SINGING THE BLUES

WITH JAMES NIXON

 

 

Born in the American South, the blues is a vocal and instrumental musical form which came from African American spirituals, work songs, shouts and chants and has its earliest stylistic roots in West Africa. This African American-derived music form recognized the pain of lost love and injustice and gave expression to the victory of outlasting a broken heart and facing down adversity.

 

The blues evolved from hymns, work songs, and field hollers: music used to accompany spiritual, work and social functions. Blues is the
foundation of jazz as well as the prime source of rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll, and country music.

 
Blues has been a major influence on later American and Western popular music, finding expression in ragtime, jazz, big bands, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and country music, as well as conventional pop songs and even modern classical music.

 

What is now recognizable as the standard 12-bar blues form is documented from oral history and sheet music appearing in African American communities throughout the region along the lower Mississippi River during the first decade of the 1900s . . . .and performed by white bands and black bands in New Orleans at least since 1908.

 

One of the early sites of blues evolution was along Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. B.B. King emerged as a major artist in the fifties and reached his height in the late sixties. His virtuoso guitar technique earned him the eponymous title "king of the blues".