Gospel, Rythm & Blues, Hip-hop and many variations of these genres.
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication,
American Popular Music.)
Jazz
music was the anthem for the first well-defined American youth culture.
Rebelling against the horrors of mechanized warfare and the straitlaced
morality of the 19th century, millions of college-age Americans adopted
jazz as a way to mark their difference from their parents’ generation.
Jazz’s attraction as a symbol of sensuality,
freedom, and
fun appear's to have transcended the boundaries of
race, religion, and class, creating a precedent for phenomena such as
the Swing Era, Rhythm & Blues, and Rock ’n’ Roll.
“America’s classical music”, Jazz, is inextricably linked to the African American experience.
Jazz, one of
America’s original art forms, emerged in New
Orleans, Louisiana, around 1900.
New Orleans’s position as a gateway
between the United States and the Caribbean, its socially stratified
population, and its strong residues of colonial French culture,
encouraged the formation of a
hybrid musical culture unlike that in any
other American city.
Jazz emerged from the confluence of New Orleans’s
diverse musical traditions, including ragtime, marching bands, the
rhythms used in Mardi Gras and funerary processions, and
African-American song traditions, both sacred (the
Spirituals) and
secular (the
Blues).
The New Orleans-born cornetist and singer
Louis Armstrong is commonly credited with establishing certain core
features of
jazz – particularly its rhythmic drive or swing and its
emphasis on solo instrumental virtuosity.
Armstrong also profoundly
influenced the development of mainstream popular singing during the
1920s and 1930s.
Armstrong emerged as an influential musician on the
local scene in the years following World War I, and subsequently
migrated to Chicago to join the band of his mentor
King (Joe) Oliver,
playing on what are regarded by many critics as the first real
jazz
records.
In 1924
Armstrong joined
Fletcher Henderson’s band in
New York City, pushing the band in the direction of a hotter, more
improvisatory style that helped to create the synthesis of
jazz and
ballroom dance music that would later be called
Swing.
By
the 1930s
Armstrong was the best–known Black musician in the world, as a result of
his recordings and film and radio appearances. Armstrong’s approach was
shaped by the aesthetics of early New Orleans
jazz, in which the cornet
or trumpet player usually held the responsibility of stating the melody
of the song being played.
Throughout his career Armstrong often spoke
of the importance of maintaining a balance between
improvisation (or
“routining,” as he called it) and straightforward treatment of the
melody.
“Ain’t no sense in playing a hundred notes if one will do,”
Armstrong is reported to have said on his 70th birthday.
[This article is excerpted from
American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by
Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University
Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the
Bureau of International Information Programs.]
Who generally began to say, JAZZ is “America’s Premier Art Form”?
This question was posted to a
jazz research message board on April 19, 2008.
Representative
John Conyers, authored a Congressional Bill (HR 57) in 1987 which
designated jazz “a rare and valuable national American treasure to which
we should devote our attention, support and resources to make certain
it is preserved, understood and promulgated.”
Rep. John Conyers’s good
friend,
Dr. Billy Taylor, called jazz “America’s classical music” long
before HR 57.
Dizzy Gillespie
said
jazz is “our native art form” in 1957, an unnamed contributor to
Harper‘s described “talk of jazz as a native art-form” in 1950, and
A 1946 issue of the
New Republic called
jazz “the only original American art form.”
The Jazz Record,
insisted that
jazz is “America’s first wholly native art form” (ca.
1943) and
In 1944 RCA Victor issued a set of records claiming to be
“p
resenting jazz music as an American art form worthy of study.”
Earlier
citations are included:
“Naturally, there have clustered
together little groups of serious European thinkers to make the same
discovery that Americans have made,
that Jazz is a great art form” (Paul
Whiteman,
Time, 1926); “
as far as America is concerned it (jazz) is actually our characteristic expression” (Gilbert Seldes,
The Seven Lively Arts,
1924);
and a mention of a book written by Japanese author,
Kamesuke
Shioiri, in 1929 (the book is untranslated, but the person posting has
offered to supply a PDF copy of it to anyone who contacts him through
the message board).
The
quotes from the earlier dates
are significant in that this
was
a minority opinion among the cultural elite at the time.
There was
much
heated debate about whether or not
jazz was even
music, much less
art.
Mostly classical conductors, saw
jazz as having artistic
merit, but
most saw it as an abomination that would lead to the
corruption of society, probably because of its purported origins in
African American culture.
But improvisation
wasn’t the main thrust of jazz of the ’10s, ’20s, or even the ’30s. It
really wasn’t until the late 1940s and ’50s that this became considered
an indispensable salient feature. It seems that as improvisation became
more important to
jazz performance, the musical result became more
questionable in terms of authenticity.
Thank
Ken Burns
for his arbitrary demarcation that essentially launched the 2nd New
Orleans School in New York City and took
jazz away from the improvisers
and performing musicians and put it into the hands of corporate-friendly
composers and academicians. Except that a lot of really great music is
marginalized so as not to question certain ideological and political
forces that lean toward global hegemony and must, by their tenets and
methodology, stifle improvisation. For example, the salient feature of
early jazz, more so than improvisation, was the use of extended
techniques, especially those resulting in unorthodox timbres.
When
James Reese Europe brought his
African American military ragtime band to
France in 1918, the local musicians couldn’t believe the sounds that
the Harlem Hell-fighters were producing with their instruments.
Trumpets
growled and wah-ed,
trombones slided and belched,
saxophones bent notes
and played without vibrato.
The first “official”
jazz recording in
1917 of the Original Dixieland
Jass Band included “
Livery Stable Blues,”
where the instruments imitated the sounds of barnyard animals.
Over
the decades, an indispensable aspect of the artistry of
jazz performance
was mastery of a set of extended techniques that could become part of
one’s “voice.”
Johnny Hodges’s swooping melodies,
Roy Eldridge’s
growls,
Walter Page’s slap bass. Listen to J
ohn Coltrane and ask
yourself if his sound and technique would have any place in the
classical saxophone world.
One thing is clear,
Coltrane was original—and he was original
in a field of original saxophonists. It doesn’t take a very discerning
ear to hear the difference between Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Dewey
Redman, Warne Marsh, Stan Getz, or Dexter Gordon.
Each took an
unorthodox way of playing and milked it into a personal voice.
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a
musical form and a
music genre that originated in
African-American communities of primarily the "
Deep South" of the
United States around the end of the 19th century from
spirituals,
work songs,
field hollers,
shouts and
chants, and rhymed simple narrative
ballads.
The
origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the
spirituals.
The
origins of spirituals go
back much further than the blues, usually
dating back to the middle of the 18th century, when the slaves were
Christianized and began to sing and play Christian
hymns, in particular those of
Isaac Watts, which were very popular.
Before the
blues gained its formal definition in terms of chord
progressions, it was defined as the secular counterpart of the
spirituals. It was the low-down music played by the rural Blacks.
Depending on the religious community a musician belonged to, it was
more or less considered as a sin to play this low-down music: blues was
the devil's music. Musicians were therefore segregated into two
categories:
gospel and blues singers, guitar preachers and songsters.
However, at the time rural Black music began to get recorded in the
1920s, both categories of musicians used very similar techniques:
call-and-response patterns, blue notes, and slide guitars. Gospel music
was nevertheless using musical forms that were compatible with Christian
hymns and therefore less marked by the blues form than its secular
counterpart.
The blues form, ubiquitous in
jazz,
rhythm and blues, and
rock and roll is characterized by specific chord progressions, of which the
twelve-bar blues chord progression is the most common. The
blue notes that, for expressive purposes are sung or played flattened or gradually bent (minor 3rd to major 3rd) in relation to the
pitch of the
major scale, are also an important part of the sound.
The blues genre is based on the blues form but possesses other
characteristics such as specific lyrics, bass lines, and instruments.
Blues can be subdivided into several
subgenres ranging from
country to urban blues that were more or less popular during different periods of the 20th century. Best known are the
Delta,
Piedmont,
Jump, and
Chicago blues styles.
World War II marked the transition from acoustic to
electric blues
and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience,
especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called
blues-rock evolved.
Etymology
One explanation for the origin of the "
blues" is that it derived from mysticism involving blue
indigo,
which was used by many West African cultures in death and mourning
ceremonies where all the mourner's garments would have been dyed blue to
indicate suffering. This mystical association towards the
indigo plant,
grown in many southern U.S. slave plantations, combined with the West
African slaves who sang of their suffering as they worked on the cotton
that the indigo dyed eventually resulted in these expressed songs being
known as "the Blues."
The term may also have come from the term "blue devils", meaning
melancholy and sadness; an early use of the term in this sense is found
in
George Colman's one-act farce
Blue Devils (1798). Though the use of the phrase in
African-American music may be older, it has been attested to since 1912, when
Hart Wand's "
Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition. In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a
depressed mood.
Lyrics
The lyrics of early
traditional blues verses
probably often consisted of a single line repeated four times; it was
only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common
current structure became standard: the so-called AAB pattern, consisting
of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next
four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Two of the first published blues songs, "
Dallas Blues" (1912) and "
Saint Louis Blues" (1914), were 12-bar blues featuring the AAB structure.
W. C. Handy wrote that he adopted this convention to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times.
The lines are often sung following a pattern closer to a
rhythmic talk
than to a melody. Early blues frequently took the form of
a loose
narrative.
The singer voiced 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, [and] hard times." This melancholy has led to the suggestion of an
Igbo origin for blues because of the reputation the
Igbo had throughout plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and outlook to life when they were enslaved.
The lyrics often relate troubles experienced within African American society.
For instance
Blind Lemon Jefferson's
"Rising High Water Blues" (1927) tells about the
Great Mississippi Flood of 1927:
- "Backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time
- I said, backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time
- And I can't get no hearing from that Memphis girl of mine."
However, although the blues gained an association with misery and
oppression, the lyrics could also 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."
-
- From Big Joe Turner's "Rebecca", a compilation of traditional blues lyrics
However,
the Christian influence was obvious.
Many seminal blues artists such as
Charley Patton or
Skip James had several religious songs or spirituals in their repertoires.
Reverend Gary Davis and
Blind Willie Johnson
are examples of artists often categorized as blues musicians for their
music, although
their lyrics clearly belong to the spirituals.
Form
The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908: Antonio
Maggio's "I Got the Blues" is the first published song to use the word
blues.
Hart Wand's "
Dallas Blues" followed in 1912;
W. C. Handy's "
The Memphis Blues" followed in the same year. The first recording by an African American singer was
Mamie Smith's 1920 rendition of
Perry Bradford's "Crazy Blues". But
the origins of the blues date back to some decades earlier, probably around 1890.
They are very poorly documented, due in part to racial discrimination within American society, including academic circles, and to the low literacy rate of the rural African American community at the time.
Chroniclers began to report about blues music in
Southern Texas and
Deep South at the dawn of the 20th century. In particular, Charles Peabody mentioned the appearance of blues music at
Clarksdale, Mississippi
and Gate Thomas reported very similar songs in southern Texas around
1901–1902. These observations coincide more or less with the remembrance
of
Jelly Roll Morton, who declared having heard blues for the first time in
New Orleans in 1902;
Ma Rainey, who remembered her first blues experience the same year in
Missouri; and
W.C. Handy, who first heard the blues in
Tutwiler, Mississippi in 1903.
The first extensive research in the field was performed by
Howard W. Odum, who published a large anthology of folk songs in the counties of
Lafayette, Mississippi and
Newton, Georgia between 1905 and 1908. The first non-commercial recordings of blues music, termed "proto-blues" by
Paul Oliver, were made by Odum at the very beginning of the 20th century for research purposes. They are now utterly lost.
Other recordings that are still available were made in 1924 by
Lawrence Gellert. Later, several recordings were made by
Robert W. Gordon, who became head of the
Archive of American Folk Songs of the
Library of Congress. Gordon's successor at the Library was
John Lomax. In the 1930s, together with his son
Alan, Lomax made a large number of non-commercial blues recordings that testify to the huge variety of proto-blues styles, such as
field hollers and
ring shouts. A record of blues music as it existed before the 1920s is also given by the recordings of artists such as
Lead Belly or
Henry Thomas who both performed archaic blues music. All these sources show the existence of many different structures distinct from the
twelve-,
eight-, or
sixteen-bar.
The social and economic reasons for the appearance of the blues are not fully known. The first appearance of the blues is often dated after the
Emancipation Act of 1863, between 1870 and 1900, a period that coincides with post
emancipation and, later, the development of
juke joints as places where Blacks went to listen to music, dance, or gamble after a hard day's work.
This period corresponds to the transition from slavery to
sharecropping, small-scale agricultural production, and the expansion of
railroads in the southern United States. Several scholars characterize
the early 1900s development of blues music as a move from group
performances to a more individualized style. They argue that the
development of the blues is associated with the newly acquired freedom
of the enslaved people.
According to Lawrence Levine, "there was a direct relationship
between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the
popularity of Booker T. Washington's teachings, and the rise of the
blues." Levine states that "psychologically, socially, and economically,
African-Americans were being acculturated in a way that would have been
impossible during slavery, and it is hardly surprising that their
secular music reflected this as much as their religious music did."
There are few characteristics common to all blues music, because the
genre took its shape from the idiosyncrasies of individual performances.
However, there are some characteristics that were present long before
the creation of the modern blues.
Call-and-response shouts were an early
form of blues-like music; they were a "functional expression ... style
without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any
particular musical structure." A form of this pre-blues was heard in slave
ring shouts and
field hollers, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content".
Blues has evolved from the unaccompanied vocal music and oral
traditions of slaves imported from West Africa and rural Blacks into a
wide variety of styles and sub-genres, with regional variations across
the United States. Though blues, as it is now known, can be seen as a
musical style based on both European
harmonic structure and the
African call-and-response tradition, transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar, the blues form itself bears no resemblance to the melodic styles of the West African
griots, and the influences are faint and tenuous.
In particular,
no specific African musical form can be identified as the single direct ancestor of the blues. However 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. That blue notes pre-date their use in blues and have an African origin is attested by English composer
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's "A Negro Love Song", from his
The African Suite for Piano composed in 1898, which contains
blue third and
seventh notes.
The
Diddley bow (a homemade one-stringed instrument found in parts of the
American South in the early twentieth century) and the
banjo
are African-derived instruments that may have helped in the transfer of
African performance techniques into the early blues instrumental
vocabulary.
The banjo seems to be directly imported from western African music. It
is similar to the musical instrument that griots and other Africans such
as the
Igbo played (called
halam or
akonting by African peoples such as the
Wolof,
Fula and
Mandinka).
However, in the 1920s, when country blues began to be recorded, the use
of the banjo in blues music was quite marginal and limited to
individuals such as
Papa Charlie Jackson and later
Gus Cannon.
Blues music also adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs",
minstrel shows and
Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment. 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."
The musical forms and styles that are now considered the "blues" as well as modern "
country music"
arose in the same regions during the 19th century in the southern
United States. 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 Blacks for blacks and by whites for whites,
respectively. At the time, there was no clear musical division between
"blues" and "country," except for the ethnicity of the performer, and
even that was sometimes documented incorrectly by record companies.
Though musicologists can now attempt to define "the blues" narrowly
in terms of certain chord structures and lyric strategies thought to
have originated in West Africa, audiences originally heard the music in a
far more general way: it was simply the music of the rural south,
notably the
Mississippi Delta. Black and white musicians shared the same
repertoire and thought of themselves as "
songsters"
rather than "blues musicians." The notion of blues as a separate genre
arose during the Black migration from the countryside to urban areas in
the 1920s and the simultaneous development of the recording industry.
"
Blues" became a code word for a record designed to sell to Black
listeners.
The
origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the
spirituals.
The
origins of spirituals go
back much further than the blues, usually
dating back to the middle of the 18th century, when the slaves were
Christianized and began to sing and play Christian
hymns, in particular those of
Isaac Watts, which were very popular.
Before the
blues gained its formal definition in terms of chord
progressions, it was defined as the secular counterpart of the
spirituals. It was the low-down music played by the rural Blacks.
Depending on the religious community a musician belonged to, it was
more or less considered as a sin to play this low-down music: blues was
the devil's music. Musicians were therefore segregated into two
categories:
gospel and blues singers, guitar preachers and songsters.
However, at the time rural Black music began to get recorded in the
1920s, both categories of musicians used very similar techniques:
call-and-response patterns, blue notes, and slide guitars. Gospel music
was nevertheless using musical forms that were compatible with Christian
hymns and therefore less marked by the blues form than its secular
counterpart.
ues performers. The blues evolved
from informal performances in bars to entertainment in theaters. Blues
performances were organized by the
Theater Owners Bookers Association in
nightclubs such as the
Cotton Club and
juke joints such as the bars along
Beale Street in Memphis. Several record companies, such as the
American Record Corporation,
Okeh Records, and
Paramount Records, began to record African American music.As the recording industry grew, country blues performers like
Bo Carter,
Jimmie Rodgers (country singer),
Blind Lemon Jefferson,
Lonnie Johnson,
Tampa Red and
Blind Blake became more popular in the African American community. Kentucky-born
Sylvester Weaver was in 1923 the first to record the
slide guitar style, in which a guitar is fretted with a knife blade or the sawed-off neck of a bottle.
[67] The slide guitar became an important part of the
Delta blues.
[68] The first blues recordings from the 1920s are categorized as a traditional, rural
country blues and a more polished 'city' or urban blues.
Country blues performers often improvised, either without
accompaniment or with only a banjo or guitar. Regional styles of country
blues varied widely in the early 20th century. The (Mississippi) Delta
blues was a rootsy sparse style with passionate vocals accompanied by
slide guitar. The little-recorded
Robert Johnson[69]
combined elements of urban and rural blues. In addition to Robert
Johnson, influential performers of this style included his predecessors
Charley Patton and
Son House. Singers such as
Blind Willie McTell and
Blind Boy Fuller performed in the southeastern "delicate and lyrical"
Piedmont blues tradition, which used an elaborate ragtime-based
fingerpicking guitar technique. Georgia also had an early slide tradition,
[70] with
Curley Weaver,
Tampa Red,
"Barbecue Bob" Hicks and
James "Kokomo" Arnold as representatives of this style.
[71]
The lively
Memphis blues style, which developed in the 1920s and 1930s near
Memphis, Tennessee, was influenced by
jug bands such as the
Memphis Jug Band or the
Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers. Performers such as
Frank Stokes,
Sleepy John Estes,
Robert Wilkins,
Joe McCoy,
Casey Bill Weldon and
Memphis Minnie used a variety of unusual instruments such as
washboard,
fiddle,
kazoo or
mandolin. Memphis Minnie was famous for her
virtuoso guitar style. Pianist
Memphis Slim
began his career in Memphis, but his distinct style was smoother and
had some swing elements. Many blues musicians based in Memphis moved to
Chicago in the late 1930s or early 1940s and became part of the urban
blues movement, which blended country music and electric blues.
[72][73]
1960s and 1970s
By the beginning of the 1960s, genres influenced by
African American music such as
rock and roll and
soul
were part of mainstream popular music. White performers had brought
African-American music to new audiences, both within the U.S. and
abroad. However, the blues wave that brought artists such as
Muddy
Waters to the foreground had stopped. Bluesmen such as
Big Bill Broonzy and
Willie Dixon started looking for new markets in Europe.
Dick Waterman
and the blues festivals he organized in Europe played a major role in
propagating blues music abroad. In the UK, bands emulated U.S. blues
legends, and UK blues-rock-based bands had an influential role
throughout the 1960s.
Blues performers 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
blended his blues style with rock elements and playing with younger
white musicians, creating a musical style that can be heard on the 1971
album
Endless Boogie.
B. B. King's 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 from a saxophone, trumpet, and trombone, instead of using slide
guitar or harp.
Tennessee-born
Bobby "Blue" Bland,
like B. B. King, also straddled the blues and R&B genres. During
this period, Freddie King and Albert King often played with rock and
soul musicians (
Eric Clapton,
Booker T & the MGs) and had a major influence on those styles of music.
The music of the
Civil Rights and
Free Speech movements in the U.S. prompted a
resurgence of interest in American roots music and early African American music. As well as Jimmi Bass Music festivals such as the
Newport Folk Festival brought traditional blues to a new audience, which helped to revive interest in prewar acoustic blues and performers such as
Son House,
Mississippi John Hurt,
Skip James, and
Reverend Gary Davis. Many compilations of classic prewar blues were republished by the
Yazoo Records.
J. B. Lenoir from the Chicago blues movement in the 1950s recorded several LPs using acoustic guitar, sometimes accompanied by
Willie Dixon on the acoustic bass or drums. His songs, originally distributed in Europe only,
commented on political issues such as racism or Vietnam War issues, which was unusual for this period. His
Alabama Blues recording had a song that stated:
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
White audiences' interest in the blues during the 1960s increased due to the Chicago-based
Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the
British blues movement. The style of British blues developed in the UK, when bands such as
The Animals,
Fleetwood Mac,
John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers,
The Rolling Stones,
The Yardbirds, and
Cream and Irish musician
Rory Gallagher performed classic blues songs from the
Delta or
Chicago blues traditions.
[115]
The British and blues musicians of the early 1960s inspired a number of American
blues rock fusion performers, including
Canned Heat, the early
Jefferson Airplane,
Janis Joplin,
Johnny Winter,
The J. Geils Band,
Ry Cooder, and The
Allman Brothers Band. One
blues rock performer,
Jimi Hendrix, was a rarity in his field at the time: a black man who played
psychedelic rock. Hendrix was a skilled guitarist, and a pioneer in the innovative use of
distortion and
feedback in his music. Through these artists and others, blues music influenced the development of
rock music.
Santana, which was originally called the
Carlos Santana Blues Band, also experimented with
Latin-influenced blues and blues-rock music around this time. At the end of the 1950s appeared the very bluesy
Tulsa Sound
merging rock'n'roll, jazz and country influences. This particular music
style started to be broadly popularized within the 1970s by
J.J. Cale and the cover versions performed by
Eric Clapton of "
After Midnight" and "
Cocaine".
1980s to the 2000s
Since at least the 1980s, there has been a resurgence of interest in
the blues among a certain part of the African-American population,
particularly around
Jackson, Mississippi and other
deep South regions. Often termed "
soul blues" or "
Southern soul",
the music at the heart of this movement was given new life by the
unexpected success of two particular recordings on the Jackson-based
Malaco label:
Z. Z. Hill's
Down Home Blues (1982) and
Little Milton's
The Blues is Alright (1984). Contemporary African-American performers who work this vein of the blues include
Bobby Rush,
Denise LaSalle,
Sir Charles Jones,
Bettye LaVette,
Marvin Sease,
Peggy Scott-Adams, Mel Waiters,
Clarence Carter, Dr. "Feelgood" Potts, O.B. Buchana, Ms. Jody,
Shirley Brown, and dozens of others.
During the 1980s
, blues also continued in both traditional and new forms. In 1986, the album
Strong Persuader revealed
Robert Cray as a major blues artist. The first
Stevie Ray Vaughan recording,
Texas Flood, was released in 1983, and the Texas-based guitarist exploded onto the international stage. 1989 saw a revival of
John Lee Hooker's popularity with the album
The Healer.
Eric Clapton, known for his performances with
the Blues Breakers and
Cream, made a comeback in the 1990s with his album
Unplugged, in which he played some standard blues numbers on acoustic guitar. However, beginning in the 1990s,
digital multitrack recording and other technological advances and new marketing strategies that include
video clip
production have increased costs, and challenge the spontaneity and
improvisation that are an important component of blues music.
In the 1980s and 1990s, blues publications such as
Living Blues and
Blues Revue began to be distributed, major cities began forming blues societies, outdoor blues festivals became more common, and more
nightclubs and venues for blues emerged.
In the 2000s to the 2010s
blues-rock gained a cultural following especially as popularity of the internet increased and artists started creating
YouTube channels, forums, and
Facebook pages. Many notable blues-rock musicians in this time period are
Beth Hart,
Warren Haynes,
Gary Clark Jr.,
Derek Trucks,
Jason Ricci and the New Blood,
Susan Tedeschi,
Joe Bonamassa, and
Shemekia Copeland. Alternative rock groups still combined strong elements of blues in their music especially
Awolnation,
Cage the Elephant,
The White Stripes, and
The Black Keys.
Musical impact
Blues musical styles, forms (12-bar blues), melodies, and the blues
scale have influenced many other genres of music, such as rock and roll,
jazz, and popular music. Prominent jazz, folk or rock performers, such as
Louis Armstrong,
Duke Ellington,
Miles Davis, and
Bob Dylan have performed significant blues recordings. The blues scale is often used in
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 in orchestral works such as
George Gershwin's "
Rhapsody in Blue"
and "Concerto in F". Gershwin's second "Prelude" for solo piano is an
interesting example of a classical blues, maintaining the form with
academic strictness. The blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular
music and informs many
modal frames, especially the
ladder of thirds used in rock music (for example, in "
A Hard Day's Night"). Blues forms are used in the theme to the televised
Batman,
teen idol Fabian Forte's hit, "Turn Me Loose",
country music star
Jimmie Rodgers' music, and guitarist/vocalist
Tracy Chapman's hit "Give Me One Reason".
Early country bluesmen such as
Skip James,
Charley Patton,
Georgia Tom Dorsey played country and urban blues and had influences from spiritual singing. Dorsey helped to popularize
Gospel music. Gospel music developed in the 1930s, with the
Golden Gate Quartet. In the 1950s,
soul music by
Sam Cooke,
Ray Charles and
James Brown used gospel and blues music elements. In the 1960s and 1970s, gospel and blues were these merged in
soul blues music.
Funk music of the 1970s was influenced by soul; funk can be seen as an antecedent of hip-hop and contemporary R&B.
R&B music can be traced back to
spirituals and blues. Musically, spirituals were a descendant 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 African-American community are much better
documented than the "low-down" blues. Spiritual singing developed
because African-American communities could gather for mass or worship
gatherings, which were called
camp meetings.
Edward P. Comentale has noted how the blues was often used as a
medium for art or self-expression, stating: "As heard from Delta shacks
to Chicago tenements to Harlem cabarets, the blues proved—despite its
pained origins—a remarkably flexible medium and a new arena for the
shaping of identity and community."
Before
World War II, the boundaries between blues and
jazz were less clear.
Usually jazz had harmonic structures stemming from
brass bands,
whereas blues had blues forms such as the 12-bar blues. However, the
jump blues of the 1940s mixed both styles. After WWII, blues had a
substantial influence on jazz.
Bebop classics, such as
Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time", used the blues form with the pentatonic scale and blue notes.
Bebop marked a major shift in the role of jazz, from a popular style
of music for dancing, to a "high-art," less-accessible, cerebral
"musician's music".
The audience for both blues and jazz split, and the
border between blues and jazz became more defined.
In popular culture
Like
jazz,
rock and roll,
heavy metal music,
hip hop music,
reggae,
country music, and
pop music, blues has been accused of being the "
devil's music" and of inciting violence and other poor behavior.
In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable,
especially as white audiences began listening to the blues during the
1920s. In the early twentieth century,
W.C. Handy was the first to popularize blues-influenced music among non-black Americans.
During the blues revival of the 1960s and '70s, acoustic blues artist
Taj Mahal and legendary Texas bluesman
Lightnin' Hopkins wrote and performed music that figured prominently in the popularly and critically acclaimed film
Sounder (1972). The film earned Mahal a
Grammy nomination for Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture and a
BAFTA nomination. Almost 30 years later, Mahal wrote blues for, and performed a banjo composition, claw-hammer style, in the 2001 movie release
Songcatcher, which focused on the story of the preservation of the
roots music of Appalachia.
Perhaps the most visible example of the blues style of music in the late 20th century came in 1980, when
Dan Aykroyd and
John Belushi released the film
The Blues Brothers. The film drew many of the biggest living influencers of the
Rhythm and blues genre together, such as
Ray Charles,
James Brown,
Cab Calloway,
Aretha Franklin, and
John Lee Hooker. The band formed also began a successful tour under the
Blues Brothers marquee. 1998 brought a sequel,
Blues Brothers 2000 that, while not holding as great a critical and financial success, featured a much larger number of blues artists, such as
B.B. King,
Bo Diddley,
Erykah Badu,
Eric Clapton,
Steve Winwood,
Charlie Musselwhite,
Blues Traveler,
Jimmie Vaughan,
Jeff Baxter.
In 2003,
Martin Scorsese made significant 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 documentary films for
PBS called
The Blues.
He also participated in the rendition of compilations of major blues
artists in a series of high-quality CDs. Blues guitarist and vocalist
Keb' Mo' performed his blues rendition of "
America, the Beautiful" in 2006 to close out the final season of the television series
The West Wing.
“America’s classical music” is inextricably linked to the African American experience.
Jazz, one of America’s original art forms, emerged in New
Orleans, Louisiana, around 1900. New Orleans’s position as a gateway
between the United States and the Caribbean, its socially stratified
population, and its strong residues of colonial French culture,
encouraged the formation of a hybrid musical culture unlike that in any
other American city. Jazz emerged from the confluence of New Orleans’s
diverse musical traditions, including ragtime, marching bands, the
rhythms used in Mardi Gras and funerary processions, French and Italian
opera, Caribbean and Mexican music, Tin Pan Alley songs, and
African-American song traditions, both sacred (the spirituals) and
secular (the blues). The New Orleans-born cornetist and singer
Louis Armstrong is commonly credited with establishing certain core
features of jazz – particularly its rhythmic drive or swing and its
emphasis on solo instrumental virtuosity. Armstrong also profoundly
influenced the development of mainstream popular singing during the
1920s and 1930s. Armstrong emerged as an influential musician on the
local scene in the years following World War I, and subsequently
migrated to Chicago to join the band of his mentor King (Joe) Oliver,
playing on what are regarded by many critics as the first real jazz
records.
In 1924 Armstrong joined Fletcher Henderson’s band in
New York City, pushing the band in the direction of a hotter, more
improvisatory style that helped to create the synthesis of jazz and
ballroom dance music that would later be called swing. By the 1930s
Armstrong was the best–known black musician in the world, as a result of
his recordings and film and radio appearances. Armstrong’s approach was
shaped by the aesthetics of early New Orleans jazz, in which the cornet
or trumpet player usually held the responsibility of stating the melody
of the song being played. Throughout his career Armstrong often spoke
of the importance of maintaining a balance between improvisation (or
“routining,” as he called it) and straightforward treatment of the
melody. “Ain’t no sense in playing a hundred notes if one will do,”
Armstrong is reported to have said on his 70th birthday.
[This article is excerpted from
American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by
Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University
Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the
Bureau of International Information Programs.]
This question was posted to a jazz research message board I
subscribe to on April 19, the day after this year’s annual extortion to
Aunt Iris was due. I remembered that part of the hard-earned cash my
wife and I had to pay this year goes to the salary of Representative
John Conyers, who authored a Congressional bill (HR 57) in 1987 which
designated jazz “a rare and valuable national American treasure to which
we should devote our attention, support and resources to make certain
it is preserved, understood and promulgated.” (I’m just doing my civic
duty as a good citizen.) But I also remembered that Conyers’s good
friend, Dr. Billy Taylor, called jazz “America’s classical music” long
before HR 57.
According to the sources on the message board Dizzy Gillespie
said jazz is “our native art form” (although he didn’t specify any
nationality in the term “our”) in 1957, an unnamed contributor to
‘s described “talk of jazz as a native art-form” in 1950, and a 1946 issue of the
calls jazz “the only original American art form.” Another magazine, Art Hodes’s
,
insists that jazz is “America’s first wholly native art form” (ca.
1943) and in 1944 RCA Victor issued a set of records claiming to be
“presenting jazz music as an American art form worthy of study.”
Earlier citations are included: “Naturally, there have clustered
together little groups of serious European thinkers to make the same
discovery that Americans have made, that Jazz is a great art form” (Paul
Whiteman,
, 1926); “as far as America is concerned it (jazz) is actually our characteristic expression” (Gilbert Seldes,
,
1924); and a mention of a book written by Japanese author, Kamesuke
Shioiri, in 1929 (the book is untranslated, but the person posting has
offered to supply a PDF copy of it to anyone who contacts him through
the message board).
The quotes from the earlier dates are significant in that this
was a minority opinion among the cultural elite at the time. There was
much heated debate about whether or not jazz was even music, much less
art. Some, and mostly classical conductors, saw jazz as having artistic
merit, but most saw it as an abomination that would lead to the
corruption of society, probably because of its purported origins in
African American culture. But that was the dilemma, if Dvořák were to
be taken seriously (and enough time and money had been invested in his
residency at The National Conservatory that he had to be taken
seriously), then any truly original American music had to be steeped in
African American musical aesthetics (as well as Native American ones).
My point is that by the time the music being called jazz was being
accepted by the masses, it was played by an elite group of ethnically
diverse performers. Why the work of Scott Joplin isn’t considered an
original American art form while the drivel that Paul Whiteman was
calling jazz is, escapes me (unless one takes into account the tastes of
most American highbrow music lovers, then it all comes into
perspective). It seems that as long as there has been a music called
jazz, someone has been trying to call it an American art form and
someone else has poo-poohed the attempt.
But improvisation (and I am blogging about improvised music)
wasn’t the main thrust of jazz of the ’10s, ’20s, or even the ’30s. It
really wasn’t until the late 1940s and ’50s that this became considered
an indispensable salient feature. It seems that as improvisation became
more important to jazz performance, the musical result became more
questionable in terms of authenticity. I almost want to thank Ken Burns
for his arbitrary demarcation that essentially launched the 2nd New
Orleans School in New York City and took jazz away from the improvisers
and performing musicians and put it into the hands of corporate-friendly
composers and academicians. Except that a lot of really great music is
marginalized so as not to question certain ideological and political
forces that lean toward global hegemony and must, by their tenets and
methodology, stifle improvisation. For example, the salient feature of
early jazz, more so than improvisation, was the use of extended
techniques, especially those resulting in unorthodox timbres. When
James Reese Europe brought his African American military ragtime band to
France in 1918, the local musicians couldn’t believe the sounds that
the Harlem Hellfighters were producing with their instruments. Trumpets
growled and wah-ed, trombones slided and belched, saxophones bent notes
and played without vibrato. The first “official” jazz recording in
1917 of the Original Dixieland Jass Band included “Livery Stable Blues,”
where the instruments imitated the sounds of barnyard animals. Over
the decades, an indispensable aspect of the artistry of jazz performance
was mastery of a set of extended techniques that could become part of
one’s “voice.” Johnny Hodges’s swooping melodies, Roy Eldridge’s
growls, Walter Page’s slap bass. Listen to John Coltrane and ask
yourself if his sound and technique would have any place in the
classical saxophone world, and then ask yourself who was the better
saxophonist, Marcel Mule or John Coltrane. Without answering that
directly, one thing is clear, Coltrane was original—and he was original
in a field of original saxophonists. It doesn’t take a very discerning
ear to hear the difference between Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Dewey
Redman, Warne Marsh, Stan Getz, or Dexter Gordon. Each took an
unorthodox way of playing and milked it into a personal voice.
continued to perform to enthusiastic audiences, inspiring new artists steeped in traditional blues, such as New York–born
.
blended his blues style with rock elements and playing with younger
white musicians, creating a musical style that can be heard on the 1971
album
.
