# Is a strange story with deep roots

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2017/08/25/strange-story-deep-roots/
- Published: 2017-08-25T21:16:04+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Sometime around 1890, the blues emerged as a distinct African-American art form,
rooted in the southern U.S. and drawing on work songs and hollers, folk tradition,
black spirituals, and the popular music of the time. **

Looking back from 1890, one can speculate about the African influence in the musical
structure of the blues as it grew from slave culture and the memory of slavery. 
Looking forward from 1890, a time of transition in America and of dashed hopes for
blacks in the resurgent Jim Crow South, one can see the blues as a powerful force
both shaping and shaped by the evolution of American popular culture (from the “
race records” craze of the 1920s through the blues-fueled rock revolution of the
postwar years) and the history of black and white race relations in the century 
ahead.

**WHY SHOULD I CARE? **

“The blues ain’t nothing but a good man feelin’ bad.” That’s what Leon Redbone said,
anyway, and who can’t relate to that?

Another clever bluesman once said that the blues is what the blues doctor prescribes
for people who have the blues, which actually is less crazy than it sounds. If you’ve
ever had the blues and heard the blues on the radio and felt just a little bit better…
That’s when the blues is the best medicine. Not convinced?

What about when your parents went crazy for Elvis? That was the blues. When your
older brother bangs his head to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath? Those guys are blues.
Dance to James Brown? You know he had the blues. Enjoy the White Stripes? Yep, Jack
White plays the blues too.

If you’re starting to wonder if the blues just about defined popular music in the
twentieth century, you’re on the right track. Pretty spectacular success for a style
from the rural ghetto (that’s right), where the most famous practitioner was an 
obscure Mississippian who may have made a deal with the Devil in the middle of the
road one night in the 1930s.

Whoa is right: The history of the blues is a strange story with deep roots and a
lot to say about the shape of American culture.

The blues emerged from a black cultural melting pot in the American South of the
1890s, drawing on a rich mix of African-American spirituals, traditional songs, 
European hymns, folk ballads, work songs and hollers, and contemporary dance music.
By the 1910s (when the first recorded blues were published as sheet music), the 
blues had taken the form widely recognized today: 12 bars, AAB lyrical structure,
and a distinctive scale with the third and seventh notes flatted.

Blues came into its own as an important part of the country’s relatively new national
popular culture in the 1920s with the recording, first, of the great female classic
blues singers and, then, of the country folk blues singers of the Mississippi Delta,
the Piedmont of the Carolinas, and Texas. As huge numbers of African Americans left
the South (driven by dismal socio-economic conditions and the hope of a better life
above the Mason-Dixon line) between 1915 and the 1940s, the blues went with them
and took root in the urban centers of the North, particularly Chicago. The more 
urban, electric blues that developed and eclipsed the rural blues of the ’30s fed
directly into both rock and roll and what would become known as rhythm and blues.
With the folk revival of the 1950s and ’60s, white audiences “rediscovered” and 
breathed new commercial life into the folk blues (and some of the remaining Delta
bluesmen who had languished in obscurity since the 1930s) and made it the cornerstone
of the tremendously popular British and American blues rock of the next decade.

But to say that the blues was or is just that skeletal outline is like describing
a human being using only descriptions of DNA and genetic processes. The blues, one
prominent writer has suggested, happened “as a result of one group of people being
forced to enter another’s history.” The story of the blues, then, is the history
of African Americans told through the story of their most popular music. The blues
is the story of the frustrations of failed Radical Reconstruction, of violence and
oppression in the Jim Crow South, of the desperation of the sharecropping system,
and of the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. The story of the blues is the
story of black culture coming to a position of prominence and influence in American
society. It is the story of the women of the classic blues whose early records—the
first “race” recordings—pointed to a tremendous market for African-American cultural
production, and of the young white liberals and intellectuals who sought out the
rural blues as an artifact of America’s vanishing agrarian past. It is the story
of the cultural present finding inspiration in the cultural past. But perhaps most
fundamentally, the story of the blues is one of American race relations, a document
of struggle and conflict on the one hand. but also a suggestion of something universally
human that just might point the way toward a future more premised on understanding
and cooperation.

### _Related_