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The Beginning and History of The Blues
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If you’ve ever felt a guitar note bend like a sigh or heard a voice carry a whole life in one line, you’ve brushed up against the blues. This story traces the History of American Blues from its earliest roots to its global travels and triumphant return via the British scene. It’s relaxed and conversational here, but we’re serious about accuracy—so settle in for an engaging journey through the people, places, and sounds that shaped modern music.
The blues began as an expression of African American life in the post–Civil War South. It grew from work songs, field hollers, spirituals, and ring shouts—music built on call-and-response, flexible rhythm, and the “blue” notes that tug at the heart. These were practical songs for hard days and long nights, functional and communal before they were ever commercial. In that setting, the blues was both survival and storytelling.
By the late 19th century, sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, and racial violence defined daily reality for many Black Southerners. Musicians sang about wandering, railroads, levees, bosses, lost love, and the hope of something better up the road. Juke joints on plantation edges and rural dance halls became laboratories for new sounds, where a lone voice and a guitar could fill the room with feeling. The music’s intimacy matched the intimacy of the stories.
Musically, the 12-bar blues form became a common framework, with its I–IV–V harmony and AAB lyric pattern, though early blues was far more fluid. Singers stretched bars, slid between notes, and played with time. Instruments were whatever was available: guitars, fiddles, harmonicas, homemade percussion. Slide guitar—using a bottleneck or metal tube—gave the music its keening, vocal-like cry.
One of the first people to notate and popularize the sound for wider audiences was W.C. Handy, a bandleader and composer who encountered blues musicians in Mississippi. His “Memphis Blues” (1912) and “St. Louis Blues” (1914) weren’t field hollers; they were sophisticated compositions that borrowed the spirit, scale, and feel of rural music for urban stages. Handy called himself the “Father of the Blues,” and while the title is debated, his role in broadcasting the idiom is undeniable. He helped lift the blues from local tradition to national consciousness.
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The first big commercial breakthrough came with Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920, which launched the “race records” market. The classic female blues era followed: Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Ida Cox toured the TOBA vaudeville circuit, fronting bands and packing theatres. Their songs told of love, betrayal, and independence, often with sly humour and fierce resolve. These stars proved the blues could headline.
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