American Popular Music: Blues
Directions: Using knowledge of your recent research on the origins of African American vocal,
instrumental and lyrical traditions, gather evidence of these traditions in the American popular
music genre, blues. Use the notes organizers to identify evidence on how three of the traditions
influenced blues music
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Palmer, Robert. "Rock Begins." The Rollingstone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. Third ed.
New York: Random House, 1992. 3-15. Print.
Evidence: Work songs; Influence of early African American music (minstrelsy); African
instruments; griot;
African Americans had developed their own distinctive and diverse body of folk music by 1900
alongside the relatively pure African strains that survived in some church music and in the work
songs sung by gang laborers. The black creations that white knew were minstrel songs - lively,
often humorous tunes that tended to resemble Anglo-American gigs and reels. Many minstrel
songs were composed by whites such as Dan Emmett (composer of “Dixie.”) and Thomas D.
Rice (“Jump Jim Crow”), but all of them inspired ultimately by black plantation orchestras that
had regaled visitors in the antebellum South. Both black groups and their white imitators
consisted of banjos, fiddles (an instrument with numerous West African precedents) and various
percussion instruments, notably tambourines, triangles, and bone clappers. The earliest plantation
orchestras had probably played African dance music like that performed by the lute-and fiddle
playing griots of African savanna today. By the time we heard of them, they had learned enough
European dance tunes to satisfy their white patrons, and the fiddlers were paying so attention to
European musical standards. The white minstrels, who copied black playing styles and tunes as
closely as they could, became the rage of America and Europe during the years just before the
Civil War. For the first time, an essentially black music, albeit in diluted form, had found favor
with a large white audience. Oddly enough, many popular minstrel songs were absorbed into
black tradition following the war. They turned up in the repertoires of black banjo- and guitar
playing minstrels, or songsters, well into the twentieth century.
During the first decades of the century, a new kind of black-secular song emerged. The
songs were originally known as “one-verse songs” because they repeated a single line several
times. Gradually an aab stanza form replaced the older aaa, and the songs began to be called
blues. They may have represented an attempt by rural blacks to accommodate the demands of
guitar accompaniment within free flowing strains of their field cries and work songs. In any case,
the blues spread rapidly, first through the tent-show performances of such vaudeville singers as
Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, then through the polished blues-based composition of W.C. Handy and
finally, after 1926, through recordings by authentic rural bluesmen such as Blind Lemmon
Jefferson
Palmer pgs. 6, 7
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Evidence: Blues as a musical expression of life; resistance to social injustice
(similar to the spirituals)
McNally, Dennis. On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom.
Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2014. Print.
The origins of the first blues are indeed a mystery. The precise facts, the where and
when, are a matter of guesswork based on this fragmentary information. Some
things are clear. The primal blues originated in the period from roughly 1885 to
1900 and spread like wildfire from Texas to the Carolinas and from Missouri down
to New Orleans. They contained flatted thirds and sevenths (blue notes, pentatonic
scale)....The blues were a musical expression of black life.
As such, their purpose was the maintenance of cultural identity and implicitly a
resistance to white authority. Their impact was social and spiritual as much as
musical, and they maintained community. In that, the blues closely resembled
black church life, although with dramatically different trapping. Not the least of the
reasons the church so deeply objected to the blues was that they encroached on the
church’s turf by offering the same sort of emotional relief. More than anything
being written in America at the time, the blues was universal and realistic,
especially on the primary subject of love and death.
McNally pg. 104
Evidence: Blues as resistance to social injustice (spirituals); tradition of the Griot
Given the realities of turn-of-the-century black life, dissenting opinions required
subtlety - the relevant phrase is signifying. Signifying meant commenting, often
obliquely, on the subject at hand. It is African in nature because it is intimately
related to improvisation and call-and-response group communication. What the
blues signified for the singer was autonomy, the right to sing his own song in his
own way. In 1900, that was a political statement. As it went along, the blues
acquired associations of rambling - the freedom to travel was a particularly
cherished right at the time - a celebration of pleasure...and a total lack of concern
for any authority not actually pointing a gun at the singer.
McNally pg. 108
Some of the most oppressed people on this green earth, deprived of almost every
cultural advantage, had created something that was so enormously potent it would
affect all of American music for the next one hundred years and beyond.
McNally pg. 110 -117
Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Song “Grey Goose” and its hidden meaning
It was explicitly about a goose so tough that it wouldn't die, and when it did, was
too tough for knives and forks. There were overt comments about hard times,
floods, cops, fires and disasters of all sorts...presented with grim reality that stood
in extreme contrast to the sugary fantasyland of mainstream pop songs. In the
words of an early-century Alabama railroad gang song, “White folks on the sofa/
Niggers on the grass.”
McNally pg. 190
Evidence: On the social conditions in the Mississippi Delta where Blues music
began; Influence of Ring Shouts
Along with disease and raging animal life, the Delta’s supreme fertility made it a
brutally difficult place to clear for farming, which meant that from the beginning a
large African American labor force working on sizable plantations would be
required. After the Civil War, the landowners had enormous problems with credit
and turned to sharecropping as a way of ensuring a labor force, which black people
saw as a step toward land ownership. Through adroit manipulations of the
economic system, the owners made sure their ‘croppers were fairly stuck in place.
Nothing would change terribly much for the next ninety years.
For most African Americans, the result was either cotton feudalism or
homelessness, and there were vagrancy laws that meant if you weren’t working in
the fields, you were going to work in the field at the Parchman Farm Prison.
That was life in the Delta. Schools barely existed, and churches were the only
social institution available. There, ring shouts provided a framework for courtship
for people who’d be married in their very early teens with the nourishing of
African-style dancing, “a two-phrase tune to a steady beat,” wrote Alan Lomax, “a
leader improvising against an overlapping chorus, a syncopated offbeat rhythm that
made both the words and the youngsters dance.”
McNally pg 117
Evidence: Influence of work songs, call and response
Charles Peabody was a Harvard archaeologist excavating Native American burial
mounds...in 1902 and 1903; and he heard black workers singing. Their music so
fascinated him that he reported on it to the Journal of American Folklore in 1903.
The workers started with Sunday’s hymns, sung in call in response style, “hymns
of the most doleful import. Rapid changes were made from these to ragtime
melodies..” The music was “weird in interval and strange in rhythm, peculiarly
beautiful.’ They sang of many things, from murder - “They had me arrested for
murder/ And I never harmed a man” - to humorous remarks about their white boss:
I’m so tired I’m most dead,/ Sittin’ up there playing’ mumbley-peg.”
McNally pg. 105
Evidence: arwhoolies, moans, field collars, percussive beat, improvisation
Blues - It was dark in content, with lyrics that frequently pondered questions of
faith and death. It was African, with extreme singing styles that used lots of moans,
whoops, and hollers, and it had a powerful percussive beat. It allowed for an
exceptional amount of improvisation, so that lyric lines would float from song to
song.
McNally pg. 116
Evidence: Spirituals, Improvisation, Field Hollers, Griot - Bessie Smith “Empress of the Blues”
Langston Hughes would write that her music was the essence of “sadness...not softened with
tears, but without even a god to speak to.” There was a little got too; as guitarist Danny Barker
pointed out, her show had a “church deal mixed up in it.” She improvised a fair amount with
both rhythm and melody, and she moved audiences as though she were an evangelist. Barker
added, “She could bring about mass hypnotism.”
Carl Van Vechten, music critic, wrote of Bessie Smith “Her face was beautiful...Walking slowly
to the footlights, to the accompaniment of the wailing, mute brasses, the monotonous African
pounding of the drum...she began her strange, rhythmic rites in a voice full of shouting and
moaning and praying and suffering, a wild, rough, Ethiopian voice, harsh and volcanic.”
McNally pg. 157.
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Evidence: Blues as resistance to social injustice (spirituals)
Blues music, the most representative musical form of the 1920's in United States,
emerged from the same musical and social fabric as each other early form of black
American music; the pains of black people amid change. As such, blues music was
reflective of the black American struggle to achieve success in life. (Jones, Blues
People: 63) These musical forms all emerged as responses to social, economic and
often state-sanctioned rejection and repression. The circumstances of the black
American in America's history post-Emancipation greatly shaped the development
of these, America's first indigenous musical products.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA03/faturoti/harlem/collage/bluesroots.html
"Blues Roots." Virginia.edu. American Studies at University of Virginia, 2 Sept. 2009. Web. 28
Feb. 2016.
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Evidence: Field Hollers /Work Songs
From “Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues”
Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. New York:
Amistad, 2004. Print.
“When the people were slaves, they’d holler ‘cause it make the day go ‘long and they wound’t
worry about what they were doing, and that’s what the blues come from. Then in the twenties,
like. they named it the blues, with Mama Rainey and all, Ida Cox, Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon
Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson.”
Primary source quote by Honeyboy Edwards
Wald pg. 9
Evidence: Griot Tradition -Ma Rainey
Primary Source quote by Thomas “George Tom” Dorsey (He was blues artist, Ma Rainey’s, band
leader. He described Rainey’s effect on the audience as more than entertainment. Dorsey
considered her a sot of secular high priestess, inspiring deep spiritual fervor)
“She possessed her listeners; they swayed, they rocked, they moaned and groaned, as they felt
the blues with her. A woman swooned who had lost her man. Men groaned who had given their
weeks pay to some woman who promised to be nice, but slipped away and couldn't be found at
appointment time. By this time she was just about at the end of her song. She was ‘in her sins’ as
she bellowed out. The bass drum rolled like thunder and the stage lights flickered like forked
lightening
O see the lightning flashing, I see the waves a-dashing
I got to spread the news; i feel this boat-a crashing
I got to spread the news; my man is gone and let me
Now I got the stormy seas blues...
The applause thunders for one more number. Some woman screams out with a shrill cry of agony
as the blues recalls sorrow because some man trifled on her and wounded her to the bone. Rainey
is ready not to take the encore as her closing song. Here she is tired, sweaty, swaying from side
to side, fatigued but happy.”
Wald pgs. 24, 25
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Evidence: Influence of Ring Shout (Voodoo Religion)
See article for full text. Here are some passages:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/debra-devi/voodoo_b_1518269.html
Devi, Debra. "Possessed: Voodoo's Origins and Influence from the Blues to Britney." Huffington
Post. Huffington Post, 16 May 2012. Web. 28 Feb. 2016. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
debra-devi/voodoo_b_1518269.html>.
Possessed: Voodoo's Origins and Influence from the Blues to Britney
By Debra Devi
Vodou (the proper Kreyol/Creole spelling of Voodoo) is a neo-African religion that evolved in
the New World from the 6000-year-old West African religion Vodun. This was the religion of
many slaves brought from West Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean.
Vodun was brutally repressed by slave-owners, yet its powerful beats, ethics and aesthetics
endured. We owe our concepts of cool, soul and rock and roll to it.
The roots of rock are in a West African word for dance -- rak. As Michael Ventura wrote in his
important essay on rock music, "Hear that Long Snake Moan:”
The Voodoo rite of possession by the god became the standard of American performance in
rock'n'roll. Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown, Janis Joplin, Tina
Turner, Jim Morrison, Johnny Rotten, Prince -- they let themselves be possessed not by any god
they could name but by the spirit they felt in the music. Their behavior in this possession was
something Western society had never before tolerated.
The Trans-Atlantic slave trade carried these ideas to the New World, particularly as slavers
burrowed inward from Senegambia on the West African coast to the Kingdom of Dahomey, a
Vodun stronghold.
Vodun practices like drumming were definitely noticed by nervous colonists who had imported
fierce warriors and tribal priests to work their farms. After a deadly rebellion in the South
Carolina colony in 1739, the colonists realized slaves were using talking drums to organize
resistance. The Slave Act of 1740 in South Carolina barred slaves from using "drums, horns, or
other loud instruments." Other colonies followed suit with legislation like the severe Black
Codes of Georgia.
Soon, religious repression was in full swing. Slaves caught praying were brutally penalized, as
this excerpt from Peter Randolph's "Slave Cabin to the Pulpit" recounts:
In some places, if the slaves are caught praying to God, they are whipped more than if they had
committed a great crime. Sometimes, when a slave, on being whipped, calls upon God, he is
forbidden to do so, under threat of having his throat cut, or brains blown out.
Vodun practitioners taken as slaves to plantations in Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and Jamaica were also
prohibited from practicing their religion. But enslaved Vodun priests arriving in the Catholic
West Indies quickly grasped similarities between their tradition of appealing to loa to intercede
with God, and Catholics praying to saints for intercession. By superimposing Catholic saints
over the loa, slaves created the hybrid religions Santeria (saint worship) in the Spanish Islands,
Vodou in Haiti and Candomblé in Brazil.
On Aug. 22, 1791, Haitian slaves revolted on a signal from Vodou priests, who consulted their
oracle to determine which military strategies would succeed. The revolutionaries defeated
Napoleon Bonaparte's army and declared independence Jan. 1, 1804, establishing Haiti as the
world's first black republic. Freaked by a successful slave revolt, the United States and Western
Europe slapped economic sanctions on Haiti, turning the prosperous colony into an impoverished
state that could no longer sell the products of its fields.
In 1809, Vodou arrived in the United States en masse when Haitian slave owners who had fled to
Cuba with their slaves were expelled. Most relocated from Cuba to New Orleans, nearly
doubling the city's size in one year. Today, 15 percent of New Orleans practices Vodou, and it's
popular in other U.S. cities with African and Haitian communities.
Among the arriving Haitians was Marie Laveau. She became the leader of New Orleans Vodou
practitioners in 1820 when she was elected the human representative of the Grand Zombie.
(Former White House Social Secretary Desirée Rogers is descended from Marie Laveau.)
Laveau kept a python named Zombi, and danced with it on her shoulders while presiding over
ceremonies. This image was appropriated, with other Vodou nods, for Britney Spears's "I'm a
Slave 4 U" performance at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards.
Meanwhile, despite the severe repression, Vodun practices crept into Southern black churches.
Descriptions of black Baptist church services in the late 1800s and early 1900s depict the
congregation dancing in a circle in a "rock" or "ring shout" as they follow the deacon, who bears
a standard.
It was the deacon's job to whip parishioners into a frenzy of fainting and speaking in tongues
called "rocking the church." The concept of a deity "riding" with a worshiper transferred to these
Christian churches, where the cry "Drop down chariot and let me ride!" was often heard, as well
as "Ride on!" and "Ride on, King Jesus!" This became the solidarity shout, "Right on!"
Blues singers fronting big bands, like Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing, copied the way church
solo singers belted over the choir. The radio beamed this new "shouting blues" all over black
America. It was picked up by country blues singers like Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker, who
had moved to Chicago and used it with their new electrified bands. These, in turn, inspired
rockers like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones
The first musician to bring pop-Voodoo imagery to the stage was Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who
would rise from a coffin onstage with a bone in his nose. Hawkins had intended for his hit record
"I Put A Spell On You" to be a soulful ballad. But once the producer "brought in ribs and chicken
and got everybody drunk, we came out with this weird version," Hawkins admitted, adding "I
found out I could do more destroying a song and screaming it to death." Hawkins kicked off the
undead craze among rockers like Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson.
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Evidence: influence of the griot tradition
http://www.americanbluesscene.com/2014/07/language-blues-griot/
Media
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQX87oO-kyI