The blues is a uniquely American genre that emerged during the late nineteenth century out of black oral traditions. Revival hymns, spirituals, minstrel songs, folk ballads, work songs, and field hollers chronicling poverty and oppression became fodder for improvised songs of sorrow. Oral traditions that were expressed through vocal lines of great beauty and meaning, which made the blues distinctive, were passed from parent to child. They chronicle the lives and relationships of good and bad men and women, class and segregation, sex, food and intoxicants, involuntary servitude, race and religion, transportation, and work. The blues are an individual’s artful response to pain, suffering, and oppression with roots derived from African traditions, and have evolved with hybrid genres including rhythm and blues, soul blues, gospel blues, boogie-woogie, western swing, and early rock and roll. Ballads, dances, field hollers, and spirituals all influenced the evolution of the blues. African Americans, beyond appreciating the music, value the poetry of the blues as an important part of black oral tradition.
Although blues songs are not necessarily collective or community-based, sociologists and anthropologists study them as part of a traditional form of music to understand vernacular regional “double meanings” used by black working-class Southerners. Travel, both physical and transcendental, is an overarching motif of blues lyrics derived from its forbidden nature in Southern plantation society. Travel symbolized freedom to be black with a sense of self-identity. Minstrelsy appropriated stereotypes from Southern plantation society to move aspects of African American culture into mainstream popular culture. The earliest blues ballads (or “badman ballads”), such as “Frankie and Albert,” date back to the 1890s. They were passed down orally before being recorded in the 1920s. Early blues were sung in African American communities in St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, the Carolinas, and east Texas; they were narrative folk songs that celebrated events in a subjective manner.
The blues moves the body in folkways. In his “Foreword” for Paul Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues (1960), African American writer Richard Wright speculated on why a seventeenth-century Virginia planter might justify purchasing a slave from Africa: “these odd black creatures will die early in our harsh climate and will leave no record behind of any sufferings that they might undergo.” Then Wright asserted that the most astonishing characteristic of the blues was that they are not essentially pessimistic, but rather an “almost exultant affirmation of life, of love, of sex, of movement, of hope.”
The eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade between West Africa, the West Indies, and colonial North America laid seeds for the dynamic blues culture. While slave owners discouraged the continuance of African music, communication, and oral traditions, African Americans were taught to play the violin and other European instruments to entertain. The Great Awakening brought vigor and expression to hymns, to which African lyrics, rhythmic retentions, “call and response,” improvisation, and embellishments were added. Songs from antebellum America were first published in 1867 as Slave Songs of the United States. W. C. Handy’s account of a lone guitarist playing in a Mississippi railroad station in 1900 is one of the earliest landmarks for the blues, suggesting that the first blues bands featuring the guitar, mandolin, piano, and harmonica were derived from the same kind of string bands that played at country dances and medicine shows.
Black spirituals sung by slaves imbued the blues with a transcendental quality, suggesting themes of freedom, renewal, and release from bondage: songs like “Crossing over Jordan” and “Bound for the Land of Canaan” have double meanings that remain relevant to blues music today, thereby offering singers opportunities to improvise and adapt themes and nuances. Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races” (1850) parodies the chorus of the popular black hymn tune from “Roll Jordan Roll.” Fiddle playing was passed from black father to son in Southern plantation society with the fiddle and banjo being the most popular instruments for dances; for slaves, fiddling became a means for earning money that facilitated escape from bondage. The greatest dream of slave fiddlers was to get a real violin.
After the Civil War, Reconstruction (1865–1877) shifted the work of former slaves who stepped into freedom from plantations to reconstructing railroads, repairing levees, and working in mines. Former slaves tilled the soil of abandoned plantations but were forced into the sharecropping system that continued well into the twentieth century; in sharecropping, the landowner allowed tenants to farm cotton on land in return for a share of the crop. Work songs and field hollers introduced many of the embellishments that characterize the blues, from yodel-like decorations to principal melody notes. Those who were able to get jobs worked in deplorable conditions, such as in the logging and turpentine camps that were operated as company towns in the South, where three-quarters of the workers were black.
Reconstruction also brought about the use of convict labor in the South. Prisoners in chain gangs were leased to work on farms or as railroad labor as an alternative form of involuntary servitude to help the region’s failing economy. Prison chain gang members labored in dangerous and inhumane working conditions and lived in tents or wagons; many were worked to death. As with sailors and call-and-response sea shanties, the gangs often selected a designated caller who set the pace of labor with a work song with specific cadences suitable to specific tasks and which diverted attention from suffering. The rhythm and content of convict work songs influenced blues music. Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter (1888–1949) worked as a prison laborer in Sugarland, Texas, and Angola, Louisiana, and his singing abilities led to shortened terms. John and Alan Lomax began collecting blues songs in the field just after record albums began to circulate widely, and Alan Lomax recognized that the blues contained another form of folklore with origins that could be tracked and studied; he later recorded Leadbelly’s song “Midnight Special” in 1934, and he led a folk music revival that continued until his death.
Juke
Used to designate a roadhouse or other establishment of drinking and dancing frequented by persons of questionable virtue, a juke joint takes its name from a Gullah word of West African origin that means “wicked” or “disorderly.” The term became associated with the types of vigorous and sometimes sexually suggestive dancing associated with such venues, a meaning with which it is still closely associated to this day. The term juke is most in evidence in standard American English in the term jukebox, an extremely common coin-operated feature of mid-twentieth-century malt shops, diners, and bars, which one would use to play songs, sometimes for dancing. In common parlance, juke can also mean to fake a movement to throw off an opponent, as in a “hip juke” in football.
C. Fee
Country blues singers in rural areas of the South played in jug bands with home-styled instruments; however, the blues is a widely accepted folk form that is considered to be an expression that has evolved with African American society in a segregated America. The blues ballad “Frankie and Johnny” was thought to have been derived from a song sung by Union troops at the siege of Vicksburg during the Civil War. In African American oral traditions, the folk story of “Frankie and Albert” was traced to St. Louis, where Frankie Baker shot her lover Allan Britt for getting involved with another woman in 1899. A variant of “Frankie and Johnnie” and “Frankie and Albert” came in a song about a St. Louis mobster called “Bob McKinney.”
Developed from African American oral traditions, the blues is a uniquely American genre that emerged during the late nineteenth century. The blues represent an outlet through which an individual may respond to pain, suffering, and oppression. Here Bluesman Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter (1888–1949) performs at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., ca. 1948. (Library of Congress)
When the first “race records” were released for black consumers, the genre was only about thirty or forty years old. Commercial recording of the country blues started in 1924, featuring black musicians. Alan Lomax’s documentary The Land Where the Blues Began chronicled how blues in the Mississippi Delta were derived from field hollers and work songs. Jug bands emerged out of minstrel and medicine shows, which were active during the 1920s. Performers played banjo, guitar, kazoo, spoons or bones, washtub basses, and the jug that sounded like a tuba. While the recording industry was not instrumental in keeping the genre alive, it allowed black record buyers to hear the voices of blues singers outside of their immediate regions and the formerly intangible improvisational character of the blues was captured and preserved.
The blues also captures nuances of black gender and sexuality by delving into the double entendre semantics of heterosexual and homosexual love with food references. St. Louis, Missouri, became the epicenter for the urban blues. Vaudeville singer Mamie Smith (1883–1946), with her Jazz Hounds, was the first black vocalist to record a blues song—“Crazy Blues” by pioneering blues composer Perry Bradford (1893–1970) for Okeh Records—on August 10, 1920. The record became a surprise hit for Okeh, which went on location to record in jazz and blues clubs where artists were performing in their own communities.
The Great Depression had a tremendous impact on the blues as musicians found it harder to find paying “gigs.” Kansas City, Missouri, with its liberal policies for drinking and gambling, became a hub for black clubs. Migration to Northern cities during the 1930s spread the blues to new urban centers. In the post–World War II years, a Great Migration carried blacks to San Francisco and Los Angeles and blues performers followed. Leftist Hungarian-born folklorist Lawrence Gellert visited prisons in the Carolinas and Georgia to gather black protest songs. Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, which utilized black vernacular, as well as for her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance, studied the folk music of the South as an anthropology student at Howard University and gathered recordings of folk songs with Alan Lomax that culminated in her book Mules and Men (1935). Janis Joplin (1943–1970) created a revival of folk blues within the context of the 1960s counterculture, performing in bars and coffeehouses in Austin, Texas, before relocating to San Francisco.
“Strange Fruit”
A haunting lament penned in reaction to a photograph of a lynching and rendered immortal via the voice of Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit” was written by an English instructor at New York’s DeWitt Clinton High School, alma mater of James Baldwin, among many other notable alumni. Named “Song of the Century” by Time magazine in 1999, the lyrics were composed by teacher Abel Meeropol, who in 1940 was accused of being a provocateur as a result.
C. Fee
Meredith Eliassen
See also Ballad; Hurston, Zora Neale; John Henry; Lomax, Alan; Minstrel Shows; Sea Shanties; Spirituals
Further Reading
Allen, William Francis, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. 1867. Slave Songs of the United States. New Hampshire: Applewood Books.
Epstein, Dena. 1977. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Evans, David. 1982. Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues. Berkeley: University of California.
Ferris, William. 1978. Blues from the Delta. Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Anchor Press.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1935. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
Kiel, Charles. 1966. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Lomax, Alan. 2013. The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax: Words, Photographs, and Music; with an Essay by Tom Piazza; Introduction by William R. Ferris. New York: Library of Congress and W. W. Norton.
Oliver, Paul. 1960. Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues. New York: Horizon Press.
Szwed, John. 2010. Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. New York: Viking.
Titon, Jeff Todd. 1973. Early Downhome Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Tracy, Steven C. 1999. Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.