History of the Blues

The Memphis and Chicago styles of blues (as well as those of Texas, New Orleans and other areas) reflect the reality that wherever African People went within the twentieth century there was no shortage from the Evil, Ignorance and Stupidity, as a single of Willie Dixon's songs puts it, that brought on the blue feeling (Dixon 210).

Some writers are emphatic in claiming that African Americans "had transformed remembered West African music into a new variety named the blues" (Lomax 64). But this transformation was probably incredibly indirect and much on the procedure of developing the blues kind is lost to history. Events in blues history were often transformed themselves as legends grew up around kernels of truth. A single of the best-known legends is W.C. Handy's account of his very first exposure towards blues. Sometime in between 1892 and 1903, the composer was on tour with his orchestra when, waiting in your train in rural Mississippi, he heard a man playing slide guitar and singing "the weirdest music I had ever heard" (quoted by Davis 25). Yet when Handy, a genuine entrepreneur, saw a blues band showered with piles of funds he soon "saw the beauty of primitive music," concluding that it "had the stuff the persons wanted" (quoted by Davis 26). Handy, who later billed himself as "The Father on the Blues," went on to publish, among others, The Saint Louis Blues.

The Delta tradition (and the blues tradition throughout Texas and also the South) consisted from the sharing of themes and styles and influences spread throughout the African American community. Thus once fans of blues music turned to Robert Johnson's recordings within the 1960s they have been also taking from the enormous number of influences that shaped his style. Subsequent scholarship has determined the amount of sources from which Johnson drew his music, lyrics, and instrumental techniques. Davis, for example, outlines the number of sources on Johnson's If I Had Possession more than Judgment Day. This a single song shows clear derivation from Patton's Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues, Hambone Willie Newbern's Roll and Tumble Blues, and Sleepy John Estes' The Girl I Love, She Got Lengthy Curly Hair (Davis 128). And in tracing this sort of derivations it's needed to rely primarily on the recorded performances of other artists. There's no way of tracing the influence of hundreds of artists, major and minor, who were not recorded or the performances of those who recorded quite little of their repertoire. But out of this vast pool of tradition the exceptional artist was the man or woman who brought the numerous sources together into something that was uniquely his or hers. Robert Johnson was remarkable simply because he "so successfully created even his slightest and most derivative songs sound like very own emanations" (Davis 128).

This theme of blues musicians who were torn among the 2 ways of living is epitomized by the work of Eddie "Son" Home who began as a preacher but "the lure of whiskey and also the sound of blues played having a slide guitar caused him" to transform careers (Evans 47). This conflict was internalized in House's music.

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