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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. The earlier (almost entirely Negro) history of the blues musical tradition is traced through oral tradition as far back as the 1860s. 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. 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
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. 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." (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. And by 1910, the word 'blues' as applied to the musical tradition was in fairly common use. Some
'bluesologists' claim (rather
dubiously), that the first blues song that was ever written down was 'Dallas Blues,'
published in 1912 by Hart Wand, a white violinist from Oklahoma City. 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
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 During the decades of the thirties and forties, the blues spread northward with the migration of many blacks from the South and entered into the repertoire of big-band jazz. The blues also became electrified with the introduction of the amplified guitar. In some Northern cities like Chicago and Detroit, during the later forties and early fifties, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, and Elmore James among others, played what was basically Mississippi Delta blues, backed by bass, drums, piano and occasionally harmonica, and began scoring national hits with blues songs. At about the same time, T-Bone Walker in Houston and B.B. King in Memphis were pioneering a style of guitar playing that combined jazz technique with the blues tonality and repertoire. In the early nineteen-sixties, the
urban bluesmen were "discovered" by young white American and European musicians.
Many of these blues-based bands like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Rolling Stones,
the Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Cream, Canned Heat, and Fleetwood Mac, brought
the blues to young white audiences, something the black blues artists had been unable to
do in America
THE BLUE TONALITIES AND WHAT DEFINES THE BLUESThere are a number of different ideas as to what the blues really are: a scale structure, a note out of tune or out of key, a chord structure; a philosophy? The blues is a form of Afro-American origin in which a modal melody has been harmonized with Western tonal chords. In other words, we had to fit it into our musical system somehow. But, the problem was that the blues weren't sung according to the European ideas of even tempered pitch, but with a much freer use of bent pitches and otherwise emotionally inflected vocal sounds. These 'bent'pitches are known as 'blue notes'. The 'blue notes' or blue tonalities are one of the defining characteristics of the blues. Tanner's opinion is that these tonalities resulted from the West Africans' search for comparative tones not included in their pentatonic scale. He claims that the West African scale has neither the third or seventh tone nor the flat third or flat seventh. "Because of this, in the attempt to imitate either of these tones the pitch was sounded approximately midway between [the minor AND major third, fifth, or seventh], causing what is called a blue tonality." When the copyists attempted to write down the music, they came up with the so-called "blues scale," in which the third, the seventh, and sometimes the fifth scale-degrees were lowered a half step, producing a scale resembling the minor scale. There are many nuances of melody and rhythm in the blues that are difficult, if not impossible to write in conventional notation. But the blue notes are not really minor notes in a major context. In practice they may come almost anywhere.
Before the field cry, with its bending of notes, it had not occurred to musicians to explore the area of the blue tonalities on their instruments. The early blues singers would sing these "bent" notes, microtonal shadings, or "blue" notes, and the early instrumentalists attempted to duplicate them. By the mid-twenties, instrumental blues were common, and "playing the blues" for the instrumentalist could mean extemporizing a melody within a blues chord sequence. Brass, reed, and string instrumentalists, in particular, were able to produce many of the vocal sounds of the blues singers. BLUES LYRICS Blues lyrics contain some of the most fantastically penetrating autobiographical and revealing statements in the Western musical tradition. For instance, the complexity of ideas implicit in Robert Johnson's 'Come In My Kitchen,' such as a barely concealed desire, loneliness, and tenderness, and much more:
Blues lyrics are often intensely personal, frequently contain sexual references and often deal with the pain of betrayal, desertion, and unrequited love or with unhappy situations such as being jobless, hungry, broke, away from home, lonely, or downhearted because of an unfaithful lover. The early blues were very irregular rhythmically and usually followed speech patterns, as can be heard in the recordings made in the twenties and thirties by the legendary bluesmen Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson and Lightnin' Hopkins among others. The meter of the blues is usually written in iambic pentameter. The first line is generally repeated and third line is different from the first two. The repetition of the first line serves a purpose as it gives the singer some time to come up with a third line. Often the lyrics of a blues song do not seem to fit the music, but a good blues singer will accent certain syllables and eliminate others so that everything falls nicely into place.
The structure of blues lyrics usually consists of several three-line verses. The first line is sung and then repeated to roughly the same melodic phrase (perhaps the same phrase played diatonically a perfect fourth away), the third line has a different melodic phrase:
CONSTRUCTION OF THE BLUESMost blues researchers claim that the very early blues were patterned after English ballads and often had eight, ten, or sixteen bars. The blues now consists of a definite progression of harmonies usually consisting of eight, twelve or sixteen measures, though the twelve bar blues are, by far, the most common. The 12 bar blues harmonic progression (the one-four-five) is most often agreed to be the following: four bars of tonic, two of subdominant, two of tonic, two of dominant, and two of tonic. Or, alternatively, I,I,I,I,IV,IV,I,I,V,V,I,I. Each roman numeral indicates a chord built on a specific tone in the major scale. Due to the influence of rock and roll, the tenth chord has been changed to IV. This alteration is now considered standard. In practice, various intermediate chords, and even some substitute chord patterns, have been used in blues progressions, at least since the nineteen-twenties. Some purists feel that any variations or embellishments of the basic blues pattern changes its quality or validity as a blues song. For instance, if the basic blues chord progression is not used, then the music being played is not the blues. Therefore, these purists maintain that many melodies with the word "blues" in the title, and which are often spoken of as being the blues, are not the blues because their melodies lack this particular basic blues harmonic construction. I believe this viewpoint to be a bit wide of the mark, because it places a greater emphasis on blues harmony than melody.
The principal blues melodies are, in fact, holler cadences, set to a steady beat and thus turned into dance music and confined to a three-verse rhymed stanza of twelve to sixteen bars.The singer can either repeat the same basic melody for each stanza or improvise a new melody to reflect the changing mood of the lyrics. Blues rhythm is also very flexible. Performers often sing "around" the beat, accenting notes either a little before or behind the beat. - by Robert M. Baker |
Brief History of Jazz |
1902: 12-year-old Jelly Roll Morton "invents" jazz (or so he claims.) A resident of Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans, Morton combines ragtime, French quadrilles and the hot blues played by Buddy Bolden, the notoriously hard-living cornet player. 1917: The Original Dixieland Jazz Band makes the first jazz recording, "Livery Stable Blues." It sells a million copies, launching jazz as popular music. Freddie Keppard had rejected the chance to make the first jazz record - he was afraid other musicians would copy his style. 1925-1928: Louis Armstrong "Satchmo", with his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens recordings, Louis Armstrong revolutionizes the jazz form, encouraging solo improvisation over ensemble playing. 1929-1945: The swing era rises and falls. Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Count Basie lead influential groups. 1935-1955: West 52d Street in Manhattan N.Y., packed with clubs, becomes the playground for Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and friends. 1936: At the Congress Hotel in Chicago, Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson sit in with Benny Goodman's ensemble. Two years later, Billie Holiday joins Artie Shaw's big band. 1939: While playing "Cherokee" during a Harlem jam session, Charlie Parker happens upon a harmonic discovery that leads to be-bop, a far more intricate style of jazz, both harmonically and rhythmically. 1943: Jazz ascends to the concert hall: The first of Duke Ellington's annual Carnegie Hall programs and the premiere of "Black, Brown and Beige," his influential long-form work about the history of American blacks. 1951: On the heels of Miles Davis's "Birth of the Cool", musicians like Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan form the so-called cool school, turning down the volume and intensity. 1951: Sidney Bechet relocates to Paris, the first of many American jazz ex-patriates including Kenny Clarke, Arthur Taylor and Bud Powell. Racial tension was less pronounced and European audiences were far more appreciative. 1954: Jazz goes outdoors: George Wein, a pianist and singer, rewrites his jazz resume by inviting musicians to Newport, R.I., for the first of many Newport Jazz Festivals. 1956: Ella Fitzgerald makes the first of several "Songbook" recordings for Verve, the impresario Norman Granz's new recording label. The "Songbooks" make Fitzgerald an international star. 1959: A pivotal year, with several records that expand the very possibilities of improvisation: Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue," John Coltrane's "Giant Steps," and Ornette Coleman's "Shape of Jazz to Come." 1964: The avant-garde gains mainstream recognition as Thelonious Monk makes the cover of Time magazine, which christens him the high priest of be-bop. 1969: Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew," a primordial jazz-rock fusion record, sells 500,000 copies, turning many rock fans on to jazz. 1972-1977: New York's "loft jazz" scene blooms, with experimental, post-bop players performing in lofts like Ali's Alley. Among the players on the scene are Joe Lovano and David Murray. 1979: On Jan. 5, the famously cosmic Charles Mingus dies in Cuernavaca, Mexico, at the age of 56. That same day, 56 whales beach themselves on the Mexican coast. 1984: The new generation gets a leader who looks backward: virtuoso trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. At 22, he wins a Grammy for his "neo-bop" record "Think of One." The same night, with impeccible technique, he takes a Grammy for his recording of classical trumpet concertos. 1991: Marsalis is appointed artistic director of the new Jazz at Lincoln Center program. 1992: A new fusion trip: The British "acid jazz" group Us3, which blends hip-hop and electronic samples of jazz cuts, gets permission to raid the Blue Note archives. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, the hip-hop group Digable Planets records "Rebirth of Slick (Cool like Dat)," built around the sampled horn lines of James Williams's "Stretchin". 1993: Joshua Redman, the Harvard summa cum laude saxophonist, chooses jazz over Yale Law and releases two records. Critics love the records and fans love Redman: June 1995: The Impulse record label, one of the most important in jazz history, is revived after a 21-year dormancy. It is the seventh major jazz label to be launched or relaunched in the past 10 years. feedback form
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