What is Blues music?
Blues music first swept the United States in the early 1910's and stayed as a driving force in the pop world for some six decades. It continues to be played and heard around the world to this day. Once it was performed by neighborhood bands, street corner guitarists, and theatrical queens, blues is now often heard as background music for commercials and Westerns. You can hear blues in the form of gentle acoustic guitar melodies to crashing blues-rock. Blues has been whispered, shouted, growled, moaned, and yodeled. It has been played on everything from harmonicas to synthesizers. A centuries worth of changing audiences, tastes and technologies leads us to the question: What is blues?
In 1917 an Irish American musical comedy star named Marie Cahill sang, "The blues ain't nothing but a good many feeling bad." Twenty-five years later, an African American guitarist named Son House sang, "The blues ain't nothing but a low-down, aching chill." In between, one of the biggest stars of the first blues recording boom, Ida Cox, sang that the blues was nothing but "your lover on your mind" and "a slow aching heart disease." All of those answers were echoed over the years by other singers and they continue to be the broadest definition of blues, as music that expresses a universal emotion.
The history of blues as a style of music begins in 1912, when W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues" - along with two other songs, "Dallas Blues" and "Baby Seals" - started a national interest in this type of music. Handy was a music teacher, band leader, and songwriter living in Mephis, Tennessee. He used older blues song that he had heard around the Mississippi Delta for his own arrangements. The melody of "Memphis Blues" was heard by James Reese Europe, a New York band leader, who worked for Vernon and Irene Castle (America's most influential dance instructors of that era). The Castles used the song to accompany a new step called the fox trot. Tis helped make the son a long time hit. In 1914 it became the first blues preserved on record.
Read More About: How folk music gave birth to the Blues.
