Blues

Blues. During the first decade of the twentieth century, a new African American social song form called blues spread throughout the South and along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. This form was similar to other nineteenth‐century music, including spirituals, work songs, hollers, ballads, and reels, but the term “blues”—meaning a type of vocal song with instrumental accompaniment for dancing—arose after 1900. Rooted in oral tradition, blues by 1912 had entered popular culture through sheet music. W.C. Handy (1873–1958), one of the first professionally trained musicians to transcribe blues into printed notation and composer of such works as Memphis Blues (1911) and St. Louis Blues (1914), became its first popularizer and spokesperson. In 1920, Crazy Blues by Mamie Smith (1883–1946) convinced the recording industry that selling African American music performed by African American artists to African American consumers could be profitable. Ma Rainey (1886–1939) and Bessie Smith (1894–1937), along with other women vocalists, dominated blues recordings in the early 1920s performing an urbane style sometimes called vaudeville blues.

In 1926, the Texas songster Blind Lemon Jefferson (1897–1929) began a successful recording career, encouraging record companies to seek out other southern guitar or piano players such as the Mississippi Delta's Charlie Patton (1891–1934) and Robert Johnson (1911–1938), whose recordings influenced three generations of blues and rock musicians.

Through the 1930s and 1940s, waves of southern migrants flooded into Detroit, and St. Louis, Missouri. Although World War II temporarily halted recording activity, the war's end brought a demand for music consistent with postwar affluence and optimism. Post–World War II blues drew on big‐band jazz, gospel, boogie‐woogie, and regional blues styles reflecting demographic changes related to wartime job opportunities. West Coast labels recorded such Texas‐born artists as T‐Bone Walker (1910–1975), who popularized the electric guitar, while East Coast labels recorded Carolina and Virginia‐born musicians. The exodus from Mississippi continued to affect Midwest blues, as exemplified by Muddy Waters (1915–1983), whose hard‐edged electric Chicago blues influenced musicians in America and Britain. Initially called “rhythm and blues,” much the same music by the mid‐1950s was targeted to an integrated audience and called rock and roll. Beginning in the late 1970s, a so‐called blues revival brought traditional blues to a worldwide audience. By the 1990s, African American audiences continued to support traditional or soul blues, and contemporary rhythm and blues continued to draw on a blues‐based aesthetic.

As a major form of oral literature, blues influenced a wide range of African American art, including the poetry of Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Sherley Anne Williams, and Sterling Brown; the visual art of Romare Bearden; the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Albert Murray, and Ralph Ellison, and the plays of August Wilson. Because of its influence on American music, including jazz, country, and rock, as well as its larger cultural impact, blues ranks as twentieth‐century America's most important musical innovation and a central component of the African American cultural heritage.
See also African Americans; Gospel Music, African American; Music: Popular Music; Music: Traditional Music.

Bibliography

Albert Murray , Stomping the Blues, 1976.
Lawrence Cohn, ed., Nothing but the Blues: The Music and the Musicians, 1993.

Barry Lee Pearson