. Many
variants exist, but this pattern is so widely known that ‘playing the blues’
generally presupposes the use of it.A secular, predominantly black American folk music of the 20th century, which has a history and evolution separate from, but sometimes related to, that of jazz. From obscure and largely undocumented rural American origins, it became the most extensively recorded of all traditional music types. It has been subject to social changes that have affected its character. Since the early 1960s blues has been the most important single influence on the development of Western popular music (see Popular music; Pop).
3. The 1920s: first recordings.
4. Piano blues and the northern migration.
8. Blues and the white audience.
PAUL OLIVER
The most important extra-musical meaning of ‘blues’ refers to a state of mind. Since the 16th century ‘the blue devils’ has meant a condition of melancholy or depression. But ‘the blues’ did not enter popular American usage until after the Civil War; and as a description of music that expressed such a mental state among the black population it may not have gained currency until after 1900. The two meanings are closely related in the history of the blues as music, and it is generally understood that a blues performer sings or plays to rid himself of ‘the blues’. This is so important to blues musicians that many maintain one cannot play the music unless one has ‘a blue feeling’ or ‘feels blue’. Indeed, the blues was considered a perpetual presence in the lives of black Americans and was frequently personified in their music as ‘Mister Blues’. It follows that ‘blues’ can also mean a way of performing. Many jazz players of all schools have held that a musician’s ability to play blues expressively is a measure of his quality. Within blues as folk music this ability is the essence of the art; a singer or performer who does not express ‘blues’ feeling is not a ‘bluesman’. Certain qualities of timbre sometimes employing rasp or growl techniques are associated with this manner of expression; the timbre as well as the flattened and ‘shaded’ notes (produced by microtonal deviations from standard temperament; see Blue note) so distinctive to the blues can be simulated, but blues feeling cannot, so its exponents contend.
As the blues was created largely by musicians who had little education and scarcely any of whom could read music, improvisation, both verbal and musical, was an essential part of it, though not to the extent that it was in jazz. To facilitate improvisation a number of patterns evolved, of which the most familiar is the 12-bar blues (see Blues progression). Apparently this form crystallized in the first decade of the 20th century as a three-line stanza in which the second line repeated the first, thus enabling the blues singer to improvise a third, rhyming line while singing the second:
I’m
troubled in mind, baby, feelin’ blue and sad.
I’m troubled in mind, baby, feelin’ blue and sad.
The blues ain’t nothin’ but a good man feelin’ bad.
This
structure was supported by a fixed harmonic progression, which all blues
performers knew: it consists of four bars on the tonic, of which two might
accompany singing and the fourth might introduce a flattened seventh; two bars
on the subdominant, usually accompanying singing, followed by two further bars
on the tonic; two bars on the dominant seventh, accompanying the rhyming line
of the vocal part; and two concluding bars on the tonic. Such a progression
could be played in any key, though blues guitarists favoured E or A and jazz
musicians B. Many
variants exist, but this pattern is so widely known that ‘playing the blues’
generally presupposes the use of it.
The term ‘blues’ is also used to identify a composition that uses blues harmonic and phrase structure but which is intended to be performed as written, such as Dallas Blues (1912) by Hart Wand and Lloyd Garrett, among the first to publish the form, or St Louis Blues (1914) by W.C. Handy. There are numerous compositions that are in no way related to blues but that bear the name, among them Limehouse Blues (1924) by Douglas Furber and Philip Braham. Published compositions in blues form, while at first bringing a new sound to a larger audience, contributed much to the confusion about the nature of blues as folk music, and helped to link the term with jazz. This association with jazz retarded blues research and the independent consideration of its origins, traditions, forms and exponents. Only since 1960 has it been extensively discussed in its own right.
In its early years the blues was wholly African American. It has been suggested that it existed before the Civil War, but this view has no supporting evidence. Influential in its development were the collective unaccompanied work-songs of the plantation culture, which followed a responsorial ‘leader-and-chorus’ form that can be traced not only to pre-Civil War origins but to African sources. Responsorial work-songs diminished when the plantations were broken up, but persisted in the southern penitentiary farms until the 1950s. After the Reconstruction era, black workers either engaged in seasonal collective labour in the South or tended smallholdings leased to them under the system of debt-serfdom known as sharecropping. Work-songs therefore increasingly took the form of solo calls or ‘hollers’, comparatively free in form but close to blues in feeling. The vocal style of the blues probably derived from the holler (see Field holler).
Blues instrumental style shows tenuous links with African music. Drumming was forbidden on slave plantations, but the playing of string instruments was often permitted and even encouraged, so the musicians among slaves from the savanna regions, with their strong traditions of string playing, predominated. The jelli, or griots – professional musicians who also acted as their tribe’s historians and social commentators – performed roles not unlike those of the later blues singers, while the banjo is thought to be a direct descendant of their banza or xalam.
In the 1890s the post-Reconstruction bitterness of southern white Americans towards the black community hardened into segregation laws; this in a sense forced the latter to recognize their own identity, and a flowering of black sacred and secular music followed. Ballads in traditional British form extolling the exploits of black heroes (e.g. John Henry, John Hardy, Po’ Lazarus and Duncan and Brady) were part of this musical expansion, and blues emerged from the combination of freely expressive hollers with the music of these ballads. Few blues were noted by early 20th-century collectors, but those collected frequently had a four-line or rhyming-couplet form. Some of the ballads popular among black singers, for example Railroad Bill, Frankie and Albert, Duncan and Brady and Stack O’Lee, had a single couplet with a rhyming third line as a refrain. In blues the ‘couplet’ consisted of one repeated line; See, See Rider, Joe Turner Blues and Hesitating Blues were among the earliest songs of this type.
At first the blues was probably only a new song form in the repertory of the black songster (see Songster (ii)), the titles providing a theme for a loose arrangement of verses (e.g. Florida Blues, Atlanta Blues and Railroad Blues). Many songsters and early blues singers in the South worked in medicine shows, street entertainments promoted by vendors of patent medicines. Their travels helped to spread the blues, as did those of wandering singers who sang and played for a living. They followed the example of the street evangelists who at that time were popularizing gospel songs. Preferring the guitar to the banjo as an accompanying instrument, the songsters represent a link between the older black song tradition and the blues. By the 1920s the blues singer, who sang and played only blues, began to replace the songster.
Blues songs had no fixed number of stanzas, and the inevitable return to the tonic after the stanza’s third line gave shape to long improvisations. The ballad singers had concentrated on the exploits of legendary black heroes, but blues singers sang of themselves and those who shared their experiences. Many stanzas rapidly became traditional and certain images or lines entered the stock-in-trade of every blues singer. But the inventive singer expressed his anxieties, frustrations, hopes or resignation through his songs. Some blues described disasters or personal accidents; themes of crime, prostitution, gambling, alcohol and imprisonment are prominent in early examples and have persisted ever since. Some blues are tender but few reveal a response to nature; far more express a desire to move or escape by train or road to an imagined better land. Many are aggressively sexual, and there is much that is consciously and subconsciously symbolic of frustration and oppression.
The earliest forms of blues were not the first to be recorded. Mamie Smith’s recording of Crazy Blues (OK/Phonola) in August 1920 brought a popularized form to a large audience; Smith was a stage performer, and her blues, accompanied by a jazz band, were sung in vaudeville fashion. They set the pattern for numerous recordings by Edith Wilson, Sara Martin, Clara Smith and many other black singers, most of whom were professional entertainers working with touring shows on theatrical circuits such as the Keith-Orpheum, or the circuit of the Theater Owners Booking Agency, which managed black artists. Among them were singers whose songs were blues in name only; but others had a deep feeling for the new idiom, including Lottie Beamon from Kansas City, Missouri, and Ma Rainey from Athens, Georgia (see fig.1), both stocky women with powerful voices, as well as Ida Cox from Knoxville, Tennessee, who was much admired for her nasal intonation. But the ‘Empress of the Blues’, as she came to be called, was Bessie Smith from Chattanooga, whose majestic recordings set a standard that few could emulate.
Many of these so-called classic blues singers came from the South or from border states and had heard rural singers whose blues they borrowed. Published blues, which had been available for some years, were performed with jazz-band accompaniment to audiences in northern cities. With Papa Charlie Jackson’s Papa’s Lawdy Lawdy Blues (Para.), recorded with banjo accompaniment in 1924, the recording industry began to make known the songs of the country tradition. Jackson’s style and technique were those of the songsters, but Long Lonesome Blues (1926, Para.), by Blind Lemon Jefferson from Texas, had the authentic sound of rural blues.
Mississippi has been popularly regarded as the birthplace of blues and has been the source of many of the earthiest, least sophisticated recordings. Many Mississippi singers were guitarists who played a heavily accented accompaniment to their frequently guttural and always expressive singing. The most influential blues singer from the state was Charley Patton, who initiated a school of singer-guitarists on Dockery’s plantation, near Clarksdale, before World War I. He influenced Tommy Johnson from the Jackson area, and they represented distinct, though linked Mississippi styles: Patton, Son House and Henry Sims, and their successors, Tommy McClennan and Bukka White, performed with deep, ‘heavy’ voices and strong, persistent rhythms, while Johnson, Ishmon Bracey and Bo Carter and the related Chatmon family used more complex, lighter rhythmic patterns and sang in higher voices, sometimes using falsetto for final syllables. Bo Carter and the Chatmons had a string band called the Mississippi Sheiks which played blues and other forms of country music and was a link with the earlier songster tradition. In Memphis, north of the Mississippi delta region, similar bands were formed in which a jug was often played as a bass instrument (see Jug band and Washboard band). Ensembles using improvised instruments to augment strings were started in many small towns, most notably in Memphis.
The Texas approach to blues was exemplified by Blind Lemon Jefferson (fig.2). His words were original and often poetic:
Sittin’
here wondrin’, will a match-box hold my clo’s?
Sittin’ here wondrin’, will a match-box hold my clo’s?
Ain’t got so many matches, but I got so far to go.
This was one of the many images he created that passed into general usage. Rambling Thomas followed his use of the guitar as an expressive ‘second voice’ answering the words of the long vocal lines. Alger Texas Alexander was so close to the holler tradition that he did not play an instrument, but on his best recordings he was accompanied on the guitar by Lonnie Johnson from New Orleans, who worked in Texas, or George ‘Little Hat’ Jones from San Antonio.
Mobile units, notably those of Columbia, Victor and Okeh, made field recordings of many singers who would otherwise have remained unknown. Some singers made few recordings, perhaps giving a false impression of their abilities. As only a few centres were used, vast areas of the South were unrepresented: hardly any recordings were made in the 1920s in Alabama, Arkansas or Florida. In Atlanta, Georgia, a school of 12-string guitar players with rich voices was recorded: among them were Barbecue Bob Hicks, his brother Charlie Lincoln, Curly Weaver, Peg Leg Howell and Blind Willie McTell. Several of them employed a knife, bottleneck or other slide to press the strings against the frets of their guitars. Some tuned their guitars to an open chord, producing a ‘cross-note’ tuning, which enabled them to press the slide against all the strings while playing a blues sequence. By moving the slide along the frets, whining, mournful sounds in keeping with blues feeling could be produced. This adaptability of the guitar made it a favourite instrument of blues singers.
Of the early southern singers only a few women were recorded. Among them were the powerful-voiced Bessie Tucker from Texas whose songs were largely about prison, and Lucille Bogan (Bessie Jackson) from Birmingham, Alabama, who sang robust blues about prostitution and lesbianism. The most notable was Memphis Minnie who, in Big Bill Broonzy’s words, ‘played the guitar like a man’. These women were admired for the masculinity of their musical attack: traditional femininity was replaced by a bragging sexuality.
The shadings and inflections of the blues can be obtained relatively simply on a guitar, but the blues pianist can produce the effect of blues grace notes and glissandos only by ‘crushing’ the keys (striking adjacent keys not quite simultaneously) and the effect of blues rhythm only by syncopation and strongly accented rhythmic phrases. Blues piano style may have derived partly from ragtime: the form known as Barrelhousehas similarities to improvised rags. Many blues pianists from Texas and Louisiana played in the makeshift lumber-camp saloons where barrelhouse style originated; among them was Little Brother Montgomery, who was an exponent of the Vicksburg Blues (1930, Para.), a standard basis for extemporization with a climbing bass figure. His contemporary from Arkansas, Roosevelt Sykes, recorded it in 1929 under the alternative name of 44 Blues (OK).
Bass figures were important in the development of piano blues; the walking bass of broken or spread octaves repeated through the blues progression provided the ground to countless improvisations. Charles ‘Cow Cow’ Davenport’s recordings, including Cow Cow Blues (1928, Bruns.), illustrate facets of the early piano blues that were unified in the playing of his protégé, Pine Top Smith, who popularized the name Boogie-woogie. Both went to Chicago from the South, as did hundreds of other blues singers, pianists, guitarists and other instrumentalists in the decade after World War I. The many immigrants forced up rent prices in Chicago and Detroit, and pianists played for beer and tips at ‘rent parties’ organized for mutual aid in the tenements. These became schools for other pianists, among them Meade ‘Lux’ Lewis and Albert Ammons.
The many blues teams formed in Chicago included that of the pianist Georgia Tom Dorsey and the guitarist Tampa Red (Hudson Whittaker), who were both from Georgia and had worked with Ma Rainey. The combination of blues and vaudeville experience led them to a vein of ‘hokum’, a combination of rural wit, sly urban sophistication and bawdiness; it was a new type of blues, entertainment without serious intent, which mildly ridiculed country manners while helping southern immigrants to adjust to urban life. With Big Bill Broonzy, another member of the Hokum Boys, Georgia Tom and Tampa Red managed to go on making recordings when the financial crash of October 1929 stopped most blues recording.
In the early 1930s the most popular blues singer was Leroy Carr, a pianist who was accompanied with uncanny rapport by the guitarist Scrapper Blackwell (fig.3). Their approach had a strong southern character, but their lyrics had a considered, reflective quality, coloured by disappointment rather than bitterness and reflecting the mood of many of their listeners. Carr was widely copied, and his classic performances, such as How Long, How Long Blues (1928, Voc.) and Midnight Hour Blues (1932, Voc.), were recorded by numerous singers, even in the 1970s, long after his death in 1935. The fatalism of his works is also found in those of his principal imitator, Bumble Bee Slim (Amos Easton), and of Walter Davis, a pianist based in St Louis. Both had somewhat flat voices and a far less impassioned delivery than that of the previous generation of blues singers. Many of the 1930s blues are characterized by a fatalism prompted by the difficulties of the Depression. Several singers of this period were based in St Louis, midway between North and South, and their blues reflected both southern and northern attitudes. Although he was still recording in 1934 (the year of his death), Charley Patton in Mississippi was already outdated, and 16 titles he made that year remained unissued. His generation of Mississippi bluesmen, including Tommy Johnson, Ishmon Bracey and Son House, was still active but unrecorded; the cooler, less emotional singers of the younger generation had taken over. So it is perhaps surprising that a singer such as Sleepy John Estes from Brownsville, Tennessee, with a country guitar and cracked voice, singing extremely parochial lyrics, should have been as extensively recorded as he was. He had a counterpart further east in Tennessee and the Carolinas in Blind Boy Fuller, a street singer with a coarse-grained voice and ragtime guitar style. He was accompanied by a brilliant harmonica virtuoso, Sonny Terry; Estes was no less sympathetically supported by his own harmonica player, Hammie Nixon.
In Chicago the tough conditions of the 1930s stimulated a more defiant, extrovert blues sound and collective performance. Tampa Red recorded some 200 titles in the decade, augmenting his plangent guitar with the heavier sound of his Chicago Five band. Its personnel varied but generally included Black Bob or Blind John Davis playing the piano, with other instruments such as tenor saxophone or trumpet taking the lead. A new departure in blues, it was followed by Big Bill Broonzy, the undisputed leader of Chicago folk music in the 1930s. Broonzy’s groups were always subordinate to his singing and immaculate guitar playing, but he was the centre of a school of urban singers of southern origin, including his reputed half-brother Robert Brown, known as Washboard Sam. Sam’s washboard playing was matched by his loud, rough voice, and he and Broonzy often played in groups. They were frequently joined by John Lee ‘Sonny Boy’ Williamson, a highly influential harmonica player with a distinctive ‘tongue-tied’ voice who recorded extensively under his own name, and William ‘Jazz’ Gillum, who also played the harmonica. Together they created an outgoing, topical form of blues that did not lose its sense of contact with those newly arrived from the South, though the sound was essentially that of Southside Chicago.
In contrast to these developments in urban blues, a new generation of ‘down-home’ singers from Mississippi, with a style firmly rooted in the Patton-House tradition, began to be recorded as the decade came to a close. Their blues were coarser and fiercer than that of their predecessors and provided a powerful stimulus for the blues in the early 1940s, when the Jive music of Louis Jordan and his contemporaries was shifting the emphasis of the blues with humorous novelty pieces intended only as entertainment. These later Mississippi singers included Tommy McClennan, Robert Petway, Bukka White and above all Robert Johnson (iii), who had the most lasting influence on the evolution of the blues. While still in his early 20s (1936–7) he recorded some 30 titles shortly before his death; these highly introverted, sometimes obsessive blues, with a whining guitar sound and throbbing beat, made a profound impression even on singers who recorded more than 20 years later. If one artist epitomized the range of performance and attitudes of the blues in the 1930s it was probably Broonzy, but the most memorable creations came from the singing and playing of Carr and Johnson.
Until the end of World War II the recording of blues had been controlled by a few large companies, but in the late 1940s small companies, many with black proprietors, started commercial production. Some were in southern cities such as Memphis and Houston, some on the West Coast, where a smooth style of blues created by westward-moving migrants from Texas found a new market. New concerns also operated in Chicago and Detroit, so the combined output of blues records was considerable. Until then blues recordings had been classified and marketed in sales catalogues as ‘Race’ records (see Race record). This segregation contributed to the development of postwar rhythm and blues, a term free of racial connotations. Rhythm-and-blues encompassed many kinds of blues and related music, from the soft-toned West Coast blues of Charles Brown to the technically brilliant guitar playing of T-Bone Walker. But, like the related rock and roll, it encompassed much else besides, including the harmonizing of the rhythm and blues quartets, the popular, nostalgic, blues-based vocals of the New Orleans pianist Fats Domino, the frenetic performances of Little Richard and the witty lyrics of rock and roll singers Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
Of postwar blues singers among the most notable was Muddy Waters (fig.4). His early manner (as seen in his Chicago recordings of 1947) owed much to Robert Johnson, but he soon added a harmonica (Little Walter) and a piano, guitar or drums to fill out the sound, as the Broonzy-Williamson groups had done. In the 1950s his music became increasingly threatening, with hoarse singing, slow blues-boogie piano playing by Otis Spann and the complementary warbling harmonica of Little Walter, Walter Horton or James Cotton. With all instruments amplified, the live sound was highly charged, and the recordings sold in large numbers. Muddy Waters’s principal rival was Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Burnett) – romantic sobriquets were still expected of blues singers. Howlin’ Wolf developed a ferocious and energetic style, shown for instance in Smokestack Lightnin’ (1956, Chess). He derived much of his style from Charley Patton, whereas Robert Johnson inspired Elmore James, who was in many ways the archetypal postwar Chicago blues singer. James was technically quite limited, depending on a bottleneck slide and rhythms formulated by Johnson; he sang in a taut, constricted voice and, like many singers of his generation, paid more attention to projection and volume than to content and subtle expression. This reflects a general change in the relationship of the blues singer to his audience: though ‘blues’ still signified both music and mood, there was greater emphasis on performance to audiences, and lyrics became more stereotyped and less personal to the singer.
Many other southern blues singers were popular in the 1950s, among them John Lee Hooker, who left Mississippi to settle in Detroit and developed his own heavily accented guitar technique. Another was Jimmy Reed, whose loose vocals against insistent rhythms set him somewhat apart from his contemporaries but made him very popular with black audiences. In Texas, Lightnin’ Hopkins extended the tradition of Blind Lemon Jefferson, dominating blues in that state. Even when the young, more urban singers from Memphis, Bobbie Bland and Little Junior Parker, settled in Texas to work and record, Hopkins did not lose his pre-eminence.
Though blues was without doubt of African American origin, it was adopted by a number of white hillbilly and country artists, who began recording blues in the 1920s. Some were imitators, but a few were innovators, like Chris Bouchillon who created the ‘talking blues’ with a spoken narrative. The Allen Brothers sang blues in harmony while, in the 1930s, the popular country singer Jimmie Rodgers often recorded his ‘blue yodels’. Though Woody Guthrie sustained the ‘talking blues’ form, white blues singers were few in the 1940s, the blues being perceived as in decline. Within jazz criticism blues had been treated with some respect, though it was seen as a precursor of jazz rather than as a distinct musical style with a parallel evolution. Leadbelly, though primarily a songster, was widely acclaimed in New York in the 1940s among jazz enthusiasts and mourned at his death (1949) as ‘the last of the blues singers’. This of course was not the case, not even in jazz itself, for the blues singers Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing continued to sing in jazz groups, and blues recordings were prominent in rhythm-and-blues in the 1950s. When Big Bill Broonzy went to Europe in the early 1950s he too was seen as a rare survivor of the blues tradition; he helped to stimulate the growing interest in blues by the publication of his autobiography (1955). Soon after his death (1958) the team of Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry went to Europe, and during the 1960s a succession of blues singers visited Britain and the Continent; some remained, among them the pianists Memphis Slim, Eddie Boyd, Curtis Jones and Champion Jack Dupree.
In 1959–60 the first serious studies of blues were published and field trips for research were undertaken, largely by Europeans. During the following years strenuous efforts were made to find forgotten or unrecorded blues singers, with the result that Fred McDowell, Robert Pete Williams, Mance Lipscomb and Robert Shaw were recorded for the first time, while Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Sleepy John Estes, Son House and others were rediscovered. Many veteran singers toured Europe, where they played to large and enthusiastic audiences. Skiffle, a quasi-country blues band music, had a fleeting popularity in Britain when Broonzy was alive, and the later visits of blues singers, the publication of many studies and magazines on the subject, the availability of recordings and the consciousness of a ‘generation gap’ (which seemed to parallel the segregation of black people in the USA) all contributed to the emergence of British pop and rock groups whose early work was strongly influenced by blues. Of these the Beatles were the best known, but the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Who owed more to blues. Blues-based pop music was loud, heavily amplified and augmented with sound-distorting devices; the performers were extravagantly dressed, and deliberately challenged established pop music (see Blues-rock). A similar movement followed in the USA, where the young musicians were, theoretically, closer to blues artists. Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield and the group Canned Heat depended closely on postwar blues based on the Chicago style.
The kindling of white interest in black music always presaged or coincided with a departure from the idiom by the black population; when blues gained white enthusiasts it lost black audiences. Some singers, for example Otis Rush and J.B. Hutto, retained their integrity as artists, taking day-time jobs and performing in clubs when they could. Fortunate blues singers toured American universities; others returned to truck driving or growing crops. In black America soul music predominated, with its gospel techniques and some element of blues expression. Few blues singers retained their audiences in the soul era; the most prominent was B.B. King, an articulate, expressive, technically accomplished guitarist with a large following. His namesakes Albert King and Freddie King worked in a similar vein, appearing at the large open-air concerts of the 1970s. Other singers of a younger generation, including Buddy Guy and Junior Wells (fig.5), used the vocal techniques and stage mannerisms of soul singing, but they too were most successful performing at universities. In the mid-1970s there were only a few blues singers working steadily, and their audiences were mainly white, though the blues had gained an international following, and blues singers were sponsored by the State Department for tours in Africa and Asia. A few black singers, notably Taj Mahal, departed from a sophisticated popular style to find some satisfaction in traditional blues, but they cannot be said to represent the culture in the sense that Jefferson, Carr, Johnson or Muddy Waters once did. By 1980, however, soul-blues singer-guitarists such as Johnny Copeland, Z.Z. Hill and Robert Cray were welcomed. Meanwhile, blues had become international, with white blues bands in most European countries, and blues being played in Japan and South-East Asia. It had also become background music to television commercials and features. Appropriated in this way it entered a new phase, being no longer African American, but a part of the currency of global popular music.
Assessment of the importance of the blues in 20th-century American folk music has often been made in relation to jazz or to pop music. As a music of the people it had its minor artists, but within the extensive corpus of recordings there are innumerable examples of folk compositions of genius and beauty, expressions of the human spirit that are both profoundly moving and complete in themselves as creative works. It is a music that will increasingly be valued in its own right. Blues singers and musicians extended the expressive range of the guitar, piano, harmonica and human voice and evolved many musical substructures within the framework of a recognizable and distinct idiom. Blues was also important as the primary artistic expression of a minority culture: it was created mainly by black working-class men and women, and, through its simplicity, sensuality, poetry, humour, irony and resignation transmuted to aggressive declamation, it mirrored the qualities and the attitudes of black America for three-quarters of a century.
A Pre-Blues, Proto-Blues. B Early Blues History. C Blues, Post-War. D Content and Analysis. E Discography and Biography – Reference.
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H. Courlander: Negro Folk Music U.S.A. (New York, 1963/R)
P. Oliver: Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues (London, 1970)
T. Russell: Blacks, Whites and Blues (London, 1970)
P. Oliver: Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (London, 1984)
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P. Oliver: Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition (London, 1968/R)
H. Oster: Living Country Blues (Detroit, 1969)
R. Middleton: Pop Music and the Blues (London, 1972)
P. Garon: Blues and the Poetic Spirit (London, 1975/R)
P. Oliver: ‘Blue-Eye Blues: the Impact of Blues on European Popular Culture’, Approaches to Popular Culture, ed. C.W.E. Bigsby (London, 1976), 227–39
J.F. Titon: Early Downhome Blues: a Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana, IL, 1977)
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D. Hatch and S. Millward: From Blues to Rock: an Analytical History of Pop Music (Manchester, 1987)
G. van Rijn: Roosevelt’s Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs on FDR (Jackson, MS, 1997)
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P. Oliver: Blues entries, Jazz on Record: a Critical Guide to the First 50 Years: 1917–1967, ed. A. McCarthy and others (London, 1968) [listeners’ guide]
R.M.W. Dixon and J. Godrich: Recording the Blues (London, 1970)
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J. Cowley and P. Oliver: The New Blackwell Guide to Blues Records (Oxford, 1997)