History of the Blues
There is little exact information a
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There is little exact information about the origin of the music known as the blues. It is not even known for certain at what point the term began to be used for this music. Yet it is clear that the term describes a feeling. The phrase "having the Blue Devils" had been used since the sixteenth century to describe depression or great sadness. Sometime after the Civil War this state of mind was described as "having the blues" and the term was probably first applied to a particular type of African American music sometime after 1900. Singing or playing the blues was seen as a means of getting rid of depression and the "blues feeling" of the musician was widely regarded as the essential element of the music (Oliver, "Blues" 37). The blues was a way of feeling that found its expression in a manner of playing, singing and writing music. The feeling that was being expressed had its origin in the horrors of African Americans' lives in the violently racist South. But the music thrived, spread, and developed in several different stylistic directions and, as writer Ralph Ellison noted, became "the closest thing to a tragic sensibility that America has ever produced" (cited by Crouch 32). The blues probably developed in the rural area known as the Mississippi Delta and was then adapted to the style of popular vocalists such as Bessie Smith (a style known collectively as "Classic Blues"). The subsequent popularity of rural blues was then followed by the adaptation
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life became even worse. In 1922 the motorized tractor had begun to make its appearance on the farms and laborers were in far less demand. This was a trend that continued through the 1950s as farming became more mechanized and chemical weed killers lowered the need for even the worst farm jobs. In general, of course, these changes resulted in the great migration, from 1910 to 1970, of 6.5 million African Americans to the industrialized North. But, as greater and greater numbers of blacks simply abandoned their futile efforts to survive in agriculture they also moved to the towns and cities of the Delta. Rural blues flourished in the more concentrated population centers of the Delta and, over the course of years, the urban blues styles were developing in Chicago and Memphis as blacks moved north.
The Delta style featured "singing [that] is generally tense and vehement" and the guitar style, rather than being very sophisticated is, instead, "imaginative and complex, using all the resources of the instrument" (Herzhaft 87). The lyrics are of usually of the metaphorical type exemplified by well-known the use of sexual metaphors as in Charlie Patton's Pony Blues and numerous other examples. But the songs also featured a strong
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Some common words found in the essay are:
African Americans, African American, Robert Johnson, Oliver Blues, Rhythm Blues, Mississippi Delta, Ma Rainey, House Blues, Charlie Patton, Classic Blues, african american, african americans, blues culture, blues music, blues musicians, oliver blues, classic blues, blues performers, blues experience, rock roll, blues ed lawrence, ed lawrence cohn, quoted shaw 97, lawrence cohn york, review 29 1995,
Approximate Word count = 7246
Approximate Pages = 29 (250 words per page)
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