The blues: the song that invented American music

On a dusty road in the Mississippi Delta, a lone man tunes his guitar. He plucks a string, slides a bottleneck along it, and the note wails, bends, hovers between two pitches. His voice answers, hoarse, like an echo of himself. No one around, and yet a whole people sings with him. This is the blues.

The blues is a music born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the American South, within the African American community. From this song of sorrow and resistance would come, in a few decades, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and soul. To understand the blues is to trace almost all of modern popular music back to its source.

From the cotton fields to the first laments#

The blues sinks its roots into the experience of slavery and segregation. Before it was a genre, it was a way of surviving through song. In the fields rang out the work songs and field hollers — work cries thrown from one enslaved person to another — as well as the spirituals, religious songs in which pain became prayer. From these oral forms, passed on without sheet music, a new music gradually arose.

It is in the Mississippi Delta, land of plantations, that the blues took its barest form: a voice, a guitar, and the bottleneck technique (a bottle neck slid along the strings) that makes the instrument "cry." Delta blues, raw and haunted, is often regarded as the original heart of the genre.

The blues does not tell of sorrow to drown in it: it sings it to keep it at bay.

The anatomy of an emotion#

If the blues moves us so deeply, it is also thanks to a structure recognisable above all others. The most famous is the twelve-bar blues, a simple, cyclical harmonic grid on which thousands of songs are built. The singing often follows the principle of call and response, inherited from African traditions: a phrase thrown out, a phrase that answers.

At the heart of its particular colour are the blue notes, those slightly flattened, "blued" notes that give the blues its melancholy grain, halfway between major and minor. Often built on a pentatonic scale, it turns a handful of notes into an ocean of emotion.

The founding voices#

The blues took shape in figures who became legends. W. C. Handy, nicknamed the "father of the blues," was among the first, in the 1910s, to transcribe and publish these musics, giving them a written footing. But it was Robert Johnson who fixed the myth: a Delta guitarist who died at twenty-seven in 1938, he is said to have sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for his talent — a legend that speaks to the almost supernatural power attributed to his music.

Women stood in the front rank. Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues," carried the genre onto the great stages in the 1920s. Then, with the Great Migration of African Americans toward the industrial North, the blues reached the cities: in Chicago, Muddy Waters electrified it, plugging the guitar into an amp to give birth to Chicago blues, harder and more urban.

The matrix of modern music#

The legacy of the blues reaches far beyond the genre itself. It is the matrix from which the great musics of the twentieth century emerged: jazz drew its melodic vocabulary from it, rhythm and blues and soul their emotion, and rock and roll its very pulse. Without the blues, no Elvis, no Rolling Stones, no electric guitar as we know it.

From the Mississippi Delta to stages the world over, the blues turned the pain of a people into a universal language. To hear a blue note is to hear a whole history — that of slavery, of segregation, but also of an indomitable dignity. To discover it is to understand where the music we listen to comes from; and to learn English is to grasp the words of these laments and hear, behind the melancholy, the incredible strength of those who sang them.

FAQ#

What is the blues? The blues is a musical genre born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the American South, within the African American community. Arising from work songs, field hollers and spirituals, it is marked by blue notes, the twelve-bar structure and call and response.

Where does the blues come from? The blues comes from the American South, and notably from the Mississippi Delta, a land of plantations. It draws its roots from the work songs, laments and spirituals of the African American community, marked by slavery and segregation.

What is a blue note? A blue note is a note slightly flattened compared with the major scale, "blued," which gives the blues its melancholy colour, between major and minor. It is one of the genre's most characteristic sonic traits, inherited from African American vocal traditions.

Why is the blues so important? The blues is the matrix of almost all modern popular music: jazz, rhythm and blues, soul and rock and roll descend directly from it. Its structure and its blue notes shaped the sound of the twentieth century the world over.

Photo credits: the images used in this article come from Pexels and Unsplash and are royalty-free.