Musical Formalization of the Blues

The blues musical form is often described as a subset or form of jazz (Funk & Wagnalls; Green 121), and that is perfectly the case to the extent that the blues motif is typical of many jazz performances. Additionally, blues and jazz are associated with the American black socio-cultural experience. But the blues as a musical form has a more reliable provenance in folk music, slave work songs, and Negro spirituals of earlier centuries, and it can be argued that jazz grew out of the blues. The fact that the blues as a standard musical form of the twentieth century is properly associated with jazz and considered a kind of jazz has to be set beside the fact that as a species of jazz it takes its emotional power from pre-20th-century motifs. The intersection of motifs, together with the analytical problems that the intersection presents, is best summarized by Green.

Nobody has ever decided to the satisfaction of anyone else where the "folk" music of, say, the itinerant guitarists of the Southwest and jazz proper begins. But, indisputably, by the beg

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the part of composers, and train imagery is a part of that. Robert Johnson, whose "ineluctable urge of selfdestruction" made his personal life miserable (Shaw 39), provides an example in "Crossroad Blues": "Standing at the crossroads, I tried to flag a ride (twice) / Ain't nobody seem to know me, everybody pass me by" (Shaw 496). In this number, the social dislocation of the Depression is experienced as one person's social alienation. The poet who can't get a break in life is expressing the frustration of the dispossessed, and the image of the train crossroads stands for the crossroads of life. The 1940s marked a dramatic tendency toward mainstreaming. Train imagery seems decisive in this connection in the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer "Blues in the Night." Train imagery dominates the lyrics, right down to the "A whoo-ee-duh-whoo-ee, / oi, clickety clack's a-echoin' back th' blues in the night" (Mercer and Arlen 3). The evocative melody almost programmatically makes references to places along the Mississippi--"from Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to Saint Joel' (4-5), and there is a melancholy built in to the piece. However, "Blues in the Night," written in 1941, is really a Tin Pan Alley adumbration of blues themes. It doe
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Approximate Word count = 4751
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page)