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Blues
The blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on the use of the blue notes and a repetitive pattern that typically
follows a twelve-bar structure. It evolved in the United States in the communities of former African slaves, from spirituals,
praise songs, field hollers, shouts, and chants. The use of blue notes and the prominence of call-and-response patterns in
the music and lyrics are indicative of the blues' West African pedigree. The blues influenced later American and Western popular
music, as it became part of the genres of ragtime, jazz, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, country music
and pop songs.
Etymology
The phrase the blues is a reference to having a fit of the blue devils, meaning 'down' spirits, depression and sadness.
An early reference to "the blues" can be found in George Colman's farce Blue devils, a farce in one act (1798).
Later during the 19th century, the phrase was used as a euphemism for delirium tremens and the police.
Though usage of the phrase in African American music may be older, it has been attested to since 1912 in Memphis, Tennessee
with W. C. Handy's "Memphis Blues".In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood.
Main characteristics
Stylistic and cultural origins
Main article: Origins of the blues
There are few characteristics common to all blues, because the genre takes its shape from the idiosyncrasies of individual
performances. However, there are some characteristics that were present long before the creation of the modern blues.
An early form of blues-like music was a call-and-response shouts, which were a "functional expression... style without
accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure."A form of this pre-blues
was heard in slave field shouts and hollers, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content".The
blues, as it is now known, can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and the West African call-and-response
tradition, transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar.
Many blues elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of
Africa. Sylviane Diouf has pointed to several specific traits—such as the use of melisma and a wavy, nasal intonation—that
suggest a connection between the music of West and Central Africa and blues. Ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik may have been
the first to contend that certain elements of the blues have roots in the Islamic music of West and Central Africa.
Stringed instruments (which were favored by slaves from Muslim regions of Africa…), were generally allowed
because slave owners considered them akin to European instruments like the violin. So slaves who managed to cobble together
a banjo or other instrument…could play more widely in public. This solo-oriented slave music featured elements of
an Arabic-Islamic song style that had been imprinted by centuries of Islam's presence in West Africa, says Gerhard Kubik.
Kubik also pointed out that the Mississippi technique of playing the guitar using a knife blade, recorded by W.C. Handy
in his autobiography, corresponds to similar musical techniques in West and Central Africa cultures. The Diddley bow, a homemade
one-stringed instrument thought to be common throughout the American South in the early twentieth centry, is an African-derived
instrument that likely helped in the transferral of African performance techniques into the early blues instrumental vocabulary.
Blues music later adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs", minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including
instrumental and harmonic accompaniment. The style also was closely related to ragtime, which developed at about the same
time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music".
Blues songs from this period, such as Leadbelly's or Henry Thomas's recordings, show many different structures. The twelve-,
eight-, or sixteen-bar structure based on tonic, subdominant and dominant chords became the most common forms. What is now
recognizable as the standard 12-bar blues form is documented from oral history and sheet music appearing in African American
communities throughout the region along the lower Mississippi River, in Memphis, Tennessee's Beale Street, and by white bands
in New Orleans.
Lyrics
Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often with the singer voicing his or her "personal woes
in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, [and] hard
times".[14] Many of the oldest blues records contain gritty, realistic lyrics, in contrast to much of the popular music
being recorded at the time. For example, "Down in the Alley" by Memphis Minnie, is about a prostitute having sex
with men in an alley.
Music such as this was called "gut-bucket" blues, a term which refers to a type of homemade bass instrument
made from a metal bucket used to clean pig intestines for chitterlings (a soul food dish associated with slavery). "Gut-bucket"
blues songs are typically "low-down" and earthy, about rocky or steamy relationships, hard luck and hard times.
Gut-bucket blues and the rowdy juke-joint venues where it was played, earned blues music an unsavory reputation; church-goers
shunned it and some preachers railed against it.
Although the blues gained an association with misery and oppression, the blues could also be humorous and raunchy as well:
Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,
Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,
It may be sending you baby, but it's worrying the hell out of me.
Author Ed Morales has claimed that Yoruba mythology played a part in early blues, citing Robert Johnson's "Cross
Road Blues" as a "thinly veiled reference to Eleggua, the orisha in charge of the crossroads".However, many
seminal blues artists such as Joshua White, Son House, Skip James, or Reverend Gary Davis were influenced by Christianity.
The original lyrical form of the blues was probably a single line, repeated three times. It was only later that the current,
most common structure of a line, repeated once and then followed by a single line conclusion, became standard.
Musical style
During the first decades of the twentieth century blues music was not clearly defined in terms of a chord progression.
There were many blues in 8-bar form, such as "How Long Blues", "Trouble in Mind", and Big Bill Broonzy's
"Key to the Highway". There are also 16 bar blues, as in Ray Charles's instrumental "Sweet 16 Bars", and
in Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man". More idiosyncratic numbers of bars are also encountered occasionally, as with
the 9 bar progression in Howlin' Wolf's "Sitting on top of the World". The basic twelve-bar lyric framework of a
blues composition is reflected by a standard harmonic progression of twelve bars, in 4/4 or (rarely) 2/4 time. Slow blues
are often played in 12/8 (4 beats per measure with 3 subdivisions per beat).
By the 1930s, twelve-bar blues became more standard. The blues chords associated to a twelve-bar blues are typically a
set of three different chords played over a twelve-bar scheme:
I I or IV I I
IV IV I I
V IV I I or V
where the Roman numbers refer to the degrees of the progression. That would mean, if played in the tonality of F, the
chords would be as follows:
F F or Bb F F
Bb Bb F F
C Bb F F or C
(When the IV chord is played in bar 2, the blues is called a "Quick-Change" blues). In this example, F is the
tonic chord, Bb the subdominant. Note that much of the time, every chord is played in the dominant seventh (7th) form. Frequently,
the last chord is the dominant (V or in this case C) turnaround making the transition to the beginning of the next progression.
The lyrics generally end on the last beat of the tenth bar or the first beat of the eleventh bar, and the final two bars
are given to the instrumentalist as a break; the harmony of this two-bar break, the turnaround, can be extremely complex,
sometimes consisting of single notes that defy analysis in terms of chords. The final beat, however, is almost always strongly
grounded in the dominant seventh (V7), to provide tension for the next verse.
Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the flatted third, fifth and seventh (the so-called blue or bent notes)
of the associated major scale. These scale tones can replace the natural scale tones or be added to the scale, as in the case
of the minor pentatonic blues scale, where the flatted third replaces the natural third, the flatted seventh replaces the
natural seventh and the flatted fifth is added in between the natural fourth and natural fifth. While the twelve-bar harmonic
progression had been intermittently used for centuries, the revolutionary aspect of blues was the frequent use of the flatted
third, flatted seventh, and even flatted fifth in the melody, together with crushing—playing directly adjacent notes
at the same time, i.e., diminished second—and sliding—similar to using grace notes.
Whereas a classical musician will generally play a grace note distinctly, a blues singer or harmonica player will glissando,
"crushing" the two notes and then releasing the grace note. In blues chord progressions, the tonic, subdominant
and dominant chords are often played as dominant sevenths, the lowered seventh (minor seventh) being an important component
of the blues scale. Blues is also occasionally played in a minor key. The scale differs little from the traditional minor,
except for the occasional use of a flatted fifth in the tonic, often sang or played by the singer or lead instrument with
the perfect fifth in the harmony.
* Janis Joplin's rendition of "Ball and Chain", accompanied by Big Brother and the Holding Company, provides
an example of this technique.
* Minor-key blues is often structured in sixteen bars rather than twelve, in the style of gospel music, as in "St.
James Infirmary Blues" and Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me."
* Sometimes, a Dorian scale is used for minor-key blues, with its minor third and seventh but major sixth.
Blues shuffles reinforce the trance-like rhythm and call-and-response, and form a repetitive effect called a " groove".
The simplest shuffles commonly used in many postwar electric blues, rock-and-rolls, or early bebops were a three-note riff
on the bass strings of the guitar. When this riff was played over the bass and the drums, the groove "feel" is created.
The walking bass is another device that helps to create a "groove" . The last bar of the chord progression is usually
accompanied by a turnaround that makes the transition to the beginning of the next progression.
Shuffle rhythm is often vocalized as "dow, da dow, da dow, da" or "dump, da dump, da dump, da"[19]
as it consists of uneven, or "swung", eighth notes. On a guitar this may be done as a simple steady bass or may
add to that stepwise quarter note motion from the fifth to the sixth of the chord and back. An example is provided by the
following tablature for the first four bars of a blues progression in E:[20][21]
E7 A7 E7 E7
E |-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
B |-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
G |-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
D |-------------------|2--2-4--4-2--2-4--4|-------------------|-------------------|
A |2--2-4--4-2--2-4--4|0--0-0--0-0--0-0--0|2--2-4--4-2--2-4--4|2--2-4--4-2--2-4--4|
E |0--0-0--0-0--0-0--0|-------------------|0--0-0--0-0--0-0--0|0--0-0--0-0--0-0--0|
Blues in Jazz
Blues in jazz is much different from blues in other types of music (such as Rock, R+B, Soul, Funk, and Blues in its own
category). In Jazz, most blues songs do not have the chord change from V to IV in the turn around (bars 9-12). Jazz blues
normally stays on the V chord through bars 9 and 10, but there are some exceptions. The II-V-I resolution is an exception
to having the V chord through bars 9-10. In every single type of blues, bar 10 is the V chord. However, some blues in jazz
have what is called a II-V-I resolution (2-5-1). The II chord is played diatonically in bar 9 instead of where the V chord
is normally played.
History of the different blues genres
Origins
Main article: Origins of the blues
Blues has evolved from an unaccompanied vocal music of poor black laborers into a wide variety of styles and subgenres,
with regional variations across the United States and, later, Europe and Africa. The musical forms and styles that are now
considered the "blues" as well as modern "country music" arose in the same regions during the nineteenth
century in the southern United States. Recorded blues and country can be found from as far back as the 1920s, when the popular
record industry developed and created marketing categories called "race music" and "hillbilly music" to
sell music by and for blacks and whites, respectively.
At the time, there was no clear musical division between "blues" and "country," except for the race
of the performer, and even that sometimes was documented incorrectly by record companies. While blues emerged from the culture
of African-Americans, blues musicians have since emerged world-wide. Studies have situated the origin of "black"
spiritual music inside slaves' exposure to their masters' Hebridean-originated gospels. African-American economist and historian
Thomas Sowell also notes that the southern, black, ex-slave population was acculturated to a considerable degree by and among
their Scots-Irish "redneck" neighbours. However, the findings of Kubik and others also clearly attest to the essential
Africanness of many essential aspects of blues expression.
The social and economic reasons for the appearance of the blues are not fully known.The first appearance of the blues
is not well defined and is often dated between 1870 and 1900, a period that coincides with the emancipation of the slaves
and the transition from slavery to sharecropping and small-scale agricultural production in the southern US.
Several scholars characterize the early 1900s development of blues music as a move from group performances to a more individualized
style. They argue that the development of the blues is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the slaves. According
to Lawrence Levine,"there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the
popularity of Booker T. Washington's teachings, and the rise of the blues." Levine states that "psychologically,
socially, and economically, Negroes were being acculturated in a way that would have been impossible during slavery, and it
is hardly surprising that their secular music reflected this as much as their religious music did."
Prewar blues
The American sheet music publishing industry produced a great deal of ragtime music. By 1912, the sheet music industry
published three popular blues-like compositions, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley adoption of blues elements: "Baby Seals'
Blues" by "Baby" F. Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews), "Dallas Blues" by Hart Wand and "Memphis
Blues" by W. C. Handy.
Handy was a formally trained musician, composer and arranger who helped to popularize the blues by transcribing and orchestrating
blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers. He became a popular and prolific composer, and billed himself
as the "Father of the Blues"; however, his compositions can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz,
a merger facilitated using the Latin habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime;Handy's signature work was the St.
Louis Blues.
In the 1920s, the blues became a major element of African American and American popular music, reaching "white"
audiences via Handy's arrangements and the classic female blues performers. The blues evolved from informal performances in
bars to entertainment in theaters. Blues performances were organized by the Theater Owners Bookers Association in nightclubs
such as the Cotton Club, and juke joints, such as the bars along Beale Street in Memphis. This evolution led to a notable
diversification of the styles and to a clearer division between blues and jazz. Several record companies, such as the American
Record Corporation, Okeh Records, and Paramount Records, began to record African American music.
As the recording industry grew, country blues performers like Charlie Patton, Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie
Johnson, Son House and Blind Blake became more popular in the African American community. Jefferson was one of the few country
blues performers to record widely, and may have been the first to record the slide guitar style, in which a guitar is fretted
with a knife blade or the sawed-off neck of a bottle. The slide guitar became an important part of the Delta blues. The first
blues recordings from the 1920s were in two categories: a traditional, rural country blues and more polished 'city' or urban
blues.
Country blues performers often improvised, either without accompaniment or with only a banjo or guitar. There were many
regional styles of country blues in the early 20th century. The (Mississippi) Delta blues was a rootsy sparse style with passionate
vocals accompanied by slide guitar. Robert Johnson,who was little-recorded, combined elements of both urban and rural blues.
Along with Robert Johnson, influential performers of this style were his predecessors Charley Patton and Son House. Singers
such as Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller performed in the southeastern "delicate and lyrical" Piedmont blues
tradition, which used an elaborate fingerpicking guitar technique. Georgia also had an early slide tradition.
The lively Memphis blues style, which developed in the 1920s and 1930s around Memphis, Tennessee, was influenced by jug
bands, such as the Memphis Jug Band or the Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers. Performers such as Frank Stokes, Sleepy John Estes,
Robert Wilkins, Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie used a variety of unusual instruments such as washboard, fiddle, kazoo or mandolin.
Memphis Minnie was famous for her virtuoso guitar style. Pianist Memphis Slim began his career in Memphis, but his quite distinct
style was smoother and contained some swing elements. Many blues musicians based in Memphis moved to Chicago in the late 1930s
or early 1940s and became part of the urban blues movement which blended country music and electric blues.
City or urban blues styles were more codified and elaborate. Classic female urban or vaudeville blues singers were popular
in the 1920s, among them Mamie Smith, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Victoria Spivey. Mamie Smith, more
a vaudeville performer than a blues artist, was the first African- American to record a blues in 1920; her "Crazy Blues"
sold 75,000 copies in its first month.
Ma Rainey, called the "Mother of Blues", and Bessie Smith sang "... each song around centre tones, perhaps
in order to project her voice more easily to the back of a room." Smith would "...sing a song in an unusual key,
and her artistry in bending and stretching notes with her beautiful, powerful contralto to accommodate her own interpretation
was unsurpassed".Urban male performers included popular black musicians of the era, such Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy
and Leroy Carr. Before WWII, Tampa Red was sometimes referred to as "The Guitar Wizard." Carr made the then-unusual
choice of accompanying himself on the piano.
Boogie-woogie was another important style of 1930s and early 1940s urban blues. While the style is often associated with
solo piano, boogie-woogie was also used to accompany singers and, as a solo part, in bands and small combos. Boogie-Woogie
style was characterized by a regular bass figure, an ostinato or riff and shifts of level in the left hand, elaborating each
chord and trills and decorations in the right hand. Boogie-woogie was pioneered by the Chicago-based Jimmy Yancey and the
Boogie-Woogie Trio (Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis). Chicago boogie-woogie performers included Clarence "Pine
Top" Smith and Earl Hines, who "linked the propulsive left-hand rhythms of the ragtime pianists with melodic figures
similar to those of Armstrong's trumpet in the right hand".
In the 1940s, the jump blues style developed. Jump blues is influenced by big band music and uses saxophone or other brass
instruments and the guitar in the rhythm section to create a jazzy, up-tempo sound with declamatory vocals. Jump blues tunes
by Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner, based in Kansas City, Missouri, influenced the development of later styles such as rock
and roll and rhythm and blues. The smooth Louisiana style of Professor Longhair and, more recently, Dr. John blends classic
rhythm and blues with blues styles.
Early postwar blues
After World War II and in the 1950s, as African Americans moved to the Northern cities, new styles of electric blues music
became popular in cities such as Chicago, Detroit and Kansas City. Electric blues used amplified electric guitars, electric
bass, drums, and harmonica. Chicago became a center for electric blues in the early 1950s.
The Chicago blues is influenced to a large extent by the Mississippi blues style, because many performers had migrated
from the Mississippi region. Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and Jimmy Reed were all born in Mississippi and moved
to Chicago during the Great Migration. Their style is characterized by the use of electric guitar, sometimes slide guitar,
harmonica, and a rhythm section of bass and drums. J. T. Brown who played in Elmore James' or J. B. Lenoir's bands, also used
saxophones, but these were used more as 'backing' or rhythmic support than as solo instruments.
Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) are well known harmonica (called "harp" by blues musicians)
players of the early Chicago blues scene. Other harp players such as Big Walter Horton were also influential. Muddy Waters
and Elmore James were known for their innovative use of slide electric guitar. B. B. King and Freddie King (no relation),
who did not use slide guitar, were influential guitarists of the Chicago blues style. Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters were known
for their deep, 'gravelly' voices.
Bassist and composer Willie Dixon played a major role on the Chicago blues scene. He composed and wrote many standard
blues songs of the period, such as "Hoochie Coochie Man", "I Just Want to Make Love to You" (both penned
for Muddy Waters), "Wang Dang Doodle" for Koko Taylor, and "Back Door Man" for Howlin' Wolf. Most artists
of the Chicago blues style recorded for the Chicago-based Chess Records label.
In the 1950s, blues had a huge influence on mainstream American popular music. While popular musicians like Bo Diddley
and Chuck Berry were influenced by the Chicago blues, their enthusiastic playing styles departed from the melancholy aspects
of blues. Diddley and Berry's approach to performance was one of the factors that influenced the transition from the blues
to rock 'n' roll. Elvis Presley and Bill Haley were more influenced by the jump blues and boogie-woogie styles. They popularized
rock and roll within the white segment of the population. Chicago blues also influenced Louisiana's zydeco music, with Clifton
Chenier using blues accents. Zydeco musicians used electric solo guitar and cajun arrangements of blues standards.
Other blues artists, such as T-Bone Walker, Micheal Walton and John Lee Hooker, had influences not directly related to
the Chicago style. Dallas-born T-Bone Walker is often associated with the California blues style, which is smoother than Chicago
blues and is a transition between the Chicago blues, the jump blues and swing with some jazz-guitar influence. John Lee Hooker's
blues is more "personal", based on Hooker's deep rough voice accompanied by a single electric guitar. Though not
directly influenced by boogie woogie, his "groovy" style is sometimes called "guitar boogie". His first
hit "Boogie Chillen" reached #1 on the R&B charts in 1949.
By the late 1950s, the swamp blues genre developed near Baton Rouge, with performers such as Slim Harpo, Sam Myers and
Jerry McCain. Swamp blues has a slower pace and a simpler use of the harmonica than the Chicago blues style performers such
as Little Walter or Muddy Waters. Songs from this genre include "Scratch my Back", "She's Tough" and "King
Bee".
Blues in the 1960s and 1970s
By the beginning of the 1960s, genres influenced by African American music such as rock and roll and soul were part of
mainstream popular music. Caucasian performers had brought African-American music to new audiences, both within the US and
abroad. In the UK, bands emulated US blues legends, and UK blues-rock-based bands had an influential role throughout the 1960s.
Blues performers such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters continued to perform to enthusiastic audiences, inspiring new
artists steeped in traditional blues, such as New York-born Taj Mahal. John Lee Hooker blended his blues style with rock elements
and playing with younger white musicians, creating a musical style that can be heard on the 1971 album Endless Boogie. B.B.
King's virtuoso guitar technique earned him the eponymous title "king of the blues". In contrast to the Chicago
style, King's band used strong brass support from a saxophone, trumpet, and trombone, instead of using slide guitar or harp.
Tennessee-born Bobby "Blue" Bland, like B.B. King, also straddled the blues and R&B genres.
The music of the Civil Rights and Free Speech movements in the US prompted a resurgence of interest in American roots
music and early African American music. Music festivals such as the Newport Folk Festival brought traditional blues to a new
audience, which helped to revive interest in prewar acoustic blues and performers such as Son House, Mississippi John Hurt,
Skip James, and Reverend Gary Davis. Many compilations of classic prewar blues were republished by the Yazoo Records company.
J.B. Lenoir from the Chicago blues movement in the 1950s recorded several LPs using acoustic guitar, sometimes accompanied
by Willie Dixon on the acoustic bass or drums. His songs commented on political issues such as racism or Vietnam War issues,
which was unusual for this period. His Alabama blues recording had a song that stated:
I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me (2x)
You know they killed my sister and my brother,
and the whole world let them peoples go down there free
Caucasian audiences' interest in the blues during the 1960s increased due to the Chicago-based Paul Butterfield Blues
Band and the British blues movement. The style of British blues developed in the UK, when bands such as Fleetwood Mac, John
Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, and Cream performed classic blues songs from the Delta
or Chicago blues traditions.
The British blues musicians of the early 1960s inspired a number of American blues-rock fusion performers, including Canned
Heat, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, The J. Geils Band, Ry Cooder. Many of Led Zeppelin's earlier hits were renditions of traditional
blues songs. One blues-rock performer, Jimi Hendrix, was a rarity in his field at the time: a black man who played psychedelic
rock. Hendrix was a skilled guitarist, and a pioneer in the innovative use of distortion and feedback in his music.[38] Through
these artists and others, blues music influenced the development of rock music.
In the late 1960s, the West Side style blues emerged in Chicago with Magic Sam, Magic Slim and Otis Rush. West Side style
has strong rhythmic support from a rhythm guitar, bass electric guitar, and drums. Albert King, Buddy Guy, and Luther Allison
had a West Side style that was dominated by amplified electric lead guitar.
Blues from the 1980s to the present
Since the 1980s, there has been a resurgence of interest in the blues among a certain part of the African-American population,
particularly around Jackson, MS and other deep South regions. Often termed "soul blues" or "Southern Soul,"
the music at the heart of this movement was given new life by the unexpected success of two particular recordings on the Jackson-based
Malaco label: Z. Z. Hill's "Down Home Blues" (1982) and Little Milton's "The Blues is Alright" (1984).
Contemporary African-American performers who work this vein of the blues include Bobby Rush, Denise LaSalle, Sir Charles Jones,
Bettye LaVette, Marvin Sease, Peggy Scott-Adams, Billy "Soul" Bonds, T.K. Soul, Mel Waiters, and Willie Clayton.
The American Blues Radio Network, founded by Rip Daniels, a black Mississippian, features soul blues on its playlists and
radio personalities such as Duane "DDT" Tanner and Nikki deMarks.
Since the 1980s, blues has also continued in both traditional and new forms. The Texas rock-blues style emerged which
used guitars in both solo and rhythm roles. In contrast with the West Side blues, the Texas style is strongly influenced by
the British rock-blues movement. Major artists of the Texas style are Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Fabulous Thunderbirds and ZZ
Top. The 1980s also saw a revival of John Lee Hooker's popularity. He collaborated with Carlos Santana, Miles Davis, Robert
Cray and Bonnie Raitt. Eric Clapton, known for his performances with the Blues Breakers and Cream, made a comeback in the
1990s with his MTV Unplugged album, in which he played some standard blues numbers on acoustic guitar.
In the 1980s and 1990s, blues publications such as Living Blues and Blues Revue began to be distributed, major cities
began forming blues societies, outdoor blues festivals became more common, and more nightclubs and venues for blues emerged.
In the 1990s, blues performers explored a range of musical genres, as can be seen, for example, from the broad array of
nominees of the yearly Blues Music Awards, previously named W. C. Handy Awards Contemporary blues music is nurtured by several
blues labels such as Alligator Records, Blind Pig Records, Chess Records (MCA), Delmark Records, Delta Groove Music, NorthernBlues
Music, and Vanguard Records (Artemis Records). Some labels are famous for their rediscovering and remastering of blues rarities
such as Arhoolie Records, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (heir of Folkways Records), Yazoo Records (Shanachie Records) and
Document Records.
Young blues artists today are exploring all aspects of the blues, from classic delta to more rock-oriented blues, artists
born after 1970 like Sean Costello, Shemikia Copeland, Johnny Lang, Corey Harris, Susan Tedeschi, and North Mississippi Allstars
developing their own styles.
Musical impact
Blues musical styles, forms (12-bar blues), melodies, and the blues scale have influenced many other genres of music,
such as rock and roll, jazz, and popular music. Prominent jazz, folk or rock performers, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington,
Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Red Hot Chili Peppers have performed significant blues recordings. The blues scale is often used
in popular songs like Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night", blues ballads like "Since I Fell for You" and
"Please Send Me Someone to Love", and even in orchestral works such as George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue"
and "Concerto in F".
The blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music and informs many modal frames, especially the ladder of thirds used
in rock music (e.g., in "A Hard Day's Night"). Blues forms are used in the theme to the televised Batman, teen idol
Fabian's hit, "Turn Me Loose", country music star Jimmie Rodgers' music, and guitarist/vocalist Tracy Chapman's
hit "Give Me One Reason".
Blues is sometimes danced as a type of swing dance, with no fixed patterns and a focus on connection, sensuality, body
contact, and improvisation. Most blues dance moves are inspired by traditional blues dancing. Although blues dancing is usually
done to blues music, it can be done to any slow tempo 4/4 music.
R&B music can be traced back to spirituals and blues. Musically, spirituals were a descendant of New England choral
traditions, and in particular of Isaac Watts's hymns, mixed with African rhythms and call-and-response forms. Spirituals or
religious chants in the African-American community are much better documented than the "low-down" blues. Spiritual
singing developed because African-American communities could gather for mass or worship gatherings, which were called camp
meetings.
Early country bluesmen such as Skip James, Charley Patton, Georgia Tom Dorsey played country and urban blues and had influences
from spiritual singing. Dorsey helped to popularize Gospel music. Gospel music developed in the 1930s, with the Golden Gate
Quartet. In the 1950s, soul music by Sam Cooke, Ray Charles and James Brown used gospel and blues music elements. In the 1960s
and 1970s, gospel and blues were these merged in soul blues music. Funk music of the 1970s was influenced by soul; funk can
be seen as an antecedent of hip-hop and contemporary R&B.
Before World War II, the boundaries between blues and jazz were less clear. Usually jazz had harmonic structures stemming
from brass bands, whereas blues had blues forms such as the 12-bar blues. However, the jump blues of the 1940s mixed both
styles. After WWII, blues had a substantial influence on jazz. Bebop classics, such as Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time",
used the blues form with the pentatonic scale and blue notes.
Bebop marked a major shift in the role of jazz, from a popular style of music for dancing, to a "high-art,"
less-accessible, cerebral "musician's music". The audience for both blues and jazz split, and the border between
blues and jazz became the more defined. Artists straddling the boundary between jazz and blues are categorized into the jazz-blues
sub-genre.
The blues' twelve-bar structure and the blues scale was a major influence on rock-and-roll music. Rock-and-roll has been
called "blues with a back beat". Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog", with its unmodified twelve-bar structure
(in both harmony and lyrics) and a melody centered on flatted third of the tonic (and flatted seventh of the subdominant),
is a blues song transformed into a rock-and-roll song.
Many early rock-and-roll songs are based on blues: "Johnny B. Goode", "Blue Suede Shoes", "Whole
Lotta' Shakin' Going On", "Tutti-Frutti", "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", "What'd I Say", and
"Long Tall Sally". The early African American rock musicians retained the sexual themes and innuendos of blues music:
"Got a gal named Sue, knows just what to do" or "See the girl with the red dress on, she knows how to do it
all night long". Even the subject matter of "Hound Dog" contains well-hidden sexual double entendres.
More sanitized early "white" rock borrowed the structure and harmonics of blues, although there was less harmonic
creativity and sexual frankness (e.g., Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock"). Many white musicians who performed
black songs changed the words; Pat Boone's performance of "Tutti Frutti" changed the original lyrics ("Tutti
frutti, loose booty . . . a wop bop a lu bop, a good Goddamn") to a tamer version.
Social impact
Like jazz, rock and roll, heavy metal and hip hop music, blues has been accused of being the "devil's music"
and of inciting violence and other poor behavior. In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable, especially
as white audiences began listening to the blues during the 1920s. In the early twentieth century, W.C. Handy was the first
to make the blues more respectable to non-black Americans.
Now blues is a major component of the African American and American cultural heritage in general. This status is not only
mirrored in scholar studies in the field but also in main stream movies such as Sounder (1972), the Blues Brothers (1980 and
1998), and Crossroads (1986). The Blues Brothers movies, which mix up almost all kinds of music related to blues such as R&B
or Zydeco, have had a major impact on the image of blues music (even though the music in the more famous first film is mostly
rhythm and blues).
They promoted the standard traditional blues "Sweet Home Chicago", whose version by Robert Johnson is probably
the best known, to the unofficial status of Chicago's city anthem. More recently, in 2003, Martin Scorsese made significant
efforts to promote the blues to a larger audience. He asked several famous directors such as Clint Eastwood and Wim Wenders
to participate in a series of films called The Blues. He also participated in the rendition of compilations of major blues
artists in a series of high quality CDs.
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