Origins of the blues

One knows few things in connection with the exact origins of the music which one indicates today like the Blues. It is difficult to precisely date the origins from the blues , mainly because this style of music evolved/moved over one long period and existed before even as one uses the " term; blues". An important reference to what rapporche narrowly of the blues is gone back to 1901, when a Archéologue of the the Mississippi described the songs of the workmen and black slaves whose songs rested on topics and technical elements characteristic of the blues.

Blues and Negro spiritual

The direct origin and most important of the blues comes from the Negro-spiritual, a form of hymns taking its roots in the camp meeting , the religious meetings into full air which developed with the Mouvement of the alarm clock with the beginning of the XIXe century. The Negro-spiritual S were an impassioned form of song giving to the listeners the same feeling of misery and absence of root that the blues. However, the Negro-spiritual less was centered on interpretation, more centered on general loneliness of humanity, with words more figurative than direct. In spite of these differences, these two forms of musics are at this point similar which they cannot be easily distinguished - much of Negro spiritual would probably have been classified as of the blues if this word had then had a broader significance.

Song of the workers

Except the hymn, the songs of work Afro-américain be were an important precursor of the modern Blues S. Those included/understood the songs sung by workers like the Stevedore S (Docker S), the odd-job mans and the slaves.

There are few characteristics common to all the styles of blues, because this kind of music rests much on individual performances with their specific characteristics. However, certain characteristics marked the period which preceded creation by the modern blues, and it are found in the majority of the musics Afro-American. In its embryonic form, the blues was “ a functional expression, resulting in musical dialogs (" cal and response") without accompaniment or harmony and which was not limited by a particular musical structure ”. This music, that one little to qualify pre-blues, was born from the songs of the workers, in particular of the escalves, which sang “ simple songs charged with emotive contents ”.

African roots

The Kora (or Cora) is a String instrument (21 cords) mixture of Harpe and Luth used by the people Mandingue in West Africa.

Beaucoupe of instuments and elements of the blues find their origin in the African Musique. The writer and historian Senegal ease, Sylviane Diouf highlighted several specific features, like the use of Mélisme S, of an intonation undulating and nasal which establish the link between the Eastern Musique of central Africa and Western and the Blues. The type-setter Afro-américain William Christopher Handy with writing in its autobiography that, sleeping in a train, it had been awaked by:

… a very thin black man, had started to play of the guitar close to me whereas I slept. Its clothing was rags. Its face carried the sadness of the ages. While he played, he pressed a knife on the cords of the guitar. … The effect was unforgettable. the strangest music which I had ever heard.

The Moslem and African roots of certain elements of the blues are described by authors like the researcher Paul Oliver and the ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik, who explain that the use of the technique of the knife, whose William Christopher Handy had been pilot, is found in the cultures of central and Western Africa, in areas where Islam is powerful and where the Kora is often the privileged string instrument.

Refer

Eileen Southern, The Music off Black Americans , W.W. Norton & Company, 1997
Reebee Garofalo, Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the USA , Allyn & Bacon, 1997
Jean Ferris, America' S Musical Landscape , Brown & Benchmark, 1993
Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development , Oxford University Near, 1968
David Ewen, Panorama off American Popular Music , Prentice Hall, 1957
Paul Oliver, Savannah syncopators: African retentions in the blues , Vista Studio, 1970

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