The Birth of the Blues

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The Birth of the Blues
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Where did the word blue come from?
blue means melancholy or depression, The word
has been used since the Elizabethan era.
The American writer Washington Irving is
credited With the term the blues. (1807)
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History of the Blues

• Field holler
• Spiritual
• Ballad
• Call and response songs
• Work songs
• Sea chanteys

By the 1890s the blues were sung in many rural
areas of the South
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Bessie Smith
The blues was considered to be a primarily
masculine discipline
HOWEVER
Mamie Smith
The first blues songs heard by whites were
sung by lady blues singers like Mamie Smith and
Bessie Smith.
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Interesting Blues info...

• Some claim the first blues song ever written
  down was Dallas Blues,
• published in 1912 by Hart Wand, a white violinist
  from Oklahoma City.
• The Blues were popularized from 1911-1914 by
  black composer,
• W.C Handy (1873-1958)

W.C. Handy

• Mamie Smith recorded the first vocalized blues
  piece in 1920, entitled Crazy Blues
• In the 1920s it became a national craze after
  exposure during World War I.
• In the 1930s Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith
  each sold millions of records

Billie Holliday
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What makes "the blues" different ?

• different scale structure?
• notes out of tune?
• different chord structure?
• a whole new philosophy?

The Blues comes from an African-American style
that mixes modal melodies with Western tonal
chords. A defining characteristic are bent
pitches, known as blues notes. The 3rd, 7th,
and sometimes 5th, of the scale are lowered a
half step. This is referred to as the blues
scale.
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Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Which came first, the blues or jazz?
The blues influenced jazz, but the popularity
of jazz made it possible for the mass recording
of the blues as mainstream music.
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The Blues lyrics
The lyrics are usually autobiographical and
usually very revealing statements. They are
usually very personal and frequently deal with
the pain of betrayal, desertion, and unrequited
love or with un-happy situations such asbeing
jobless, poverty, hunger and loneliness
The lyrics follow speech patterns, specifically,
iambic pentameter. The first line is repeated,
and the third line is different from the first
two.
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Sample lyrics

• Im goin to leave baby, aint going to say
• goodbye.
• Im goin to leave baby, aint going to say
• goodbye.
• But Ill write you and tell you the reason why.

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The Music

• The 12 bar blues is the
• most common chord
• structure used in the
• Blues.
• I I I I IV IV I I V V I I
• (the 10th chord is almost always a IV due to Rock
  and Rolls influence)

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In the 30s and 40s The Blues found a home in
Detroit and Chicago.
Some of the best Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon,
Howlin Wolf, John Lee Hooker and Elmore
James.
John Lee Hooker
Muddy Waters
T-Bone Walker brought the Blues to Houston, and
the legendary B.B. King called Memphis his home.
B.B. King
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The 60s and beyond

• The musicians of the 60s brought
• the Blues to a new young white
• audience.
• Some names of the 60s
• Paul Butterfield Blues Band
• Rolling Stones
• Yardbirds
• Cream
• Canned Heat
• Fleetwood Mac

• Some contemporary Blues
• musicians are
• Roy Buchanon
• Otis Rush
• Eric Clapton
• Robert Cray
• Stevie Ray Vaughn

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Some say

• The Blues is not an era in the
• development of Jazz, nor is it a style
• of singing or playing.

• The Blues is a way to approach music a
  philosophy.

• The Blues is a musical tradition rooted in the
  black experience
• of the post-war South.

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No matter what it was the Blues strong
autobiographical nature, its intense personal
passion, chaos and loneliness executed so
vibrantly that captured the imagination of modern
musicians and the general public as well.