RiverWeb Student Guide

The Student's Guide to RiverWeb

Section Two:

"A Music of the People:" The Blues and American Culture

EXPLANATION OF MATERIAL:

When time comes to put together textbooks and survey lectures, the historical role of black music - particularly the blues - is often one of the things squeezed out in the quest for synthesis through brevity. A random sample of ten college level textbooks, for example, reveals that while six of them at least mention music in some form, only one has a specific indexed reference to the blues and that leads to only one paragraph of text. Monographic literature of course has the luxury of a better space to content ratio and thus is more likely to include references to black music and the blues. Edward Ayers' celebrated work, The Promise of the New South (1992), for example, contains half a chapter on black music in which the blues plays a prominent role.

This absence in the mainstream is regrettable, simply because the blues are one of the most important and influential forms of black expression to modern popular culture. To be sure most historians would acknowledge their influence if asked, but relatively few incorporate the blues into their teaching, thus failing to profit from James C. Cobb's observation in The Most Southern Place on Earth (1992) that the blues "not only . . . offer invaluable insights into the lives of [Mississippi] Delta blacks, but their powerful and enduring legacy shaped the musical culture of several generations of white youths who knew little of the roots of the blues but nonetheless related to the sense of alienation and rebellion that permeated the music of those who occupied the bottom strata of Delta society."

RiverWeb allows us to close this gap because the influence of the Mississippi River, and more specifically St. Louis and East St. Louis, on the music of the blues has been tremendous. Besides being the subject of hundreds of blues songs, the Mississippi served as the main conduit of black migration in the nation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this way also the blues, formerly a music limited to black Americans in the Mississippi Delta region, began to spread across the United States, first to the river towns like St. Louis and Chicago and later to the remainder of the nation. A history of the blues and the river, then, reveals much about such subjects as the histories of race relations, transportation, migration and American culture.

But since the blues encompasses more than just the river, to understand the blues means going back to the very beginning. The origins of the blues are complicated, but to truly understand the meaning of music to African-America n society, and the blues to American culture, requires understanding where the music of black Americans began. For the blues, the earliest antecedents came from West African societies, where music and musicians played an important role. Indeed, the tribal musician known as the Griot was one of the most esteemed members of the community and was in part responsible for passing down the oral traditions of the tribe. Writers such as Olaudah Equiano noted the importance placed on music by African societies.

When the era of the slave trade began, with its inherent brutality, traders took hundreds of thousands of native Africans from their homelands and transported them to America as slaves to be used as laborers, mainly (but not exclusively) in the middle Atlantic and Southern states. This melding of many African traditions, along with other influences from the slave-holding communities, helped create a distinct American slave society culture. Within this culture, music played a preeminent role.

Using West African musical traditions as a basis, slaves created differe nt forms of songs for different kinds of work, including work songs, boat songs, and field shouts and hollers. These songs, with their repeated cadences and an emphasis on the dangers and hardships of slave life, became the most predominant influence on the music of the blues. Indeed, some of the lyrics and melodies of former field shouts and work songs became the basis of later blues songs. Famous former slaves like William Wells Brown wrote about music and its role in slave society.

A more immediate influence on the blues was ragtime, a musical form that originated in St. Louis, led by such influential African American musicians as Scott Poplin and Thomas Turpin. From there it was a few short years before the discovery of the blues in the Mississippi Delta region. The band leader W.C. Handy, whose St. Louis Blues became one of the most popular and recorded songs in music history, introduced the form to a broader audience. Not long after the golden age of blues music began, with recording labels vying for such blues greats as Bessie Smith, Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

The 1930s, the era of race records, saw the blues become a national mania, not just for the black community to which it was first marketed but to America as a whole. Blues songs such as St. Louis Blues, originally recorded by artists like Bessie Smith, soon gained entry to the mainstream through their adapted by prominent artists like Guy Lombardo and Bing Crosby. Blues artists like Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson, and the incomparable Huddy Ledbetter - who sang himself out of prison twice - made the era before the Second World War one of the most influential in American musical history.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT:

How did the East St. Louis/St. Louis region influence the music of the blues? How do you explain the prominence of music and musicians in this region?
How does the blues reflect the Mississippi river? What aspects of river life come up in the lyrics to these songs?
How does the music of the blues reflect the black experience in America?

POSSIBLE ASSIGNMENTS:

Utilizing the text, audio, and video sources available on the CD-Rom, the RiverWeb Web site, and the hyperlinks to outside sources, think about the role women played in the history of the blues. How does this reflect or differ from the rest of American society during this era?
Utilizing the four digitized sound clips of the W.C. Handy song St. Louis Blues, can you hear any differences between the four versions? For example, how does Guy Lombardo's version differ from Bessie Smith's? Is there an explanation for this?