SFX: Police sirens, breaking glass, angry crowd, youtube news reports of 2020 BLM protests/ Mix with NWA’s Fuck the Police
In the summer of 2020, people the whole world over were shocked to see one American city after another erupt and descend into chaos when peaceful marches turned violent following the murder of yet another Black American citizen at the hands of the police. This, of course, followed four years of racist rhetoric as some American politicians attempted to promote their agendas at the expense of our national unity.
I grew up shielded in a white American suburb, in a world where the grind of inner-city conditions, and the dehumanizing effects of racism were invisible to us. For some, the riots of 2020 came as a surprise; we’d been raised and taught to believe that the cause that men like Martin Luther King Jr. had fought and died for had been won. We were wrong.
The reality that black Americans live in today is better than what their ancestors had been subjugated to, but not nearly as good as it could have been had slavery never happened, or if Reconstruction had been allowed to proceed the way Abraham Lincoln had envisioned it. And if you visit certain parts of the country today, you’ll still see vestiges of the past growing up like weeds amid the cracked concrete and asphalt of our cities. The people who still suffer under the social injustices that persist in America could be called ‘having the blues’.
The great blues musician, John Lee Hooker put it this way; “The blues tells a story. Every line of the blues has a meaning.”
In the new Netflix movie, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the actress Viola Davis as Ma Rainey says this about the blues: The mother of the blues, Ma Rainey said “You don't sing to feel better. You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life.”
And the great blues guitarist, BB King said, "People all over the world have problems. And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die." =
The Blues is our topic in today’s episode of American Song, “The Miracle of the Blues”
Leadbelly talked about where the blues came from, in an interview once, and this is what he had to say “
Blues Musical Form
Today’s podcast is also about the dualities that exist in America and in the human experience, because sadly, the problems we’re experiencing today are not just found here. About this duality, singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn wrote a song, years ago, called The Angel Beast. He sings about this split nature of our species; one side capable of beauty, grace, kindness, artistic creativity, spirituality; the other side at war with this angelic nature, continually prone to ugliness, hatred, violence, and injustice. Although it isn’t really blues, let’s listen to that song anway. I think it will help set the table for what’s coming next.
Play The Burden of the Angel Beast
The origin of the blues are Spirituals, Field Hollers and Work Songs. Spirituals were heavily based on traditional African songs, with
· Frequent repetition of lyrics
· Relaxed singing styles
· Simple melodies
· Complex rhythms
· Call and response
· Improvisation
Homeless
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Many singing features of West African music persisted in slave music as well, including tremolos (a rapid vibration, instrumentalists sometimes use the term vibrato), ululations (howling, mournful sounds), shouts, hums, grunts, polyrhythms and melismas (changing notes over a single syllable of lyrical text) as well as the emotional and spiritual attachment to the ritual. Though not obvious to the white slave owners, spirituals were rooted in defiance of slave status.
Woke Up This Morning
Mississippi Fred McDowell
The African slaves also brought the tradition of singing to their field work, just like they used to do at home. Slave owners recognized that singing actually gave their slaves more stamina, productivity, and strength. Africans and auctioned slaves with stronger voices commanded a higher price. In the minds of the African captives and. American-born slaves, the singing became the work and the work became the singing. For the Africans and their descendants, singing was the one way they were allowed to keep pieces of their cultural heritage.
In all these types of music, “natural pauses in the melody were filled in with clapping, stomping, patting, vocal outbursts, and, in the case of dance music, strumming or slapping string instruments, shaking rattles, and beating sticks, bones, and other percussive instruments. Likewise, some of the instruments they played had part African origins, such as the banjo, the drums where they were not prohibited, the flute, sticks and bones and rattles
Motherless Child
O.V. Wright
The blues was born out of the squalor and pain in the lives of newly freed slaves living in the South, especially after Reconstruction – Lincoln’s dream of a reunited South and an improvement In the lives of former slaves – failed. The inventors of the blues were the ex-slaves and their descendants. It was an expression of their acceptance of the difficulties in their lives, but much more importantly, their will, their grit, their courage to persevere. Those black musicians took the best they had in the culture they’d managed to cobble together – carved out of field hollers, spirituals, and work songs, traditional folk songs, vaudeville music, and minstrel tunes, rural fife and drum music, revivalist hymns, and country dance music - and still wearing the tattered remains of the African homes they’d left behind – such as the chants their ancestors had managed to hold onto – and they created a new music which ultimately gave life to every bit of modern music we know and love today. Out of such difficult beginnings came such treasure!
We Shall Overcome
Mahalia Jackson
Blues lyrics are often about dealing with very personal types of pain. But it doesn’t wallow in self-pity. The blues is about overcoming – like Martin Luther King Jr. used in his marches – “We Shall Overcome”. Great blues is all about a catharsis – a purging – of the things that hurt us so that we can go on living better lives! Nothing captures the Christian sense of death and redemption like the blues; When you think of the blues, you think about misfortune, betrayal and regret. You lose your job, you get the blues. Your mate falls out of love with you, you get the blues. Your dog dies, you get the blues.
The fact that blues lyrics have been such an important part of the healing process is itself ironic, in the sense that the during slavery, blacks were only rarely educated. For a long-time, the plantation blacks only spoke a pigeon English, and our course, uttering anything remotely like a complaint against the master, the plantation bosses, their hardship conditions or anything else could easily lead to severe physical punishment. And there were no words in English that could adequately represent the emotional and social struggles of slave life. Instead, music had to fill the role. Early on, black music was a non-verbal form of expression. Even when instruments were prohibited, the slaves could still sing and clap hands.
You could also say that the blues is America’s first form of social protest music. But one thing that America’s blacks had was their musical legacy. In the face of this white and unyielding oppression, the blues gave voice to their humanity and to their determination to survive. And not only to survive, but to one day OVERCOME. And there was SO MUCH to OVERCOME!
Strange Fruit
Bessie Smith
As Reconstruction faded into another lost hope in the lives of America’s southern black population, White Supremacy raised its ugly head. By 1920, the Klu Klux Klan were spreading their brand of mental/ spiritual pollution by night, and heading up local, regional, and national offices during the day. Woodrow Wilson, by the way, was a klan supporter. Society passed judgement and decided that “White” ideals were good and desirable, and black values and culture were inferior in every way. White history and culture dominated in every aspect of American life, in every symbol and in every icon.
The end of slavery during the Civil War was something that had to happen. And Reconstruction would have been a great thing, but it was never going to happen in the Nation of the Angel/ Beast. When black freedom came, and despite a promise of 40 acres and a mule, the former-slaves received no compensation for their long period of slavery. The former slave owners also received no compensation for what they considered to have been the loss of tremendously valuable property, and a bitter, long-lasting resentment festered. Compensation on both sides would have meant a dramatic re-alignment of our country’s resources. Seething with resentment over their financial losses, the Southern, white power structure was totally unwilling to consider ways to integrate former-slaves into society and a gradual end, instead of a sudden end to slavery would have created as much of a disaster as the Civil War had already been. Our country is only just now beginning a long-delayed/ long-ignored consideration of reparation. Jeez, what’s taken so long? I mean, it’s only been 160 years!
So, African Americans marched forward, impoverished,but brave, into the future.
This is how Muddy Waters explained why HE left the south
It was never the intent of blues musicians to be political, and they did not set out to change the status quo in the arts or in American culture. But as time steadily marched on, this IS what happened. The very fact that the blues persisted and ultimately triumphed is, in itself, testament. Try and explain it to the red-necked, Jed Clampetts with their F-150s and their gun racks, that the country music they’re blasting was also born out of the blues, and many of them will never believe you.
Signifying Monkey – Oscar Brown
There’s a very deep, and innately African spirituality about the blues and its origins. In African religions, there are “Trickster” gods. In Africa, they frequently embody animals. In America, animal tricksters became the heroes in African American myths and stories. The most common one was the Signifying Monkey. In their stories, the Animal Tricksters became heroes because, through their wit, they could overcome richer, stronger and more powerful enemies.
In the incredibly diminished lives, slaves, and then newly freed African Americans knew that their long-term way out was a long series of individual “sneak attacks on the values of the dominant white culture”. In this New World of the Angel/ Beast, the trickster would always be a rebel, an outsider who didn’t fit into any social role or pattern. Just like the African Americans themselves didn’t.
When Africans were kidnapped from their villages and brought to America, their god, Esu, one of their important tricksters, was incarnated as the Devil himself; Southern Blacks called him Esu.
Elegbara or Exu, Echu-Elegua, Papa Legba, and Papa Le Bas. Esu and his variants all serve as messengers who mediated between the gods and men by means of tricks.
Crossroads
Robert Johnson
Starting in the late 19th century, an African American mythology developed where the Devil appeared at crossroads late at night to offer a way out. They believed that the Devil was the one handing out exceptional artistic and performative skills – that he was inspiration in Blues music.
Basically, the Trickster, or the Devil, was presenting Blacks a way out of the anonymity and dehumanization of life in the racist south by way of music or other creative fields. He Esu/ the Devil – offered a way out of the duality the Black race had been lost in since arriving in this Angel/ Beast land of duality. Personally trapped in lives of subjugation, withering poverty, and racist hatred, while still surrounded by the physical trappings the Christian faith whose bedrock was supposed to be love. Being denied even the most basic freedoms, while living in a land that was supposed to be based on liberty and freedom “for all”.
Crazily, the trickster himself represented another form of duality; acceptance of the dehumanized character attributed to slaves, which was in itself also a resistance to it. By slowly building their own culture, post-Civil War blacks were able to reject a society that had rejected them, and they found a to express their own, unique identities. In fact, for blacks, the birth of the Blues, given to them through Esu, was a reminder of their cultural and spiritual heritage. The blues inspired spiritual survival into the twentieth century. The trickster could always be found in desperate moments …. at the crossroads, trading souls.
B.B. King – Dust My Broom
From a musician’s perspective, the blues has some common features that make it ‘blues’, such as
· Syncopation. – In episode six, we talked about African polyrhythms and how they are so fundamental to jazz. The same is true for the blues.
· Bent notes – produced by pushing the guitar strings on the fret board, or bending notes on your horn by relaxing or tightening the muscles around your mouth.
· A 12-measure song form with the first four measures played on the dominant or 1 chord. The fifth and sixth measures played on the 4 chord, the seventh and eight played on the dominant chord again, the ninth and tenth meaures on the 5 chord, and the final two measures back on the dominant or 1 chord again.
· A call and response feature in the music – like jazz
· Imitation of vocal idioms – like growling and whining harmonicas and crying guitars (think of Eric Clapton’s solo on the Beatles While My Guitar Gently Weeps)
· Flatted thirds, fifths, and sevenths (meaning lowering the third, fifth, and seventh notes in a major scale by a half step)
Early Blues Figures
Blues bands may have evolved from early jazz bands, gospel choirs and jug bands. Jug band music was popular in the South until the 1930s. These were bands that featured stringed instruments and instruments made from household appliances – no, really! Jugs, washboards, large metal wash tubs turned into one-string basses, guitars, mandolins, banjos, kazoos, stringed basses, harmonicas, fiddles, were all used to amazing effect.
WC Handy: St. Louis Blues
The year is 1903, and you and I are standing in a dusty, humid train station in the town of Tutwiler, Mississippi. Off in a corner, we see two men; one is waking from a nap, the other is playing his guitar and softly singing. The sleeper will one day call himself the discoverer of ‘the blues’. The other man will go on into obscurity, with the exception of snatches of the song he sang.
The writer’s name is. W.C. Handy; he’s a band leader with an orchestra in Cleveland, MS and his band plays dances for white and black audiences. After today, he will begin to add more of this new music to his repertoire, it’s called “the blues”. This is what W C Handy wrote in his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues.
“A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of a guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly. ‘Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.’ The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I ever heard.” By 1905, Handy had adapted the blues into a number of different songs that helped fuel America’s first-ever blues craze with songs like “Memphis Blues,” “Yellow Dog Blues,” “Beale Street Blues,” and, his most popular song, “St. Louis Blues.” By 1919, Handy was already carrying the title, the “Daddy of the Blues”. Tin Pan Alley song writers started ginning up Blues songs by the dozens to feed the new craze.
Boom Boom
John Lee Hooker
At the same time, the Southern railroads started making it easier for black sharecroppers to move around the south in search of farm work. Also, once slavery was ended, the 1st amendment gave blacks the same right to assemble as all other citizens, and with that came juke joints. These were early forms of night clubs – even if they were just in old barns – and it’s there that blacks went to listen to live music, dance, and gamble. Of course, this gave blues musicians places to perform, and increased the popularity of their music.
America is known for its regional differences, and nowhere is that more true than in the south, which actually as at least three major cultures within its borders – tidewater (MD, VA, NC), greater Appalachia (southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia, through the lower Midwest, down through Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and into Oklahoma and Texas) and the deep south (rural North Carolina, through South Carolina, Georgia, northern Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, northern Louisiana, and eastern Texas). As the blues started spreading throughout the south, it also developed regional differences.
Leadbelly: Midnight Special
Early blues, also called country blues, had three major variations, depending on the region it came from.
The blues of Georgia and the Carolinas is noted for its clarity of enunciation and regularity of rhythm, and has been influenced by ragtime and white folk music. Blind Willie McTell was one of the early blues players in this style and Blind Boy Fuller.
Texas blues is more known for singing in a high, clear style and guitar backing featuring supple, fluid lines composed of single-string picking, not chord strumming. Blind Lemon Jefferson was the best known, most influential Texas bluesman. In fact, he was the first real star of blues music. Huddie Ledbetter or "Leadbelly," is another seminal Texas bluesman. Although actually born in Louisiana, Leadbelly spent most of his life in and out of jail in Texas. Because of the important work done by Texas folklorists John and Alan Lomax, we have a large legacy of recordings cover a wide range of styles. Leadbelly is best known for popularizing "Good Night, Irene”. He moved to Dallas in 1912 where he met Blind Lemon Jefferson and made the 12-string guitar his primary axe.
Blind Lemon Jefferson
See That My Grave is Kept Clean
Blind Lemon Jefferson, who grew up to become the first major country blues recording star was born in a farming community 70 south of Dallas Couchman in 1893. In his younger years, we chiefly walked the roads around his home, playing for money in the streets cafes and juke joints around town. He played both on his own, and with various string bands. Jefferson had a signature guitar style marked with single-string runs and unconventional phrasing – what one musician called "suspended time."
Thanks to the efforts of a local record-store and shoe shine-stand owner named R.T. Ashford Jefferson eventually got the attention of a Paramount record scout. For three years, between 1926 and 1929, Blind Lemon Jefferson regulary traveled to Chicago to record what were then called “race records”, records made for sale it was believed, only to African Americans. Blind Lemon Jefferson died in Chicago in December 19, 1929. Its not clear exactly what happened, but the coroner’s report indicated a heart attack. People say he had gotten disoriented in a heavy snowstorm. He was buried in Wortham Negro Cemetary in an unmarked grave. In 1996, a small monument was placed near his grave with an inscription, the lyrics to his song “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”. It reads “Lord, it's one kind favor I'll ask of you, see that my grave is kept clean."
Preaching Blues
Robert Johnson
Finally, and most important from the perspective of the influence it had on later blues and rock and roll, Mississippi Delta blues is the most intense of the three styles. Some critics have said that it’s the form that sounds most like human speech. Each examples of Mississippi Delta blues players include Son House, Robert Johnson and Charley Patton. In his short career, Robert Johnson only ever recorded 29 songs. His songs have become standards in the acoustic country blues repertoire that were performed and recorded long after his death in 1938. The list of musicians, past and present who have covered Robert Johnson songs is a veritable Who’s Who among musicians that are still very prominent today, Robert Johnson’s songs have been reinterpreted and recorded by the likes of Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, The White Stripes, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fleetwood Mac, Muddy Waters, ZZ Top, Howlin’ Wolf, Keb Mo, John Mayer, Cassandra Wilson, Foghat, Gun Club, Lucinda Williams, Cream, Big Joe Williams, Dinah Washington, Ike & Tina Turner, John Mayall & the Blues Breakers, Bonnie Raitt, Johnny Winter, Bob Dylan. This might be the most direct way of measuring his greatness.
Robert Johnson’s Grandson, Steven, is still alive, and works closely with the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation today. Let’s listen as he relates a story about his Grandfather.
Ma Rainey "Black Bottom" (1927)
Bessie Smith
By 1925, Blues had mushroomed into a full-on national craze. The most popular songs were from bands that featured important female vocalists, such as Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, Sophie Tucker, and Bessie Smith.
Ma Rainey (whose real name was Gertrude) began performing as a teenager in the first decade of the twentieth century. She performed with her husband, William “Pa” Rainey. Together, they had an act called Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues. Ma Rainey was also billed as “Mother of the Blues,” a recognition that has persisted to this day.
The two of them did tent shows in vaudeville theaters and circuses throughout the south. She first heard the blues in a small town in Missouri in 1902. In her own words, she put it like this: “A girl from town... came to the tent one morning and began to sing about the man who had left her. The song was so strange and poignant that it attracted much attention.”
Ma Rainey was immediately drawn into the music and learned the song herself. Soon, she was using it in her act as an encore. One day, when asked what kind of music it was, the was inspired to say "It's the blues...". She believed she was the one to have coined the term.
In the early days of the modern music industry, female singers tended to stay in their home communities, a lot of the time they had community leadership roles in them. They sang in clubs, speakeasies (underground prohibition era clubs) and they’d often team up with male musicians who either led bands or accompanied the singers on piano or guitar. For instance, Bessie Smith, sang with Louis Armstrong, whom we’ve talked about in an earlier episode of American Song.
F Scott Fitzgerald saw the increase in popularity to an audience that was much broader – both regionally and across black-white boundaries. He wrote the blues captured a national mood of sadness and drift among the nation’s youth in the wake of World War I, the first truly modern warfare/ total war event in human experience.
This Train
Big Bill Broonzy
Starting in 1916 and ending in 1970, the US experienced a massive shift of Southern rural blacks who moved to the Urban Northeast, Midwest and West. Reasons for it include the Great Depression, both world wars, and continued and pervasive social injustices in the south. Having been denied their 40 acres and a mule, promised to them by Abraham Lincoln, but ended after the Southern sympathizer, Andrew Johnson, replaced Lincoln, and literally forced out due to the combination of poor economic options, segregation and Jim Crow laws, America’s blacks moved to cities like Chicago. In the 1920s and ’30s, the Chicago Blue Scene was dominated by Memphis Minnie, Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, and Sonny Boy Williamson.
You Shook Me
Muddy Waters
After World War II, a new generation of great blues artists refreshed the blues scene there. , Transplanted blacks formed urban, largely over-crowded, and veery poor communities where the one thing they still had was their musical culture. In the 1930’s and 40’s, Chicago’s Maxwell Street was one of the largest, busiest open-air markets in the nation. It drew huge crowds, and that was perfect for blues musicians seeking an audience, and they’d come and jam with each other for tips.
A more dynamic version of electrified Mississippi Delta blues emerged. For Chicago blues, there are no better examples than Muddy Waters – who became known as the Father of Chicago Blues, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Little Walter Jacobs, Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, and Koko Taylor came to the forefront.
In this interview with Nick Harcourt for Guitar Center, the legendary blues guitarist, Buddy Guy, remembers his beginnings in music.
Count Basie
Jumping at the Woodside
Another midwestern city whose population grew during the Great Migration was Kansas City, and it became known as a blues market as much as it was known for its great jazz scene. The Kansas City Sound was born in the 1920s and grew up in the – 30s and – 40s as a swinging blend of the blues with attitude, with stride piano, or as Count Basie called it “swing.” During this era, Kansas City’s nightlife was protected by political boss Tom Pendergast and gangster Johnny Lazia. These two mafiosos ensured that the police turned a blind eye to the illegal alcohol, gambling, and prostitution that saturated the night scene. The ‘happening’ part of town was the 18th & Vine St. district, as well as the 12th and Vine area. A lot like New Orleans, Kansas City was a cultural melting pot. This melding of cultures proved to be the right medium for jazz and blues to prosper, and while Kansas City might be thought of more for its jazz legacy, it was here that these musical cousins, jazz and blues, fused into blues jams – this unique blend came to be called Kansas City Blues or Jump Blues. Several famous blues and jazz artists came from Kansas City, Charlie Parker and William “Count” Basie included.
From the mid-1920s through the Depression years of the 1930s, By the 1940s, the Kansas City style of jazz had spread throughout America, playing in important role in shaping modern music. During this Golden Era of Kansas City jazz, the most important band was led by Benny Moten. Among the really memorable musicians from his band were William “Count” Basie, , Jimmy Rushing, Booker Washington, Ben Webster, and Lester Young. Moten’s orchestra was the first KC band to record one of their songs, produced and released by the race record company, Okeh. Their recordings included ‘Selma ‘Bama Blues,’ ‘Chattanooga Blues,’ ‘Break o’ Day Blues,’ ‘Evil Mama Blues,’ ‘Elephant’s Wobble,’ ‘Crawdad Blues,’ ‘Waco Texas Blues,’ and ‘Ill-Natured Blues.’ Moten died young, in what should have been a routine tonsillectomy. After his death, Count Basie formed a new band and most of the guys from the Moten Orchestra went with him.
Lester Young; One O’Clock Jump
You can tell its Kansas City jazz by the use of elaborate riffing by the different sections. Riffs were often created – or even improvised – collectively, and took many forms: a) one section riffing alone, serving as the main focus of the music; b) one section riffing behind a soloist, adding excitement to the song; or c) two or more sections riffing in counterpoint, creating an exciting hard-swinging sound. The Count Basie signature tunes “One O’Clock Jump” and “Jumpin’ at the Woodside“, for example, are simply collections of complex riffs, memorized in a head arrangement, and punctuated with solos. Glenn Miller‘s famous swing anthem “In the Mood” closely follows the Kansas City pattern of riffing sections, and is a good example of the Kansas City style after it had been exported to the rest of the world. Kansas City jazz has been called blues with an education.
Mean Old World
T Bone Walker
Blues musicians – mainly from Deep South Texas who reached Los Angeles and other major western markets continued to evolve their sound which gave rise to West Coast Blues. It’s heavily influenced by a swing beat. T Bone Walker is foundational in West Coast Blues.
The new ‘urban blues’ had musical features that were different from the older ‘country blues’
· In new surroundings, the lyrics took up urban themes
· The solo bluesman –like Son House or Robert Johnson – formed bands, including a pianist or harmonica player and t a rhythm section, consisting of bass and drums.
· Newly added electric guitars and an amplified harmonicas created an emotional,
The first folk blues star was Blind Lemon Jefferson, a Texan who eventually became a successful recording artist and musical composer for Paramount. (Weissman 47) Another popular artist, Robert Johnson, a well “accomplished guitarist and composer as well as a mesmerizing vocalist” recorded only 29 songs in his short career. (Salaam) In the classic blues style, African American artists such as Ma Rainey, Ida Cox and the “Empress” of the blues, Bessie Smith, both rose to fame as female band leaders and song writers.
There’s also a school of thought that the Native Americans also played a role in the creation of the blues.
Exhibit A: In 1928, some Creek musicians from Oklahoma, a blues band called Big Chief Henry’s Indian String Band, recorded a record called “Indian Tom Tom,” two and a half minutes of bouncy bluesy Indian chant backed by a swinging fiddle and guitar. The really intriguing aspect to this little record is how well the two styles – blues and Native American chanting fit together!
Is it a coincidence that the home of country music - Eastern Tennessee, western Virginia and North Carolina, and parts of Georgia and Alabama—is exactly that land that was the traditional home for thousands of years of the Cherokee Nation?
Could music have been shared between the Native Americans, Europeans and African Americans throughout the 19thCentury? After Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, there were still isolated bands of Native Americans who continued to make their homes in hard to reach places and in sufficient numbers that could have supported contact.
After Jackson had the US Army force the Cherokee, Creeks and Choctaws off their lands on the gruelling, 5,000 mile Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, there may have been up to 2,000 Native Americans who managed to hold out. They either passed for White or were hidden and protected by white neighbors. In other places, there were cases of white-native American inter-marrying.
We’ve got a few instances where it’s at least possible to raise an eyebrow about how much influence African music actually had on the blues.
When the bluesman, Buddy Guy, went to Africa, he heard a lot of traditional West African music. About his experience, Buddy said “Don’t start me to lyin’, because I don’t. Not of what I’ve heard yet. No, I mean, I met some people there and they told me that this is where it all came from, you know, and I haven’t found anything yet . . . The blues is a different thing, man. I mean, ain’t no sense of me lyin’, ’cause you know better. The blues is, you know, a feelin’. You got to feel it to play it.”
Buddy’s assessment was backed up by Samuel Charters, a writer, historian, and musician. In the 1950’s, he went West Africa in search of musical traces to indicate a relationship between the blues and West African music. In Senegal, and in Mali, he met local griots – musical keepers of tribal histories and players of the kora, a West African 12-stringed harp. Charters wrote that even though he saw a few musical traditions that could have evolved into blues but on the whole, he felt that the roles that Griots play in African society are so different from the roles that musicians like Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, and the other early Country Blues guys were doing that he’d decided it was not likely.
Griot Songs
Griot songs were mainly long litanies in praise of, and commissioned by, local chiefs, offering extensive ancestral detail.—told in simple, repetitive verses, regular rhythm, and a standard three chords—was unknown in the west African tradition.
In a recent episode of American Song, I included an interview of the early New Orleans jazz musician, Jelly Roll Morton. In it, he shared a chlldhood memory about the Native American chants he experienced during Mardi Gras He recalled the words in the native chants included “Hey, Hey To Back-a-way-a”.
That chant echoes through a lot of early country and blues music. It’s in Jimmy Rodgers “Blue Yodel #10” and Henry Thomas’s “Cottonfield Blues.” Bobby Darin used it in his recording of “Mack the Knife”; It’s present in Woody Guthrie’s “New York Town,” and Dylan used it in his tribute to Guthrie, when he sings, “Hey-hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song.”
The Sioux medicine man, Black Elk had a “Thunder Being” vision. In it, he saw a great thunder and hail cloud and coming from it, he could hear voices crying ‘Hey-hey! Hey-hey!’ Black Elk said the voices were cheering and rejoicing that his work was being done. The spirits in the cloud were happy and rejoicing, and singing ‘Hey-Hey, Hey-Hey.’”
The Plains peoples, used the expression ‘hey-hey’ in a chant used to call the attention of the spirits, either in joy or regret. Black Elk also said they were the last words of Crazy Horse after he was bayonetted by an Army private in 1877.
Whether the Native Americans actually had a role in the creation of the blues, will probably always be shrouded in mystery.
The blues is amazing, and we’ve only just scraped the surface. If you’d like to know more, I’ve included a list of my sources on the American Song podcast page on Buzzsprout. There are also great links to informative videos I’ve sourced from YouTube that you’ll find on Facebook page, American Song podcast. There, you can also leave a note to ask questions, make suggestions for future topics you’d like me to talk about in future episodes, or just to say “Hey!” I’d enjoy getting to know you guys!
I’d like to thank all of you listeners who have been checking out these episodes of American Song. I see the cities you come from in the podcast stats, and am thrilled there are so many of you, from places here in America and around the world! If you’d like to have a hand in producing future episodes, you can help by making a small donation to the American Song Podcast; just go to our American Song Podcast page on Patreon.
Until next time, let’s keep the music going!
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/art/blues-music
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/a-brief-history-of-the-blues-by-ed-kopp.php?width=412
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/discovering-music-the-blues/content-section-5?active-tab=description-tab
https://santafe.com/a-history-of-blues-music/
https://www.liveabout.com/blues-music-history-4150423
http://www.bluesandblueberryfestival.com.au/blog/2018/11/10/the-origin-of-blues-the-music
https://tesi.eprints.luiss.it/17909/1/072752_STEINFELD_SUSANNA.pdf
https://www.interexchange.org/articles/career-training-usa/blues-in-america-history-artists/
https://youtu.be/9hZMHLGMpzc
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