Blues Music

Blues is a vernacular musical form that grew out of the African American experience in the early 20th century. It generally consists of a 12-bar song structure and features the tonicsubdominant-dominant (IIV-V) chord cadence and the prominent use of the flatted seventh note, also known as the blue note or dominant seventh. While there is evidence that the dominant seventh is related to West African musical forms, the blues has also been accommodated within European harmonic theory, in which it corresponds with the mixolydian scale. The blues provided the basis for much of the American music that followed: rock and roll, soul, and much of gospel and jazz are all variations of the blues.

Guitarbased instrumentation, the frequent use of calland-response, and the narrative themes of loss and longing place the blues squarely within African American life in the South during the Jim Crow era. Much of the popular tradition surrounding the origins of the blues emphasizes an atavistic connection with the experience of slavery and its aftermath, but recent scholarship has determined that the blues was a syncretic form that incorporated ideas from ragtime, vaudeville, and other popular music that was widely available on radio, records, and sheet music by the 1920s. Its hybrid origins help to explain the protean quality of the blues, its ability to adapt and develop in a variety of musical and cultural contexts. Robert Johnson, who is often cited, incorrectly, as the inventor of the blues, sang stories of sex, violence, and damnation as these were understood within the religion of the Mississippi Delta region, but in songs such as “Red Hot,” he also assimilated the tempo of jugband music and the vocal range of bluegrass. In “Sweet Home Chicago,” Johnson expressed a vision of the city as a hopeful alternative to the sharecropping and racial violence of African American life in the South.

Because blues was originally shaped in part by urban institutions such as radio, it did not evolve smoothly from acoustic, rural, and primordial to electrified, citified, and sophisticated. It nonetheless played a distinctive role in African American urban experience during the post–World War II period. Blues provided much of the soundtrack of working-class black life around the shipyards of Oakland, the stockyards of Chicago, and the auto plants of Detroit. Its song structure and instrumentation shaped the transition from big bands to small combos. The business of music, particularly blues, also represented a crucial economic [Page 83]strategy for urban African Americans. During the 1930s and 1940s and beyond, many African Americans worked as musicians and music teachers in Los Angeles and other cities. Even more important, blues provided the basis for blackowned businesses in the form of nightclubs, record stores, and radio.

Musical production remained firmly in the hands of white company owners until the 1960s, even while black producers had principal responsibility for selecting the artists and making the records. Such figures as Willie Dixon in Chicago, Don Robey in Houston, and Dave Clark in Memphis served as talent scouts, arrangers, engineers, and often salesmen too. In the 1940s and 1950s, along with their counterparts in other cities, they constructed regionally distinctive bodies of work around the talents of more famous artists, including McKinley Morganfield (better known as Muddy Waters) in Chicago, Bobby “Blue” Bland in Houston, and Aaron “Tbone” Walker in Los Angeles. These were the people who carried the blues into the period when it would be “rediscovered” by white audiences in Europe and America interested in the origins of rock and roll.

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