Blind Willie Johnson
Photo Source: http://www.publicdomain4u.com/html/blind_willie_johnson.htm
The Blues
A Brief History of the Blues [excerpted]
by Robert M. Baker
Source: http://www.thebluehighway.com/history.html
Joseph Machlis says that the blues is a native American musical and verse form, with no direct European and African antecedents of which we know. (p. 578) In other words, it is a blending of both traditions. Something special and entirely different from either of its parent traditions. (Although Alan Lomax cites some examples of very similar songs having been found in Northwest Africa, particularly among the Wolof and Watusi. p. 233)
The word 'blue' has been associated with the idea of melancholia or depression since the Elizabethan era. The American writer, Washington Irving is credited with coining the term 'the blues,' as it is now defined, in 1807. (Tanner 40) The earlier (almost entirely Negro) history of the blues musical tradition is traced through oral tradition as far back as the 1860s. (Kennedy 79)
When African and European music first began to merge to create what eventually became the blues, the slaves sang songs filled with words telling of their extreme suffering and privation. (Tanner 36) One of the many responses to their oppressive environment resulted in the field holler. The field holler gave rise to the spiritual, and the blues, "notable among all human works of art for their profound despair . . . They gave voice to the mood of alienation and anomie that prevailed in the construction camps of the South," for it was in the Mississippi Delta that blacks were often forcibly conscripted to work on the levee and land-clearing crews, where they were often abused and then tossed aside or worked to death. (Lomax 233)
Alan Lomax states that the blues tradition was considered to be a masculine discipline (although some of the first blues songs heard by whites were sung by 'lady' blues singers like Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith) and not many black women were to be found singing the blues in the juke-joints. The Southern prisons also contributed considerably to the blues tradition through work songs and the songs of death row and murder, prostitutes, the warden, the hot sun, and a hundred other privations. (Lomax) The prison road crews and work gangs where were many bluesmen found their songs, and where many other blacks simply became familiar with the same songs.
Following the Civil War (according to Rolling Stone), the blues arose as "a distillate of the African music brought over by slaves. 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 it." (RSR&RE 53) (author's note: I've seen somewhere, that the guitar did not enjoy widespread popularity with blues musicians until about the turn of the century. Until then, the banjo was the primary blues instrument.) By the 1890s the blues were sung in many of the rural areas of the South. (Kamien 518) And by 1910, the word 'blues' as applied to the musical tradition was in fairly common use. (Tanner 40)
...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). (Kamien 518) Instrumental blues had been recorded as early as 1913. Mamie Smith recorded the first vocal blues song, 'Crazy Blues' in 1920. (Priestly 9) Priestly claims that while the widespread popularity of the blues had a vital influence on subsequent jazz, it was the "initial popularity of jazz which had made possible the recording of blues in the first place, and thus made possible the absorption of blues into both jazz as well as the mainstream of pop music." (Priestly 10)
American troops brought the blues home with them following the First World War. They did not, of course, learn them from Europeans, but from Southern whites who had been exposed to the blues. At this time, the U.S. Army was still segregated. During the twenties, the blues became a national craze. Records by leading blues singers like Bessie Smith and later, in the thirties, Billie Holiday, sold in the millions. The twenties also saw the blues become a musical form more widely used by jazz instrumentalists as well as blues singers. (Kamien 518)
Sound Sample: Robert Johnson : Preachin' Blues
From: Companion CD to the book American Music: A Panorama by Daniel Kingman
Gospel
Text written by: Michael Tanner
Excerpted from: "The Gospel According to Brother Michael: (A Brief History of Anthem, Spiritual, and Gospel Music from Early Slavery to the Mid Twentieth Century)
Source: http://www.kusp.org/playlists/crosscurrents/history.html
Anthem music, later called 'spirituals', and much later
'gospel' music, while having a direct and vital link to Africa is
distinctly American music. A music so much a part of the fabric of
the sum of American music that much of the popular idioms of today
can be traced, with little effort, to gospel music (for brevity,
herein I will use the term 'gospel' to refer to anthem and spiritual
forms of religious Afro-American music).African Roots:
Tribal African music of four hundred years ago differed from
European and white American music in one major regard: secular music
did not exist in African traditions. Besides sacred music, Europeans
sang about love, war, and drinking, as well as the recent historical
events of nearby villages, or far off countries. While many of these
songs mentioned God in some manner, many still remained secular and
popular among the village and country folk.
All African music was naturally sacred and the concept of
singing secular music was alien to them. Their music can be seen to
satisfy four main functions in the fabric daily life, they are:
religious, agricultural and sexual fertility, hunting, and war. In
this regard African music has more in common with Native American
music than European music since song was used as a means of being in
harmony with nature and the cosmos.
One predominant style of music that is still retained and was brought
to America during the slavery period of the early 1600s to 1865, is
the call and response pattern in which a leader sings a line and the
entire group answers. Typical styles also included drums and other
percussion instruments played a complex rhythmic accompaniment.
(Sound familiar? A good example of this call and response style with
syncopated rhythms can be heard by Ray Charles who used this to great
advantage on his hit "What'd I Say").Slavery Era:
From the need to subjugate, or from fear, many American slave
owners did not allow blacks to use traditional African instruments,
nor could they play or sing their native music. Gradually much of
the words and melodies were forgotten and disappeared in North
America. It is because of this ban on their musical ancestral link,
that a new African American style of music was created. New songs
were created using the African traditions of harmony, call and
response, behind a strong rhythmic meter mixed with European
traditions of harmony and musical instruments. Gospel songs created
by blacks used Christian subjects with African vocal and rhythmic
influences. The church became a sanctuary for black slave
expression. It was the only place that groups of slaves could
congregate without fear of white supervision. Though not all slave
holders allowed religious instruction or permission to worship and
had to meet secretly.
The enslavement of blacks in the American Colonies began
during the 1600's. Slavery flourished in the South, where large
plantations grew cotton, tobacco, and other crops. The plantations
required many laborers. Work songs and "field hollers" were used to
ease the drudgery of hard labor in the fields, later they were sung
while laying railroad track, or while working in places such as the
many turpentine camps in the mid 1800s.
Slavery was less profitable in the North, where economic activity
centered on small farms and industries. By 1860, the slave states
had about 4 million slaves. The slaves made up nearly a third of the
South's population. Since demographically, more blacks lived in the
South, the birth of gospel music became endemic first in the South
before it was finally spread to the rest of white America. First,
through traveling minstrel shows in the late 1800s, then through
vaudeville and sheet music in the early 1900s, and finally through
records in the early 1920s. Many of the songs and melodies were
embraced by whites and began to greatly influence white religious and
popular American music.
By the early 1800s it was common for slaves to perform for
their masters, and later in front of polite white society in larger
musical ensembles, but it wasn't until the end of the Civil War that
European musical instruments were abundantly available to former
slaves. Instruments were literally left on battlefields that were
befriended by new black owners. Instruments were cheap and freed
blacks used what little new income they had to purchase or barter for
them. Although some blues forms existed in the early 1800s, as the
end of the 1800s drew near the first black secular music, the "blues"
began to evolve almost instantly and simultaneously all over the
states and territories, where ever large groups of blacks lived.
Technically the field holler was the first musical style to
move away from religious themes and concerned its self with work only
(and much can be said about the double meanings of many gospel songs,
such as Swing Low, Sweet Chariot which on the surface is about life
in the hereafter, but any slave knew it was about the promise of life
in the here and now devoid of slavery. "home" wasn't necessarily
heaven, but of freedom instead. Some historians argue that all early
gospel songs were codified songs of protest). However, blues was the
first solely secular form of African American based music with the
birth of ragtime and jazz following closely behindThe Church:
The role of the church remained central to blacks in America
once they were emancipated. With emancipation, a just and equal
freedom was elusive and largely nonexistent. Jim Crow laws remained
as a given in the South and a huge exodus of blacks migrated to the
industrialized North (and continued until the 1970s), which promised
jobs and more freedom. To a very limited degree jobs were found, but
only jobs that whites did not want. More freedom was granted to them
only, as some historians argue, because the North lacked the
tradition of a fully organized and functioning racist tradition, and
because virtually the entire organized abolitionist tradition existed
in the North. The former abolitionists switched from advocating
emancipation to advocating fair treatment for recently freed blacks.
With this political and social backdrop, the church evolved as a
religious sanctuary from the eyes of slave holders to a sanctuary
where black culture and music could thrive. In this atmosphere
churches were used as meeting places for black town forums with, at
times, more of political than religious agendas.
Gospel music was changing rapidly. As once rural blacks
migrated to large cities in the North and South, and with the advent
of a growing black economy an emerging urban sophistication, gospel
music turned it's back on some of the cruder forms of harmony,
melody. and structure. Whites portraying blacks nationwide in
minstrel shows whetted the appetite for white audiences who desired
to hear the real thing. Beginning in 1871 the black Fisk Jubilee
Singers, who were students of the all black Fisk University in
Nashville, Tennessee, traveled widely in America internationally with
great success singing spirituals. Also, the late 1800s Ragtime was
developing into what later a 1917 San Francisco newspaper music
critic called "jazz" (alternately spelled "jass").
Gospel music had influenced blues and jazz, and now, by the early
1900s, blues and jazz were in turn, influencing gospel music. for
instance, the syncopated rhythms of ragtime firmly entered many of
church performers approach to existing and newer songs. Many
traveling singing preachers began to accompany themselves with piano
and guitar. The guitar became a popular form of accompaniment due to
the practicality of ease of mobility. Since blues pianists and
guitarists were common nationwide, the singing preachers began to
adopt the chordal and melodic styles of many of bluesmen and women.
Blues and jazz was the popular rage, and served as the spice for
black musical palates, while gospel was the religious staple.
The more theatrical and prosperous traveling preachers and performers
sang in revival tents and as guests in churches and missions for the
homeless. Many of them traveled with an entourage of musicians and
small choirs.
White music publishers recognized that the antebellum style
of black jubilee and spirituals were rapidly fading and began to
widely publish a huge amount nineteenth century sheet music. This
brought a potentially dying form of gospel music into the white
parlors and churches which were loved either for the beauty of the
music or or baser nostalgia of the good old days of antebellum South.
After the Civil War, it had become the norm for black
churches to factionalize into various denominations according to the
region and predominant white denominational influence. The more
conservative black Methodist and Separatist Baptist churches from
their inception preferred the sedate hymns of English composer Isaac
Watts (1674-1748). Blacks embraced Methodism early on since white
Methodists readily adopted some of the black camp meeting songs, and
repetitive choruses. In addition these white Methodists mimicked the
black style of disjointed affirmations, prayers, and pledges. Still,
both black and white Methodists and black Separatist Baptists
services were musically tame in comparison to the emerging black
Holiness and Four Square churches. These churches retained the
unrestrained "country" element found in lesser sophisticated
congregations, and relates more directly in musical form, intensity,
and attitude found in various blues forms of the day and later in
rhythm and blues, rockabilly, and rock and roll.
The invention of recorded cylinders and records overshadowed
sheet music sales of gospel music and much more rapidly spread gospel
music into white and black homes (who could afford them), and even
more so in the early 1920s on the radio, but the concept of singers
attaining a "Star" status hadn't yet developed until post W.W.II.
Gospel Sound Sample: Sheep Sheep Dont'cha Know the Road:
Sung by Bessie Jones and the Sea Island Singers
From: Companion CD to the book American Music: A Panorama by Daniel Kingman
