Blues

Blues is a genre of American popular music that attained national prominence in the 1910s and 1920s. Coinciding with the advent of the recording industry, blues helped foster a distinct cultural sphere in the mass media for African Americans. Often mistakenly interpreted as an unmediated expression of individual sorrow, blues is a highly stylized and constantly evolving art form that affirms the lives and communal values of its audiences. Although it commonly is perceived as "folk" music, in its first few decades blues was synonymous with a variety of types of black popular music and thus cannot be characterized by style alone.

ORIGINS AND INCEPTION

The blues is an African-American invention that was a reworking of European-derived conceptions of song form, melody, harmony, and meter along African cultural lines. Musical techniques born of that negotiation include bent or "blue" notes, syncopation, and the twelve-bar blues form. As a commercial genre, blues emerged in the 1900s from ragtime. Songwriters who were looking for the next big craze began to combine the vernacular music of African Americans with Tin Pan Alley song forms. Foremost among those musical entrepreneurs was W. C. Handy, the self-proclaimed "Father of the Blues," who set off a publishing explosion in 1912 with "Memphis Blues."

Black vaudeville theaters and the traveling tent shows that visited remote areas of the South were the main institutions that supported early blues. As blues gained notice through sheet music sales, popular singers, both black and white, fashioned themselves as purveyors of authentic "Negro" blues. Popular dance bands in northern cities such as James Reese Europe's New York-based orchestra began arranging blues numbers for a mainly white middle-class audience.

RACE RECORDS AND BLUES QUEENS

In 1920 the success of Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" proved the existence of an African-American audience for recorded blues, and record companies rushed to develop "race record" catalogues, targeting the musical preferences of the black working class. The biggest stars of that period were women, the majority of whom had honed their talent on tent show and black vaudeville stages, environments that demanded they cultivate powerful voices and commanding stage presences. Backed by the most sophisticated jazz bands of the day, singers such as Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Ida Cox used their recordings to create larger-than-life personae, singing as women who were glamorous, sexually independent, and often rowdy. Their bravado was full of entertaining off-color humor, yet the music also provided a way for its predominantly African-American female audience to confront issues of gender and sexuality: Ma Rainey's sarcastic "Prove It on Me Blues" (1928) laid claim to a lesbian identity, and Bessie Smith's "Hard Time Blues" (1926) asserted independence from a no-good man.

BLUES AS A MALE-DOMINATED GENRE

For African-American women after the blues queens greater fame and fortune could be found in more mainstream jazz and pop genres. Singers from Billie Holliday to Dinah Washington sang blues numbers throughout their careers but were not associated exclusively with blues. Thus, blues became largely male-dominated, a genre in which competing versions of masculinity vied for popularity. From 1926 until his untimely death in 1929 the best-selling blues artist was the Texas-born guitarist and singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, whose "down home" guitar style and moaning vocals began a boom in recordings by country blues artists. Songs such as "Black Snake Moan" (1927) used thinly veiled metaphors to express sexual yearning ("some pretty mama better come and get this black snake soon"). Not all sexual content in country blues, however, was heterosexual. Although not big hits, recordings such as Charlie Jordan's "Keep It Clean" (1930) and Kokomo Arnold's "Sissy Man Blues" (1934) celebrated homosexual desire.

As African Americans continued to migrate north, blues took on an increasingly urban character. The piano-playing crooner Leroy Carr exploited the potential of microphone recording, crafting smooth, seductive blues that earned him legions of female admirers and dozens of male imitators. In contrast, virtuosic boogie-woogie pianists such as Pine Top Smith were mainstays at late-night Chicago parties, using a steady bouncing beat to encourage women to "shake that thing" on the dance floor. Fusing the rhythmic drive of boogie-woogie with humorous double entendre, as in the song "Let Me Play with Your Poodle" (1942), the guitarist-singer Tampa Red created a smart-talking version of blues known as hokum. A notable exception to the overwhelming male bias was Memphis Minnie, whose guitar technique and strong singing voice earned the respect of her male peers.

BLUES AS THE DEVIL'S MUSIC

Blues musicians rejected the puritanical attitude toward matters of sexuality and bodily pleasure that marked early American culture. Whether one hears the ubiquity of sexual topics in blues as the legacy of an African world-view or understands it as a matter of class and race (working-class blacks were not expected to adhere to normative moral standards and were thus "freer" to refer to sexuality in music), blues made many people uncomfortable enough to charge that it was Devil's music.

Certainly some of those charges were the result of well-meaning guardians warning young girls (or boys) to stay away from the sexually charged atmosphere of blues clubs. Some scholars argue, however, that direct references to the Devil in blues demonstrate the survival of African and circum-Caribbean religious beliefs. They maintain that blues betray a familiarity with African-American "cult religions" such as hoodoo in which African deities such as Eshu-Elegbara were reinterpreted as the Devil. Other scholars disagree, charging that white fans, eager to hear blues as "dangerous" and "primitive," blew the Devil myth out of proportion. According to this camp, most references to the Devil were meant as humorous gestures, not serious religious incantations.

PRESENCE IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE

Some of the artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance (c. 1920–1930) took an interest in blues. For example, the poet Langston Hughes and the writer Zora Neale Hurston considered blues an authentic expression of "Negro" subjectivity. They defended the music against middle-class highbrow critics in the hope that they and other black artists would be able to use blues as a foundation for their own works. Blues also have figured prominently in the work of more recent African-American writers and critics. Alice Walker's award-winning novel The Color Purple (1982) contains a character modeled on an early blues queen, and the scholar Houston A. Baker, Jr., has made blues a focal point for creating an African-American school of literary criticism.

IMPACT AND LEGACY

Since the 1960s white enthusiasts largely have shaped the history of the blues. Their preference for Mississippi-style country blues performers such as Robert Johnson and for electrified Chicago-based musicians such as Muddy Waters resulted in a skewed historiography that gave short shrift to significant and commercially successful figures such as the blues queens and Leroy Carr. At the same time blues has been displaced by newer genres of popular music. However, despite their greater appeal to younger generations, genres such as rock 'n' roll and soul drew heavily on blues. Rock 'N' Roll pioneers such as Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley all used blues forms. "The Godfather of Soul," James Brown, who always maintained that he hated blues, based hits such as "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" (1965) on twelve-bar blues patterns. More recently hip-hop artists have modeled a style of ostentatious display, braggadocio, and irreverence that harks back to the days of the blues queens. The impact of blues on American popular music has been far-reaching and undeniable.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbott, Lynn, and Doug Seroff. 1996. "'They Cert'ly Sound Good to Me': Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville, and the Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues." American Music 14(4): 402-454.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. 1984. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Baraka, Imamu Amiri. 1963. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: W. Morrow,.

Carby, Hazel V. 1999. "'It Jus' Be's Dat Way Sometime': The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues." In Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, ed. Robert Walser. New York: Oxford University Press.

Murray, Albert. 1976. Stomping the Blues. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Palmer, Robert. 1981. Deep Blues. New York: Viking Press.

Wald, Elijah. 2004. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. New York: Amistad.

                                               Robert Walser

                                             Loren Kajikawa