Portal:Blues

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The Blues Portal

Blues is a music genre and musical form that originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale, and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove.

"The Blues" is characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the racial discrimination and other challenges experienced by African-Americans.

Many elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa. The origins of the blues are also closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery. Later, the development of juke joints. It is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century. The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues rock developed, which blended blues styles with rock music. (Full article...)

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The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta, or simply the Delta, is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi (and portions of Arkansas and Louisiana) that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth" ("Southern" in the sense of "characteristic of its region, the American South"), because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history. It is 200 miles (320 km) long and 87 miles (140 km) across at its widest point, encompassing about 4,415,000 acres (17,870 km²), or, almost 7,000 square miles of alluvial floodplain. Originally covered in hardwood forest across the bottomlands, it was developed as one of the richest cotton-growing areas in the nation before the American Civil War (1861–1865). The region attracted many speculators who developed land along the riverfronts for cotton plantations; they became wealthy planters dependent on the labor of people they enslaved, who composed the vast majority of the population in these counties well before the Civil War, often twice the number of whites.

As the riverfront areas were developed first and railroads were slow to be constructed, most of the bottomlands in the Delta were undeveloped, even after the Civil War. Both Black and White migrants flowed into Mississippi, using their labor to clear land and sell timber in order to buy land. By the end of the 19th century, black farmers made up two-thirds of the independent farmers in the Mississippi Delta. (Full article...)

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Albert King in concert, 1968.

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Quotes

“

Blues is really America's finest art form and most dominant art form of the 20th century.

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— Georgie Fame

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Blues is a natural fact, something that a fellow lives. If you don't live it, you don't have it.

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— Big Bill Broonzy

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The blues is a low-down achin' heart disease
Like consumption killing me by degrees.

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— Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)"

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When you lay down at night, turning from one side of the bed to the other and can't sleep, what's the matter? Blues got you.

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— Lead Belly

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The blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll.

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— Muddy Waters

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Burnside performing at the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee

R. L. Burnside (November 23, 1926 – September 1, 2005) was an American blues singer, songwriter and guitarist. He played music for much of his life but received little recognition before the early 1990s. In the latter half of that decade, Burnside recorded and toured with Jon Spencer, garnering crossover appeal and introducing his music to a new fan base in the punk and garage rock scenes. (Full article...)

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The following are images from various blues-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1George "Harmonica" Smith, 1980 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 2Eddie Shaw, 2015 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 3Curley Weaver (from List of blues musicians)
Image 4Mississippi Fred McDowell, 1972 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 5Hubert Sumlin in Montreux, 1978 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 6Deborah Coleman, 2009 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 7Eric Clapton, 2006 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 8Koko Taylor, 2006 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 9Albert King in Paris, 1978 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 10Debbie Davies, 2019 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 11Mamie Smith (from List of blues musicians)
Image 12Ma Rainey (from List of blues musicians)
Image 13RonnieEarl, 1996 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 14Cedric Burnside, 2018 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 15Pinetop Perkins in Paris, 1976 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 16Memphis Minnie, 1930 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 17Emancipation from Freedmen's viewpoint; illustration from Harper's Weekly 1865 (from Origins of the blues)
Image 18Kenny Wayne Shepherd, 2010 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 19Blind Lemon Jefferson (from List of blues musicians)
Image 20Shemekia Copeland, 2019 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 21Robben Ford, 2007 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 22Son House (from List of blues musicians)
Image 23Luther Tucker, 1964 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 24Otis Rush, 1997 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 25Buddy Moss in Georgia prison camp, 1941 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 26Muddy Waters with James Cotton, 1971 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 27Paul Butterfield at Woodstock Reunion, 1979 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 28Luther Allison (from List of blues musicians)
Image 29Keb' Mo', 2012 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 30Dexter Allen, 2004 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 31Billy Boy Arnold (from List of blues musicians)
Image 32Big Joe Turner, 1955 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 33Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, 1999 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 34Robert Jr. Lockwood, 1982 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 35Susan Tedeschi, 2006 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 36Robert Cray, 2007 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 37Jimmy Witherspoon, 1974 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 38Ethel Waters, 1943 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 39Kenny Neal, 2012 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 40Jay McShann in Edinburgh, c.1995 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 41A watercolor painting of a camp meeting circa 1839 (New Bedford Whaling Museum). (from Origins of the blues)
Image 42Lowell Fulson in Paris, 1980 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 43Jimmy Rushing, 1946 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 44Mississippi John Hurt, 1964 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 45Bessie Smith, 1936 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 46Eric Bibb, 2006 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 47Jimmy Burns, 2012 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 48T-Bone Walker at American Folk Blues Festival, Hamburg, 1972 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 49Henry Townsend, 1983 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 50Corey Harris, 2006 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 51Willie Dixon at Monterey Jazz Festival, 1981 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 52Alvin Youngblood Hart, 2009 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 53Bobby "Blue" Bland (from List of blues musicians)
Image 54Sara Martin and Sylvester Weaver (from List of blues musicians)
Image 55Lucky Peterson (from List of blues musicians)
Image 56B.B. King in Rome, 1984 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 57Roy Rogers, 2014 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 58"Sweet Home Chicago" performed at the White House with Barack Obama joining B.B. King on the chorus (from List of blues standards)
Image 59Charlie Musselwhite, 2003 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 60Lead Belly (from List of blues musicians)
Image 61Freddie King in Paris, 1975 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 62John Lee Hooker in Toronto, 1978 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 63Louis Jordan in New York City, 1946 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 64Joe Louis Walker, 2007 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 65An 1890s photo of the tourist steamer Okahumke'e on the Ocklawaha River, with black guitarists on board (from Origins of the blues)
Image 66Jimmy Rogers, 1991 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 67Buddy Guy, 2008 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 68Chris Thomas King, 2005 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 69Junior Wells, 1983 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 70Big Joe Williams, 1971 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 71Master Kora maker Alieu Suso in the Gambia (from Origins of the blues)
Image 72Son Seals, 1977 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 73Detail from cover of The Celebrated Negro Melodies, as Sung by the Virginia Minstrels, 1843 (from Origins of the blues)
Image 74Lonnie Johnson, 1941 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 75Eddie Clearwater in Montreux, 1978 (from List of blues musicians)
Image 76Albert Collins at Long Beach Blues Festival, 1990 (from List of blues musicians)