Introduction to the Blues, Part 1

Robert Johnson

San Antonio, Texas

November 1936

A young black man enters an ARC studio. He crushes out his cigarette and pulls a guitar from a dented, road-stained case. He takes a seat in front of the mic and prepares for what will be a five day recording session. As he tunes his instrument and waits for his cue, he reflects on the long road that brought him here.

He recalls his childhood in Hazelhurst, Mississippi: his poor stepfather whose name he rejected for his biological father's - a man he had never met. His early noodling on the Jew's Harp and harmonica. His initial dabbling on the guitar, an instrument he found difficult to master.

He remembers Virginia, his wife who died in childbirth at the age of 16.

He recalls being a very young, green, completely incompetent "Bluesman" in Robinsonville. He can still hear the crowds shouting to "get that guitar from that boy!" Even his hero, the great Son House described his music as "a racket."

But that was before the Crucible of the Road. Before the jook joints of the road gangs and lumber camps, the filthy smoky roadhouses, his second, secret marriage.

He recalls the shock in Robinsonville when he returned, a changed man.

Some said he had something supernatural to him.

Some said he had sold his soul to the Devil for his newfound skills. As he begins to pick the first song, it becomes apparent why. The music has an unearthly, almost orchestral quality. All the tortured, restless spirits of the Deep South seem to channel through his fingers and his voice.

The song is "Crossroad Blues."

The man's name is Robert Johnson.

Defining the Blues

"Blues is the Healer."

"Blues is the Mother of Music."

"Blues ain't nothin' but a good man feelin' bad."

We all know the blues. We know it's quality and taste. We can identify its influence in almost all pop, rock, soul, funk and jazz and their countless offshoots., but what defines the blues? Before we can attempt to trace its origins, we must identify the nuts-and-bolts components of this art form and follow them to their sources.

Blues, like haiku, is a very formally structured, minimalist art form where endless expression is allowed only within very strict parameters. For simplicity's sake, I will define these parameters as follows:

Call-and-Response: Either a musical exchange between instrument and instrument or instrument and vocal (good examples of both in John Lee Hooker's "Boom Boom Boom"), there is some usage of this technique in most blues. Often this is a "conversation" between lead vocal and lead instrument ala B.B. King. Occasionally there is a call-and-response between vocals (Ray Charles' "What I Say?")

I-IV-V chord structure: Arguably the most defining quality of the blues. Whether in a minor or major key, blues almost always follows either a 12 bar ("Hootchie Kootchie Man") or 8 bar ("Walkin' by Myself") structure along the I-IV-V intervals.

Pentatonic Scales: Though there are infinite variations of passing tones, tri-tones and extensions, the "meat" of the blues is the five-note scale, whether major (I-ii-iii-V-vi) or minor (i-III-iv-v-vii).

Now that we have identified the basics of what is arguably the most important musical genre of the past two centuries, let's follow them back to their genesis.

Digging For the Roots

Seeking the origins of the Blues is an Indiana Jones-like adventure taking one deep into the buried collective swamps of oppression, genocide and cultural osmosis. Into the wilderness of pain and all we have tried to leave behind. It is also a story of the triumph of art over adversity and the indomitability of the Human Spirit. We begin half a millennium ago in pre-slavery West Africa...

A Tale of 3 Continents: Field Hollers, Spirituals and Slavery

Traditional West African culture has from ancient times had music and rhythm at its heart. Drums are used for communication, celebration, worship and recreation. Work songs and sacred hymns are built on ancient call-and-response structures, often with highly sophisticated harmonic accompaniment. This is folk music, known to almost all and certainly to a great majority of the doomed souls along the African Coast who were to be the victims of the slave trade holocaust. For centuries, they would be captured, transported to another continent and enslaved. There would be a systematic effort to eradicate all traces of their former identity; their religion, their language, their culture, even their names.

But the music would remain in their hearts. The work song, though sung in new tongues, would sustain them through the hours of backbreaking labor and new folk songs with a familiar feel would entertain them in their precious "free" time.

... and they would bring the music to their new church where it would be forever impacted by another ancient musical form - the European Spiritual. Simple folk hymns like "Amazing Grace," often built on a pentatonic scale and with a I-IV-V structure, would have a tremendous influence on the field hollers and spirituals of the American slaves and would eventually evolve into what would become Gospel music. This musical tradition would continue to develop long after the slaves' Emancipation.

Spirituals and work songs, rooted in both the slavery era and the West African societies from which most African-American slaves were originally taken, provided cultural sustenance to African Americans in the midst of intense racial oppression. They first came to be valued by northern white audiences in the late-19th century. Later, folklorists began collecting (and eventually recording) traditional southern music. John and Alan Lomax recorded southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. They recorded “Long John,” a work song, sung by a man identified as “Lightning” and a group of his fellow black convicts at Darrington State Prison Farm in Texas in 1934. Black prisoners working in gangs to break rocks and clear swamps relied on the repeated rhythms and chants of work songs (originating in the forced gang labor of slavery) to set the pace for their collective labor. “Long John” mixed religious and secular concerns, including the notion of successful escape from bondage, a deeply felt desire of both slaves and prisoners. historymatters.gmu.edu

Jim Crow, Jook Joints and the Devil's Music

Once their long-awaited freedom had finally arrived, the former slaves quickly found that they had once again been screwed. There was no equality. There were no forty acres. There was no mule. There was instead an impoverished life as a sharecropper and second-class citizen. Ostracized and segregated from White society, African Americans formed a vibrant, dynamic counter-culture to offset their new hardships. Religion was still alive and well, but blacks began to seek solace in more earthly, secular pursuits. House parties and hootenannies became common. Musicians entertained party-goers with a new, Gospel-based but decidedly nonspiritual form of music. They accompanied each other with whatever instruments were affordable to a sharecropper: harmonicas, Jew's Harps, washboards, sometimes cheap guitars and banjos. If guitars were unavailable, wires could be nailed to a wall, tuned and played with a bottle or piece of metal. This technique would eventually be applied to the guitar as Slide or Bottleneck.

Unable to enter a white drinking establishment, blacks in the South began to open "jooks," cheap bars that featured dancing and entertainment. These were rough, dangerous places shunned by the more upstanding members of the community. The lyrics of the entertainers dealt with despair, poverty, violence and frustration. There was explicit carnality and outright sexual bragging. The new music had cut its umbilical chord to Gospel. The Blues were born.

By the 1930s, the Blues was incredibly popular throughout the South. There were Blues records and radio stations. Blues produced celebrities and legends like Son House and Willie Brown. It provided the soundtrack to rural black life.

It was still virtually unknown to most of America.

This would soon change.