Blues – Who invented the blues? Where, when and why? Are there any real answers to these questions? Of course not. There can not be such answers for any oral tradition. Hello Doly here, lets talk about blues evolution and history.
Introduction
New genres don’t appear overnight, they evolve through decades or centuries. And besides that, before the rise of the 20th century, there were not many audio documents to help us understand the exact origin of the emerging African American styles, especially for the Blues that was generally regarded as lower-class music, unfit for documentation. Nevertheless, musicologists, just like archeologists, try to connect the musical and historical dots and draw a picture about the people and the conditions that led to the birth and evolution of the Blues. In this history of music series, I’ll try to summarize the history of the Blues, as it unfolds through the socio-economic pressure on African Americans and the musical exchange with the white folk tradition in North America through the centuries.
The Beginning 1492
Ones Upon a time at 1492, Christopher Columbus leading three ships, sails to the West to reach the Indies. Instead, he arrives in the Bahamas islands, and the westward expansion of the Europeans begins.
During the 16th century, Spain built a colonial empire in the Americas, and Spaniard colonists brought their instruments and their Spanish-arabic music with them. But there were not the only ones in this westward expansion. It Was included Portuguese, English, French, Dutch and others.
Their fought to control the resources of the emerging transatlantic world and worked together to facilitate the dislocation of the indigenous people of the Americas and Africa.
1607s (blues evolution)
In 1607, the English Empire founded Jamestown in Virginia, where immigrants from Ireland, Scotland and England settled, bringing with them their own traditions.
1619s (blues evolution)
Twelve years later, in 1619, twenty or so African slaves from Kingdom of Ndongo arrived in Jamestown, along with white British servants and enslaved Native Americans. Within the next three centuries the use of African slaves was fundamental to growing colonial cash crops. The Atlantic Triangular Slave Trade, describes the way that, millions of slaves got imported in Americas in order to cover the increasing demand in labor. Ships in West Indies and Virginia got loaded with cotton, sugar, tobacco, molasses, spices, and coffee and shipped to England where these goods were sold and exported to Europe. The profits were used to buy rum, cloth, weapons and other manufactured goods, which were shipped to West Africa to be exchanged for slaves.
British slave-buyers recruited slaves from African sellers at the West and Central African coast, initially from Senegal, Gambia and Guinea Coast, then from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria and Cameroon and later from Angola and Mozambique. Then, the ships made the journey of the “Middle Passage” back to the Caribbean islands and Spanish colonies in Central and South America, and later to British North America. The slaves were sold in auctions and sent to “seasoning camps” to be trained to obey. Africans spoke different languages and had different ethnic traditions and beliefs. When they were taken as slaves to America they were stripped of everything, except for what they carried inside their head: memories of their way of life and their culture. Slave traders often encouraged dance and music among the captives on slave ships, to prevent them from falling into depression and dying. African musical instruments were used, so some of them reached North America while others were constructed from memory. One way slaves kept some of their musical traditions was by singing while working.
The Work Song
The habit of group singing through all activities, is the very core of African tradition. The “Work Song” had not only an artistic side to it, but also a utilitarian principle: to relieve the boredom of a tedious job, enhance strength and endurance, and coordinate the labor a group, which improves efficiency.
It has the characteristic African “Call and Response” format, with improvisation by the leader. Although the “group singing” tradition declined, under the individualizing sharecropping farm system, after mid 19th century, it continued to flourish until the 1960s, in the penitentiaries of the South, where black prisoners were working in “chain gangs”.
There are numerous recordings from these prisons, mostly made by John Lomax in the ’30s and later by his son Alan Lomax in the ’40s and ‘ 50s. The Lomaxes hoped that in prison, where the black inmates are most isolated from the white culture, they could find the most original black folk music, “untouched” by the modern world. Of course that could not be entirely true, since all inmates were once free, being influenced by the music of their time.
The Prison Song
Anyway, these “Prison Songs” hopefully give us an idea of how the Work Songs of the past sounded like. Here is an example, where inmates of a Texas prison cut timber with axes, singing a Work song to synchronize their movements. Another type of African American Work Song is the “Field Holler”, a term used to describe different forms of expressions and communications through a solo vocal style. Field Holler was a personal unaccompanied song, like a musical signature, that announces existence in the field, and through it, the worker voices his individual feelings, sorrows and complaints. It may have evolved from the group work songs as a mode of singular expression.
The Musicologist Research
Some scholars suggest that 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.
Some of these elements are the melismatic way of singing and the microtonal nature of the scales the hollers used. Professor Kwabena Nketia also believed that the way the notes sung in these African-American styles relate in part, though not exclusively, to the pitch and tone elements of African languages. Fortunately, there are many recordings of Field Hollers thanks to John and Alan Lomax, all made, after the ’30s of course.
Here is an example of a Cornfield Holler by Thomas J. Marshall. if we hear it deeply, African Americans managed to keep some of their African traditions and incorporated them, in anyway they could, in their new life in the Americas.
This heritage can also be heard in the relatively new musical styles of Blues, Jazz, Gospel etc. In the next chapter we’ll talk about the social conditions and the various traditions in the 18th and 19th century that paved the way for new music genres to be born.
To Be Continued……….
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