Big Bill Broonzy was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. His career began in the 1920s, when he played country music to mostly African-American audiences. In the 1930s and 1940s, he navigated a change in style to a more urban blues sound popular with working-class black audiences.
ig Bill Broonzy (born Lee Conley Bradley; June 26, 1893[1][2] or 1903[3][4] – August 14, 1958) was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. His career began in the 1920s, when he played country music to mostly African-American audiences. In the 1930s and 1940s, he navigated a change in style to a more urban blues sound popular with working-class black audiences. In the 1950s, a return to his traditional folk-blues roots made him one of the leading figures of the emerging American folk music revival and an international star. His long and varied career marks him as one of the key figures in the development of blues music in the 20th century.
Broonzy copyrighted more than 300 songs, including adaptations of traditional folk songs and original blues songs. As a blues composer, he was unique in writing songs that reflected his rural-to-urban experiences.[5]
Life and career
Early years
Born Lee Conley Bradley,[4] he was one of the 17 children of Frank Broonzy (Bradley) and Mittie Belcher. The date and place of his birth are disputed. Broonzy claimed to have been born in Scott, Mississippi, but a body of emerging research compiled by the blues historian Robert Reisman suggests that he was born in Jefferson County, Arkansas. Broonzy claimed he was born in 1893,[6] and many sources report that year, but family records discovered after his death suggested that the year was 1903.[4]
Soon after his birth the family moved to an area called Lake Dick, Arkansas, near Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where Bill spent his youth. He began playing music at an early age. At the age of 10 he made himself a fiddle from a cigar box and learned how to play spirituals and folk songs from his uncle, Jerry Belcher. He and a friend, Louis Carter, who played a homemade guitar, began performing at social and church functions.[7] These early performances included playing at "two-way": picnics where whites and blacks danced at the same event, but with different stages for blacks and whites.[8]
On the understanding that he was born in 1898 rather than earlier or later, sources suggest that in 1915, 17-year-old Broonzy was married and working as a sharecropper.[6] He had given up playing the fiddle and had become a preacher. There is a story that he was offered $50 and a new violin if he would play for four days at a local venue. Before he could respond to the offer, his wife took the money and spent it, so he had to play.
It has been previously stated that in 1916 his crop and stock were wiped out by drought and he went to work locally until he was drafted into the Army in 1917,[9] that he served for two years in Europe during the First World War and that after his discharge from the Army in 1919, he left Pine Bluff and moved to the Little Rock area. However, biographer Bob Riesman, after examining Broonzy's family records, census records and local draft cards, concluded that Broonzy was only 14 in 1917 when the U.S. entered WW I and that Broonzy never actually served in the Army during World War I.[10] In 1920, Broonzy moved north to Chicago in search of opportunity.[6]
1920s
After arriving in Chicago, Broonzy switched from fiddle to guitar. He learned to play the guitar from the veteran minstrel and medicine show performer Papa Charlie Jackson, who began recording for Paramount Records in 1924.[11] Through the 1920s Broonzy worked at a string of odd jobs, including Pullman porter, cook, foundry worker and custodian, to supplement his income, but his main interest was music. He played regularly at rent parties and social gatherings, steadily improving his guitar playing. During this time he wrote one of his signature tunes, a solo guitar piece called "Saturday Night Rub".[12]
Thanks to his association with Jackson, Broonzy was able to get an audition with Paramount executive J. Mayo Williams. His initial test recordings, made with his friend John Thomas on vocals, were rejected, but Broonzy persisted, and his second try, a few months later, was more successful. His first record, "House Rent Stomp", backed with "Big Bill Blues", credited to Big Bill and Thomps (Paramount 12656), was released in 1927.[13] Although the recording was not well received, Paramount retained its new talent and in the next few years released more records by Big Bill and Thomas. The records sold poorly. Reviewers considered his style immature and derivative.[14]
1930s
In 1930, Paramount for the first time used Broonzy's full name on a recording, "Station Blues" – albeit misspelled as "Big Bill Broomsley". Record sales continued to be poor, and Broonzy was working at a grocery store. He was picked up by Lester Melrose, who produced musical acts for various labels, including Champion Records and Gennett Records. Harum Scarums, a trio composed of Broonzy, Georgia Tom, and Mozelle Alderson, recorded the two-part "Alabama Scratch" in Grafton, Wisconsin, for Paramount Records (Paramount 13054) in January 1931, and it was reported that it sounded "as if it was a real party".[15] Broonzy recorded several sides released in the spring of 1931 under the name Big Bill Johnson.[16] In March 1932, he traveled to New York City and began recording for the American Record Corporation on their line of less expensive labels (Melotone Records, Perfect Records and others).[12] These recordings sold better, and Broonzy was becoming better known. Back in Chicago he was working regularly in South Side clubs, and he toured with Memphis Minnie.
In 1934 Broonzy moved to RCA Victor's subsidiary Bluebird Records and began recording with the pianist known as "Black Bob."[17] With Black Bob his music was evolving to a stronger R&B sound, and his singing sounded more assured and personal. In 1937, he began playing with the pianist Joshua Altheimer, recording and performing with a small instrumental group, including "traps" (drums), double bass and one or more melody instruments (horns or harmonica or both). In March 1938 he began recording for Vocalion Records.[18]
Broonzy's reputation grew. In 1938 he was asked to fill in for the recently deceased Robert Johnson at the "From Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall, produced by John H. Hammond.[19] He also appeared in the 1939 concert at the same venue.[7] His success led him in the same year to a small role in Swingin' the Dream, Gilbert Seldes's jazz adaptation of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, set in New Orleans in 1890 and featuring, among others, Louis Armstrong as Bottom and Maxine Sullivan as Titania, with the Benny Goodman sextet.
Broonzy's recorded output through the 1930s only partially reflects his importance to Chicago blues. His half-brother, Washboard Sam, and his friends Jazz Gillum and Tampa Red, also recorded for Bluebird. Broonzy was credited as the composer of many of their most popular recordings of that time. He reportedly played guitar on most of Washboard Sam's tracks. Because of his exclusive arrangements with his record label, Broonzy was careful to allow his name to appear on these artists' records only as a composer.[18]
1940s
Broonzy expanded his work during the 1940s as he honed his songwriting skills, which showed a knack for appealing to his more sophisticated city audience as well as people that shared his country roots. His work in this period shows he performed across a wider musical spectrum than almost any other bluesman before or since, including in his repertoire ragtime, hokum, country blues, urban blues, jazz-tinged songs, folk songs and spirituals. After World War II, Broonzy recorded songs that were the bridge that allowed many younger musicians to cross over to the future of the blues: the electric blues of postwar Chicago. His 1945 recordings of "Where the Blues Began", with Big Maceo on piano and Buster Bennett on sax, and "Martha Blues", with Memphis Slim on piano, clearly showed the way forward. One of his best-known songs, "Key to the Highway", appeared at this time. When the second American Federation of Musicians strike ended in 1948, Broonzy was signed by Mercury Records.[20]
In 1949, Broonzy became part of a touring folk music revue, I Come for to Sing, formed by Win Stracke, which also included Studs Terkel and Lawrence Lane. Terkel called him the key figure in the group. The revue had some success thanks to the emerging folk revival. When the revue played at Iowa State University in Ames, Broonzy met a local couple, Leonard and Lillian Feinberg, who found him a custodial job at Iowa State when a doctor ordered Broonzy to discontinue touring later that year. He remained in Ames until 1951, when he resumed touring.[21][better source needed]
1950s
EP cover (Melodisc EPM7-65), released in the UK in 1956, with an advertisement for Broonzy's autobiography, Big Bill Blues
Broonzy left Chicago in 1950 to work as a janitor at Iowa State, having performed there and established relationships with a likely view to develop his own influence and craft.[22] After his return to performing, the exposure from I Come for to Sing made it possible for him to tour Europe in 1951. Here Broonzy was greeted with standing ovations and critical praise wherever he played.[23] The tour marked a turning point in his fortunes, and when he returned to the United States he was a featured act with many prominent folk artists, such as Pete Seeger, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. From 1953 on, Broonzy's financial position became more secure, and he was able to live well on his earnings from music. He returned to his solo folk-blues roots and travelled and recorded extensively.[20] His numerous performances during the 1950s in British folk and jazz clubs were a significant influence on British audiences' understanding of the blues[24][better source needed] and bolstered the nascent British folk revival and early blues scene. Many British musicians on the folk scene, such as Bert Jansch, cited him as an important influence.[25] John Lennon and Paul McCartney, of the Beatles, also cited Broonzy as an important early influence.[26]
In 1953, Vera (King) Morkovin and Studs Terkel took Broonzy to Circle Pines Center, a cooperative year-round camp in Delton, Michigan, where he was employed as the summer camp cook. He worked there in the summer from 1953 to 1956. On July 4, 1954, Pete Seeger travelled to Circle Pines and gave a concert with Broonzy on the farmhouse lawn, which was recorded by Seeger for the new fine-arts radio station in Chicago, WFMT-FM.[27]
In 1955, with the assistance of the Belgian writer Yannick Bruynoghe, Broonzy published his autobiography, Big Bill Blues.[7] He toured worldwide, traveling to Africa, South America, the Pacific] region, and across Europe into early 1956. In 1957 Broonzy was one of the founding faculty members of the Old Town School of Folk Music. On the school's opening night, December 1, he taught a class, "The Glory of Love".[28]
Big Bill Broonzy's gravestone located at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois
Illness and death
In the late 1940s, Big Bill Broonzy's doctor warned him that 20 years of constant traveling and living the lifestyle of an "itinerant musician" would have dangerous effects on his aging body and health. In June 1956, Broonzy began to feel "frazzled", explaining to Pim Van Isveldt that "his nerves might be bad".[29] From 1956 to 1957, as he was performing his last tour in Europe, Broonzy's condition worsened, and he was subsequently diagnosed with cancer in July 1957. Broonzy made his last recordings in Chicago from July 12 to 14, 1957.
In September 1957, Broonzy wrote to Van Isveldt that he recently underwent surgery that removed one of his lungs. Broonzy tried to convince her that he would return to London, but he never toured Europe again. A second surgery that took place in the fall of 1957 ended up severing his vocal cords, and although another operation was planned in the early winter of 1958, in hopes of repairing his damaged vocal cords, Broonzy never performed again.[30]
By 1958, Broonzy was suffering from throat cancer. A benefit concert was organized to assist Broonzy with his medical debt, and the concert ended up raising approximately $2,000. After the two-and-a-half hour performance, Broonzy reportedly stood on stage to thunderous applause, thanking his friends and colleagues for "making the evening so memorable".[31]
On August 14 or 15, 1958 (sources vary on the precise date), Broonzy died in an ambulance from cancer as he was being rushed to Billings Hospital from his home at 4716 South Parkway. His funeral was held on August 19, and he was buried in Lincoln Cemetery, in Blue Island, Illinois.
Style and influence
Broonzy's influences included the folk music, spirituals, work songs, ragtime music, hokum, and country blues he heard growing up and the styles of his contemporaries, including Jimmie Rodgers, Blind Blake, Son House, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Broonzy combined all these influences into his own style of the blues, which foreshadowed the postwar Chicago blues, later refined and popularized by artists such as Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon.[7]
Although he had been a pioneer of the Chicago blues style and had employed electric instruments as early as 1942, white audiences in the 1950s wanted to hear him playing his earlier songs accompanied only by his own acoustic guitar, which they considered to be more authentic.
He portrayed the discrimination against black Americans in his song "Black, Brown and White".[32] The song has been used globally in education about racism, but in the late 1990s its inclusion in antiracism education at a school in Greater Manchester, England, led pupils to taunt the school's only black pupil with the song's chorus, "If you're white, that's all right, if you're brown, stick around, but if you're black, oh brother get back, get back, get back". The national media reported that the problem became so bad that the nine-year-old boy was withdrawn from the school by his mother. The song had already been adopted by the National Front, a far-right British political party that peaked in popularity in the 1970s and opposed nonwhite immigration to Britain.[33]
A considerable part of Broonzy's early ARC/CBS recordings has been reissued in anthologies by CBS-Sony, and other earlier recordings have been collected on blues reissue labels, as have his European and Chicago recordings of the 1950s. The Smithsonian's Folkways Records has also released several albums featuring Broonzy.
In 1980, he was inducted into the first class of the Blues Hall of Fame, along with 20 other of the world's greatest blues legends. In 2007, he was inducted into the first class of the Gennett Records Walk of Fame, along with 11 other musical greats, including Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Gene Autry, and Lawrence Welk.
As an acoustic guitar player, Broonzy inspired Muddy Waters, Memphis Slim, Ray Davies, John Renbourn, Rory Gallagher,[34] and Steve Howe.[35] In the September 2007 issue of Q Magazine, Ronnie Wood, of the Rolling Stones, cited Broonzy's track "Guitar Shuffle" as his favorite guitar music. Wood remarked: "It was one of the first tracks I learnt to play, but even to this day I can't play it exactly right."[citation needed] Eric Clapton has cited Broonzy as a major inspiration, commenting that Broonzy "became like a role model for me, in terms of how to play the acoustic guitar".[36] Clapton featured Broonzy's song "Hey Hey" on his album Unplugged. The Derek and the Dominos album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs includes their recording of "Key to the Highway". Tom Jones has cited Broonzy as a major influence on him and in a 2012 interview described his first experience of Broonzy's music as having been "Fuk, what is that? Who is that?"[37] Another musician heavily influenced by Broonzy was Jerry Garcia, who upon hearing a recording of Broonzy's blues playing decided to exchange an accordion he received on his 15th birthday for an electric guitar.[38]
In the benediction at the 2009 inauguration ceremony of President Barack Obama, the civil rights leader Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery paraphrased Broonzy's song "Black, Brown and White Blues".[39][failed verification]
In collaboration with the WFMT network, the Chicago History Museum, and the Library of Congress, an hour-long interview of Broonzy, recorded on September 13, 1955, by Studs Terkel was made available online. The interview includes reflections on his life and on the blues tradition, a performance of one of his most famous songs, "Alberta", and performances of "Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad" and other classics.[40][failed verification]
Discography
Between 1927 and 1942, Broonzy recorded 224 songs, which makes him the second most prolific blues recording artist during that period.[41] These were released before blues records were tracked by recording industry trade magazines. By the time Billboard magazine instituted its "race music" charts in October 1942, Broonzy's recordings were less popular, and none appeared in the charts.[42]
Selected singles
Many of Broonzy's singles were issued by more than one record company, sometimes under different names. Additional versions of some songs were also released. These are marked with a superscript plus sign.
Date Title Label & Cat. no. Comments
1927 "House Rent Stomp" Paramount 12656+ as Big Bill and Thomps
"Big Bill Blues" Paramount 12656 as Big Bill and Thomps
1930 "Station Blues" Paramount 13084 as Big Bill Broomsley
"Saturday Night Rub" Perfect 147+ as Famous Hokum Boys
"I Can't Be Satisfied" Perfect 157 as Sammy Sampson
1932 "Mistreatin' Mama" Champion 16396+ as Big Bill Johnson
1934 "At the Break of Day" Bluebird 5571+
"C. C. Rider" Melotone 13311+
1935 "Midnight Special" Vocalion 03004 as State Street Boys
"Bricks in My Pillow" ARC 6–03–62
1936 "Matchbox Blues" ARC 6–05–56+
1937 "Mean Old World" Melotone 7–07–64+
1937 "Louise Louise Blues" Vocalion 03075+
1938 "New Shake 'Em on Down" Vocalion 04149+ electric guitar by George Barnes
"Night Time Is the Right Time No. 2" Vocalion 04149+ electric guitar by George Barnes
1939 "Just a Dream" Vocalion 04706+
"Too Many Drivers" Vocalion 05096
1940 "You Better Cut That Out" Okeh 05919
"Lonesome Road Blues" Okeh 06031
"Rockin' Chair Blues" Okeh 06116+
1941 "All By Myself" Okeh 06427+
"Key to the Highway" Okeh 06242+
"Wee Wee Hours" Okeh 06552
"I Feel So Good" Okeh 06688+
1942 "I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town" Okeh 06651 as Big Bill & His Chicago 5
1945 "Please Believe Me" Hub 3003-A (HU418B) as Little Sam, blues vocalist, with Don Byas Quartet
1945 "Why Did You Do That To Me" Hub 3003-B (HU 419B) as Little Sam, blues vocalist, with Don Byas Quartet
1951 "Hey Hey" Mercury 8271
Broonzy also appeared as a sideman on recordings by Lil Green, Sonny Boy Williamson I, Washboard Sam, Jazz Gillum and other Bluebird Records artists.[43]
Albums
Big Bill Broonzy and Washboard Sam (1953)
Big Bill Broonzy and Roosevelt Sykes (DVD, recorded 1956)
His Story (Folkways Records, 1957)[44]
Big Bill Broonzy Sings Country Blues (Folkways Records FA 2326, 1957)
Blues with Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (Folkways Records, 1959)
Big Bill Broonzy Sings Folk Songs (Folkways Records FA 2328, 1962)
Big Bill Broonzy Sings Folk Songs (Smithsonian Folkways, 1989) (reissue)
Best of the Blues Tradition (1991)
Do That Guitar Rag (1928–1935) (1991)
Trouble in Mind (Smithsonian Folkways, 2000)
Broonzy Volume 2: 1945–1949: The Post War Years (2000)
Big Bill Broonzy in Concert (2002)
Big Bill Broonzy on Tour in Britain: Live in England & Scotland (2002)
Big Bill Blues: His 23 Greatest Songs 1927–42 (2004)
Get Back (2004)
Big Bill Amsterdam Live Concerts 1953 (2006)
Keys to the Blues (2009)
All The Classics 1936-1937, Vol. 4 (2019)
Harum Scarum —the trio comprised of Big Bill Broonzy, Georgia Tom Dorsey and Mozelle Alderson — sound like they’re having one whale of a time on the two-part “Alabama Scratch.”
Recorded in Grafton, Wis., for Paramount in January 1931, the record (Paramount 13054) is a chaotic free-for-all: “Everybody get hot now! It’s tight like that! Work it out now! Now come in everybody now and pull off your shoes! Let’s have a stinkin’ good time.” But if you think for a minute that all that raucous energy is courtesy of a big plate of cookies, I’ve got some Pat Boone albums you might like for your collection.
“Unlike RCA and Columbia, Paramount was a kind of a loose place to record,” said John Tefteller of Tefteller’s World’s Rarest Records. “And, yes, they did have alcohol available. They didn’t exactly encourage the singers to get so blasted drunk they couldn’t perform, but they did allow them to drink a little bit before making the record to loosen them up and make their songs flow a little bit more. On this one, it did result in a relaxed and a wild kind of performance, as if it was a real party.”
Harum Scarum Alabama Scratch
There are only two known copies of “Alabama Scratch” in existence. And Tefteller owns both. One is battered beyond comparison. The other was cleaned and used for the CD accompanying the 2013 Blues Images calendar. Obscure for decades, the “Alabama Scratch” recordings were rescued from the dust bin by Tefteller.
“I don’t think it had ever been reissued anywhere,” he says. “I cannot say for sure if there’s another copy out there somewhere. There certainly could be. But it hasn’t surfaced in the 83 years since it was recorded. If a clean one ever turned up, I’d buy it! It wouldn’t go for that much money, since most people wouldn’t know what it was. I’d guess about $3,000.”
The piano and guitar playing are exemplary — a real barn-burner — but the artists don’t sing. They crack wise, tell jokes and exhort each other on to heights of palpable party histrionics, laughing and cackling along the way. You could just picture them slapping their knees in joyous abandon.
“The problem in their rockin’ and a’ stompin’,” admits Tefteller, “is that you can’t really understand half of what they’re saying! It may have had something to do with how their microphones were set up, how heavy their dialect was or how much whiskey they actually consumed. Broonzy did a number of records like that. Sometimes these kinds of records use rudimentary double-entendre lyrics, but I thought this one was a little more interesting, thus worth rescuing and putting it back out there on a CD.”
Broonzy (1893-1958) was the star attraction of the trio. Born in Mississippi to sharecropper parents who descended from slaves, Broonzy wrote the enduring blues song “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” toured in Memphis Minnie’s band and established himself at Bluebird Records as composer and player on hundreds of sessions for himself and other singers. His fame grew to the point where he performed at one of Columbia talent scout John Hammond’s prestigious “Spirituals To Swing” concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1939. (The story goes that Hammond was looking for Robert Johnson but learned he had died.) Legendary writer Studs Terkel sought out Broonzy for a series of shows that boosted his appeal. Broonzy ultimately found himself in Paris recording and living the life where he was toasted by the elite and got to enjoy the fruits of his talent. Late in life, he also turned to folk music, his icon status resulting in two European documentary movies about his life. He wrote an autobiography (“Big Bill Blues”) but soon learned he had throat cancer. He died at the age of 65 at the height of his international fame.
Georgia Tom Dorsey (1899-1993) quit singing the blues early in his career to enjoy a long life in service to God.
Although Mozelle Alderson (no known dates of birth or death) was a featured vocalist for The Hokum Boys, most of her career was spent singing backup on tours and recordings for other artists. She recorded under the names Ja
A record by Big Bill Broonzy was the first blues record I purchased. I got it in the spring of 1960 at my local music store in Ealing in West London where I grew up. Bill’s record was in the Folk Music section, alongside Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Leadbelly and possibly Joan Baez. I listened to these other artists a year later. Bill had toured in Europe quite a bit, and was a well-known name to me. I loved his voice, his guitar playing and his handsome face. I was 15 years old, and had been playing guitar for four years. It wasn’t until two years later that I discovered that in Ealing we were lucky enough to have The Ealing Club, a crypt-like basement where Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies regularly performed (as did the fledgling Rolling Stones a little later)—they had met and worked with Big Bill a few times, and played some of his songs. I always felt close to Big Bill. He was my first Blues crush. I felt I had sat at his feet. If I were to allow my heart to tell the tale, I would say that I had actually sat at his feet, and had heard the pain and joy of his life firsthand through his wonderful songs.
Bob Riesman’s book makes quite a bit of the way Big Bill reinvented himself, and possibly invented much of his past in a creative manner. I’m not known for my love of facts either. If a Blues, R&B or rock ’n’ roll career life-story is worth telling, it’s worth dressing up. I’m not an academic biographer. Riesman is that, and he gets close to the real truth about Big Bill’s life, but does so in a generous and non-judgemental way that actually deepens the impact and power of everything Bill did as a creative artist and musician who reserved the right to gild the lily. In particular, Bill’s family life, his years doing rough work, and his ability to reflect the stories and experiences of his contemporaries, all combine in this book to bring the terrible racial events and atrocities of those times back into relevance as historical facts rather than blues hearsay.
We’ve heard the songs, we’ve seen the face, we may even have listened to Big Bill himself telling interviewers like Alan Lomax how it really was, in his own inimitable and creative way. This book sets Bill’s extraordinary life and career in meticulously researched perspective. This giant of man—Big Bill Broonzy—deserves such a book, and Riesman is clearly the right man for the job. His affection for his subject is as evident as his respect. This is a compelling historical biography of an artist who sang right at the beginning of a musical era that later included rock ’n’ roll. If rock ’n’ roll and all its recent spawn can in any sense be regarded as art, or carries any social meaning, or transmits reflective or historical relevance to those who love it, this book will help to explain why.
Back before it all caught fire, we heard Big Bill, and we knew that music could tell the truth as well as entertain. Riesman makes it clear that such music might not relate the facts, but he never for a second doubts that Big Bill Broonzy knew the truth, even if he couldn’t resist dressing it up sometimes.
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
In the end, it was Win Stracke who made the arrangements. In the weeks before he died, Big Bill Broonzy had pleaded with his wife Rose to let him stay home instead of returning to the hospital. But when Win arrived at the apartment after getting the phone call at 3 a.m. that Bill was failing, he decided that it would be too difficult for the family members gathered at the bedside to witness the final painful moments, and he called the ambulance. He also made sure that a room was waiting at Billings Hospital on the University of Chicago campus, only two miles away. But by the time Bill arrived there in the early hours of Friday, August 15, 1958, he had already passed.
There was, of course, a lot more to do once Bill was dead: coordinating the memorial service, selecting the location of the grave at the cemetery, and raising the money so these events could take place. The life insurance payout from the Local 208 black musicians’ union wouldn’t be enough by itself to cover the funeral, although the $500 that Win collected from friends and admirers over the weekend would help close the gap.
Win had known Bill for a dozen years, since 1946. Win’s broad face and deep, warm, bass voice were familiar to Chicago television audiences from his appearances as a working-class singer of operatic arias and folk ballads on Studs Terkel’s popular show Studs’ Place and as the genial host of the children’s program Animal Playtime. Bill and Win had traveled together through the Midwest in a folk song revue called “I Come for to Sing,” playing Big Ten college campuses and Chicago nightclubs. It was Win who had launched Bill on the European tours that made him an internationally known name. When Win fulfilled his longtime dream by opening a folk music school in Chicago in December 1957, Bill performed at the opening-night concert, strumming as the school’s first teacher diagrammed his technique on the blackboard for the first class. Bill had trusted Win enough to name him as the executor of his estate.
Win wanted to make sure that Bill would be honored in ways that underscored his importance to his various constituencies. He started by arranging for several musicians to perform at the funeral at the Metropolitan Funeral Parlors, located at Forty-fifth and South Parkway, two blocks from Bill and Rose’s apartment. There was no shortage of talent at the service, with offerings from gospel star Mahalia Jackson, who had performed overseas with Bill in 1952; her informally adopted son, Brother John Sellers, who had appeared with Bill during his last tour of England in 1957; and Studs Terkel, whose connection with Bill went back to the earliest “I Come for to Sing” shows in the late 1940s. Win himself picked up his guitar and sang for the several hundred mourners as well, choosing the recently written but seemingly ageless folk song “Passing Through,” whose chorus stressed that “We’re all brothers and we’re only passing through.”
But the leads in the next day’s newspapers told of something unusual and probably unprecedented: “Big Bill Broonzy sang at his own funeral,” wrote the reporters for the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times.
It was indeed Bill, recorded barely a year earlier during his final recording session, before a doctor’s scalpel had nicked his vocal cords during surgery on what turned out to be the lung cancer that killed him. He sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in a slow tempo, stretching out the words, strumming almost to himself, as if the guitar were an organic part of him and the playing was like inhaling as he gathered his strength for the next phrase. The effect, not surprisingly, was powerful, bringing many of those in attendance to tears. As they cried, they could see Bill in an open casket surrounded by an impressive array of flowers that featured a huge arrangement in the shape of a guitar.
After the service, at the cemetery, two more of Win’s ideas combined to leave a lasting imprint. He had written to a friend that “the pallbearers will be four white and four colored singers,” and that he had hired a professional photographer. So Mickey Pallas, whose photos had appeared in Ebony and Sepia, was there to document Bill’s final journey. One of Pallas’s images of Bill’s casket, borne by the pallbearers, succeeded in capturing the image that Win had worked hard to create.
At the head of the procession, white handkerchief in breast pocket, eyes downcast, his face a somber mask, walked Muddy Waters. Not long after Muddy had arrived in Chicago in the mid-1940s, Bill had reached out to him, and Muddy always spoke of Bill with admiration, affection, and respect. To Muddy’s left was Brother John Sellers, and in sequence behind him was a trio of Chicago blues musicians: Tampa Red, who, along with Bill, ruled the Chicago blues world of the 1930s and ‘40s; Otis Spann, Muddy’s gifted piano player, his eyes fixed on the ground; and pianist Sunnyland Slim, whose most visible feature was the balding top of his bowed head as he brought up the rear. “Little Walter” Jacobs would have been included among the pallbearers if the harmonica star had not been shot in the leg earlier that year.
On the opposite side of the casket were Win, Studs, bassist Ransom Knowling, and Chet Roble, a cabaret piano player who had joined the “I Come for to Sing” revue in the early 1950s. Roble was glancing to one side, Studs was staring down even harder than Spann, and Win—a big man, tall and broad-shouldered—looked ahead to the approaching grave site. Bill might have wasted away to less than a hundred pounds by the time he died, but these were men bearing a load that weighed on them, no matter how light the casket.
What the picture showed was what Win had likely intended, and then some. Certainly there was the image of blacks and whites united in common cause—as Win had sung earlier, we’re all brothers. It was not a trivial public statement less than a year after Arkansas governor Orval Faubus confronted federal troops sent to Little Rock by President Eisenhower to enforce school integration. In fact, eight years after Bill’s funeral, white crowds cursed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as he marched in the streets of Chicago for an end to unfair housing practices. The pallbearers were also brought together by their shared professional commitment to music with a link to Bill. Each made his living in some part by performing and recording blues and folk music. In addition, it was a picture of Chicago in 1958, a vibrant and dynamic center of music made largely by people who had been born someplace else. Waters, Sellers, Sunnyland, Knowling, and Spann all came originally from Mississippi, Tampa Red from Georgia, Terkel from New York, and Stracke from Kansas.
The photo showed Muddy assuming the role of a leader of the Chicago blues community, even though both Tampa and Sunnyland were older. While other blues musicians had a more direct musical influence on Muddy, he always talked about Bill as someone who demonstrated how to act when you’ve had some success, how to carry yourself—how to be a man. By 1958 Muddy’s band had been among the most dominant in a fiercely competitive city for nearly a decade. Although the personnel had changed over time, Muddy’s vision, talent, and determination had driven its success. If there was a rite of passage, a ceremony where Muddy claimed the status he had earned, it was this event. The passing of a giant like Bill, and its effect on Muddy, was visible in his solemn expression and dignified posture.
There were other people who had played meaningful roles in Bill’s life who were not in Chicago on that hot August day to hear Bill’s voice and to watch as his friends laid his body down. Broadcaster and musician Alexis Korner, whose radio commentaries and liner notes brought his passion for Bill’s music to a growing audience of British blues fans, was in London, where he had helped organize a benefit concert for Bill five months earlier. Yannick and Margo Bruynoghe were in Brussels, where they had welcomed Bill into their home and had arranged for Bill to star in an award-winning short film. Jazz writer Hugues Panassié was in France, where he had introduced Bill to European audiences in 1951. And Pete Seeger, who had played with Bill at college concerts and hootenannies since the 1940s, was somewhere on the road.
These individuals were among the numerous friends Bill had made since he started playing for white audiences, mostly after World War II, in New York and Chicago and Europe. They and others had helped him present to the world the stories in which he entwined his own life with the history of the blues and the black experience in America. They had arranged for Bill’s concerts on stages in Copenhagen, Barcelona, and Milan; recorded his songs in Paris and Amsterdam; and edited his autobiography, which had been published in four countries and two languages. And then there were his missing colleagues from the early days of the blues world who had died, whose names he had called out in the final recording session a year before: Leroy Carr, Big Maceo Merriweather, Jim Jackson—men who had played for whiskey at rent parties and recorded their songs on 78 rpm discs sold as “race records.”
[guitar playing in background] Sitting across the mic here from me in a chair about the same size as mine while the gentleman differs in size, Big Bill Broonzy, all six foot two of him. Big Bill, probably the great blues singer of our time, the great blues artists, and we're going to try to find out what makes Big Bill tick. The guitar you hear in the background is the brother of Big Bill, that's his bosom brother, his guitar there. Bill, how would you describe the blues, what is a blues song?
Big Bill Broonzy Well, blues is really came from in the way people live and the way that some some of them the way they are treated, and to the places where they live and the work they do.
Studs Terkel In other words, the blues deals with the daily lives of people, the kind of work they do, the way they live from day to day, the blues is songs about the experience of people, but how many blues songs have you written, Bill?
Big Bill Broonzy Two hundred sixty.
Studs Terkel Two hundred sixty blues. How far back does that go?
Big Bill Broonzy Well, the first blues that I made put on record was 1925.
Studs Terkel Nineteen-- How do you go, how do you go about writing a blues? Where do the ideas come from?
Big Bill Broonzy Well, the main thing about writing the blues is to get any kind of thing that you can think of, well, we'll just say, a knife, a razor, a woman, or let's take a knife. How many things you think you could do with a knife? You could maybe trim your toenails with it, or you could cut a stick with it, then you could kill a man with it too, you know.
Studs Terkel And so this knife, this woman, this job you do, part of your life. How many
Big Bill Broonzy That's right.
Studs Terkel What that means to you in your life and so you work a song out dealing with a knife.
Big Bill Broonzy Well, it's, maybe you can think of more more than five things that you could do with a knife, you know, so you get five verses.
Studs Terkel What's the first blues song? I know blues is just an integral part of your life, Bill. What's the first blues song you remember?
Big Bill Broonzy Well, they didn't call it a blues, the first one that I heard, it was my uncle used to play it, they called it "Cryin' Joe Turner."
Studs Terkel This was down in Mississippi?
Big Bill Broonzy That was in Mississippi, yeah. And they called it a reel at that time, and my -- I remember him coming home once and he started playing that around the house and my mother kicked him out the house on account of him playing that because she didn't allow reels to be played in the home, 'cause my mother was church, you know, she was a church woman,
Studs Terkel Your mother was a very religious woman. And this song, this non-religious song, this reel, this move was considered sinful, is that the idea? And so he couldn't play this song in the house and he couldn't take his instrument in the house with him, either. This is your uncle, you say?
Big Bill Broonzy No, my mother.
Studs Terkel No, but your mother prevented your uncle, her brother, from singing it in the house. Your mother is still alive. How old is
Big Bill Broonzy My uncle is alive, too. My mother is 102 and my uncle is 105.
Studs Terkel And they were both slaves.
Big Bill Broonzy Yeah, they were slaves.
Studs Terkel This song, "Cryin' Joe Turner," this goes, you might say goes back to the slavery days, maybe.
Big Bill Broonzy Well, it must too, because my uncle played it and he was, he sung it, because they they had confidence in this man if they really needed something they had always figured that he would come around.
Studs Terkel This man you're talking about is Joe Turner. He's sort of a Santa Claus, a good Samaritan who comes through in a pinch. How did that go, as you remember it, Bill?
Big Bill Broonzy Well, this is the way my uncle taught it to me. But since then, I've heard it played so many different ways since then. But this is the way that he played it all the time.
[content
Studs Terkel Joe Turner been here and gone.
Big Bill Broonzy That's the way my uncle used to play it on a five-string banjo.
Studs Terkel Well, Bill, that song then, we think of blues as song of sadness, song of misery, here's a song then that has hope to it, that's a blues, too. I mean, out of the disaster, the flood of 1892 and, say a drought, people hope for better things and Joe Turner is a symbol of that, is that the idea?
Big Bill Broonzy Well, yeah, yeah, because they lost everything they had, and in fact they been, is some of them didn't get a chance to to get anything out of their crops of that whole year, see?
Studs Terkel So they bank on this fellow they hope will show up, with this idea. Well, Bill, I know you're going to retune the guitar now so while you're retuning, see, the guitar of Bill was specially tuned for "Cryin' Joe Turner," he's going to untune it now for the next one. As he's doing that, want to talk about Mississippi blues singers. Bill, you're known as a Mississippi blues singer. How does that differ from a blues singer from the rest of the country, say?
Big Bill Broonzy Well, you take a fellow like Lonnie Johnson.
Studs Terkel He's from New Orleans.
Big Bill Broonzy Lonnie Johnson from New Orleans. Well, they live different in New Orleans than we do in Mississippi.
Studs Terkel You mean more of a city life, is that what you
Big Bill Broonzy And then the main thing is what they live, what they what they what they raise what they make a living with, in and off of, in Louisiana, you take the Louisiana people, they work for on the docks, they maybe some of them did a little sugar cane they raise around there, maybe a little rice or something like that, see. But you take the Mississippi people, they live off of their cotton and corn and potatoes and stuff like that they raise, you know? Then they don't just raise maybe a half acre, they raise hundreds and hundreds of acres of cotton and corn and potatoes and in fact, the business they, they really farms down there, you know, it's not like around New Orleans those people there, they live, their lives are different, I don't -- That's what I said and that's what makes the difference in the blues because
Studs Terkel Because the life is different. The blues deals with life. And so a Mississippi song is more of a shouting song, wouldn't you say? One time
Big Bill Broonzy Well, some time you shout the blues, if a -- That's just like a guy's been in bed for so long then he happened to get lucky and make some money, then he shout the blues. But if a guy, maybe he worked in some place and he didn't get any money at all, well he don't feel happy then.
Studs Terkel He doesn't feel like shouting. But you once said to me, another difference; music in the New Orleans singer and the Mississippi singer is that the New Orleans man is more of a technical musician and not as much feeling as the Mississippi.
Big Bill Broonzy I would call, I would call it that, because the regular jazz, regular jazz you will have at least I said, I said, you'll have to give that to New Orleans, because we do, we did play some jazz, we had fellows down there in Mississippi that did play jazz but it wasn't, it wasn't like the New Orleans jazz.
Studs Terkel I know you describe the guitar you play, the way you play it, as plucking blue notes, whereas Lonnie of New Orleans, Lonnie Johnson, would pluck chords, giving this more feeling, this
Big Bill Broonzy Well, you take a fella like Lonnie -- If he make a -- Well, I'll, I'll get this tuned.
Studs Terkel Yeah. For those who may have tuned in late, Bill is retuning the guitar while we're talking here. You know what I'm thinking of, Bill? You worked behind a plow in New Orleans.
Big Bill Broonzy No, in Mississippi.
Studs Terkel In Mississippi, rather, that's what I meant, you worked behind a plow in Mississippi, more plows used there than in the city of New Orleans. And since
Big Bill Broonzy I don't, I don't, I don't say they don't use plows there, but I think to move the plow then used there they push them, they don't they don't have nothing to pull them.
Studs Terkel You do the pushing and the pulling, both. And out of that, since blues deal with the daily experience of a man you wrote a song called, "The Plow-Hand Blues," and I think this would be kind of an example here of out of your life coming a music. Here's an example with the plow, the idea of a plow, what it does when you start writing a song about it.
Big Bill Broonzy A blue note is, see, if you make a chord like this [music], it should be 'C,' but Lonnie would play a chord like that [music], or maybe one like this, you know [music], or like this [music]. Or see, we we we blue singers, we wouldn't, we wouldn't play that [music].
Studs Terkel It's what comes to
Big Bill Broonzy It's the same thing [music].
Studs Terkel That's the way you play it.
Big Bill Broonzy Yeah.
Studs Terkel In Mississippi. And how would "The Plow-Hand Blues" go?
Big Bill Broonzy [Music] Now that's played in the key of 'A.' But now, real musicians, he would make 'A' like this [music].
Studs Terkel In your case, there's more of your own feeling goes into it, so it's never the same way.
Big Bill Broonzy We've -- That's what we
call [content
Studs Terkel Well, Bill, I always wanted to ask you that question about the guitar. How did you get to learn to play the guitar? How long ago was that?
Big Bill Broonzy Well, I first started out
Studs Terkel This is a fiddle you started playing when you were a boy.
Big Bill Broonzy Yeah, well, I was around 12, 14 years old.
Studs Terkel What -- Did you buy this fiddle?
Big Bill Broonzy No, I made it.
Studs Terkel You made it.
Big Bill Broonzy Yeah. Me and a boy named Louie, Louie Carter.
Studs Terkel You made it out of what?
Big Bill Broonzy We made it out, well, we made it out of a cigar box.
Studs Terkel Cigar box?
Big Bill Broonzy Yeah.
Studs Terkel What were the strings?
Big Bill Broonzy And a broom broom broom handle and we had, we'd get a piece of strings and things from haywire and sometimes we use strings from from this guy C.C. Rider, he'd, a lot of times he'd break one of his real strings on his violin, fiddle
Studs Terkel You mentioned C.C. Rider. That's the name of a blues. There was a man by the name of C.C. Rider?
Big Bill Broonzy Yeah, yeah that was that was that was the name they called him. I never did know his real name, but he was a guy that would, about the only only man down there that could ride in any train or boat or carriage, what's the number they had for transportation, he never had to pay any fare, he just get on it and ride.
Studs Terkel Because he was known as C.C. Rider, the man with the fiddle.
Big Bill Broonzy No, it was not, not just that, but he was known as a guy who was an entertainer.
Studs Terkel I mean, the great entertainer.
Big Bill Broonzy Yeah, and he played around for all the white people around down there down through there them days and then they let him ride on anything that was going from last number he went from one town to the other town was
Studs Terkel Well, this C.C. Rider blues, then that's his, that's originally
Big Bill Broonzy -- Yeah, well, they, they, yeah, that
Studs Terkel How did that go, as you recall,
Big Bill Broonzy I'd come in from
[music]. [content
Big Bill Broonzy You could sing that all night, you know, and I always admired the way he
Studs Terkel He said, "My home is on the water, I don't like land no more." In other words, he was sort of a traveling man.
Big Bill Broonzy Yeah, he
Studs Terkel He traveled light.
Big Bill Broonzy He always lived from one town to the other, see, and he always rode boats, you know, the --Any of the guys that owned a boat down there that was carrying cotton or cotton seeds or corn or potatoes or wasn't ever there was transferring from different places owned by boats, why C.C. Rider get on a boat and go anyplace
Studs Terkel So it was his violin and himself, they were the ticket of admission. Well, Bill I know you've hit just about every state in the union, you've traveled a lot and there's one song that you've written, I know. Is this one of the earliest ones you've written, that "Making My Getaway?"
Big Bill Broonzy Yeah, that was back around the first time when I first started playing.
Studs Terkel This is kind of a getaway song. How did you get to write that? How did you get to write this "Make a" -- It's a travel song like C.C. Rider's
Big Bill Broonzy Well, this song wasn't just actually sung by one man, it was a -- This song was originated from a gang of, gang of workers, working on jobs while that there a lot of times you'd -- Well, when I first went off from home, I left home, or as they called it, running off. When I left from home, why we got in, I got into a place, I mean, of a boy that left home with me, his name was Louie. And me and him got into a place and all we could get was clothes and food. And we never did get no pay.
Studs Terkel So you were stuck there.
Big Bill Broonzy Yeah. And he was afraid to tell the man he was going to leave so we'd all sing the day that he was going to leave, that night we'd start singing this song that day.
Studs Terkel You mean, when one of you would head out, say head out north, you wouldn't want the fellow who employed you to know this, you want the other fellas
Big Bill Broonzy No, because you couldn't leave
Studs Terkel Yeah, and so
Big Bill Broonzy If you let the henchmen of his, what we'd call henchmans, we'd call them fatmouths
Studs Terkel Fellas that talk too much, you mean. They'd inform on you.
Big Bill Broonzy Well, they'd tell if they heard about it, they'd know that you was
Studs Terkel Then this is sort of a hidden language, sort of double-talk, you just want the fellas you know to leave, and you sing a straight
Big Bill Broonzy -- It wasn't what you'd call, you wouldn't be a prisoner.
Studs Terkel No.
Big Bill Broonzy But the thing about it, the man wouldn't pay you, and in fact if anything, he's just keep you down, you work and you get clothes and plenty of food. And we wanted money, you know?
Studs Terkel You're stuck and you wanted to head out.
Big Bill Broonzy So they wouldn't pay you, so you would just instead of just going up tell them, "Well, I'm going to leave tomorrow," see, well, we wouldn't do that, we'd just sing that day on the job and we'd leaving out that that next, that night.
Studs Terkel And that's how "Making My Getaway"
came [content
Studs Terkel Bill, that's pretty close to being an underground railway song in a way, that is, it says one thing and has a deeper meaning. Bill, your mother, your mother you say is a very devout Christian.
Big Bill Broonzy Well, she's always been, ever since I know her.
Studs Terkel And -- But she doesn't allow blues to be sung in the house. You can't bring your guitar in the house
Big Bill Broonzy No, not when I go there, I don't ever take it over there, I keeps it [unintelligible].
Studs Terkel I'm sure as a boy, then, you must have learned a lot of camp meeting songs, and
Big Bill Broonzy Well, I know a gang of them, [unintelligible] I
Studs Terkel Well, do you recall some from your boyhood that you may have learned from your mother or your
Big Bill Broonzy Yes, I know "[I Done Eyes?]" and "Stay in the Field" and "You Gotta Stand Your Test in Judgment."
Studs Terkel Well, that "You Gotta Stand Your Test in Judgment" that goes back to slavery days since you say your mother was
Big Bill Broonzy -- Yeah, well, they sung them songs before I was
Studs Terkel "You gotta stand your test of judgment, you gotta do it all by yourself."
Big Bill Broonzy Yeah, that's the way they sung it in them days. Of course, I don't think there's even singing, now the Christian people that sings in church now, if they do, they got it a little different, dressed up as I call it, because they wouldn't sing it like my my fore-parents sung it back in them days because the younger people now, they're educated and they they've added music to those songs.
Studs Terkel And the feeling
Big Bill Broonzy Well, the feeling
Studs Terkel -- Still the same.
Big Bill Broonzy They don't care about their feeling now, they think about the class and the style and the different -- It's just same as me now. I'm 60 years old, but I wouldn't want to wear a suit my dad wore when he was 22.
Studs Terkel Well, how would you sing "Make My Test
Big Bill Broonzy Well, I have to sing it the way that I
Studs Terkel learned Well,
Big Bill Broonzy 60 years ago. [Music]. I can't dress it up because I don't know how, I'm not that
Studs Terkel Well, I have heard you sing
[content
Studs Terkel I can't think of a better moral than you gotta stand up by yourself or you don't [bank on?] anybody else but yourself, your test and judgment. Bill, so far you've touched on the songs that deal with daily life, this dealt with belief, work song, "The Plow-Hand Blues," a travel song, that "C.C. Rider," "Making My Getaway." Now you mentioned earlier big things in the life of any man, women, love. What about blues and a love song? A man, woman, love, blues of a sort. You've written, of the 260 you've written, I'm sure a good number have dealt with the man, a woman and an idea.
Big Bill Broonzy Well, a lot of times, a lot of times, a guy, a guy writes writes a blues and he writes it about a woman; a lot of times he don't have to be in love with that particular name that he's he's he's singing about, the woman that's got that particular name, and then sometime they do. But most [in general?] of the time that blue singers sing a blues, really for a fact, he wouldn't mention, he wouldn't just come out and say the real woman that he was singing about. He'd sing about one woman and meant -- Meant for another woman, you know?
Blues is a music genre[3] and musical form that originated amongst African-Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s.[2] Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale, and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove.
"The Blues" is characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the racial discrimination and other challenges experienced by African-Americans.[4]
Many elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa. The origins of the blues are also closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery. Later, the development of juke joints. It is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century. The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues rock developed, which blended blues styles with rock music.
Etymology
The term 'Blues' may have originated from "blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness. An early use of the term in this sense is in George Colman's one-act farce Blue Devils (1798).[5] The phrase 'blue devils' may also have been derived from a British usage of the 1600s referring to the "intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal".[6] As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils and came to mean a state of agitation or depression. By the 1800s in the United States, the term "blues" was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase 'blue law', which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday.[6]
In 1827, it was in the sense of a sad state of mind that John James Audubon wrote to his wife that he "had the blues".[7] The phrase "the blues" was written by Charlotte Forten, then aged 25, in her diary on December 14, 1862. She was a free-born black woman from Pennsylvania who was working as a schoolteacher in South Carolina, instructing both slaves and freedmen, and wrote that she "came home with the blues" because she felt lonesome and pitied herself. She overcame her depression and later noted a number of songs, such as "Poor Rosy", that were popular among the slaves. Although she admitted being unable to describe the manner of singing she heard, Forten wrote that the songs "can't be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit", conditions that have inspired countless blues songs.[8]
Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition.[9][10] In lyrics, the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood.[11]
Lyrics
American blues singer Ma Rainey (1886–1939), the "Mother of the Blues"
Early traditional blues verses often consisted of a single line repeated four times. However, the most common structure of blues lyrics today was established in the first few decades of the 20th century, known as the "AAB" pattern. This structure consists of a line sung over the first four bars, its repetition over the next four, and a longer concluding line over the last bars.[12] This pattern can be heard in some of the first published blues songs, such as "Dallas Blues" (1912) and "Saint Louis Blues" (1914). According to W.C. Handy, the "AAB" pattern was adopted to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times.[13] The lyrics are often sung in a rhythmic talk style rather than a melody, resembling a form of talking blues.
Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative. African-American singers voiced their "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, [and] hard times".[14] This melancholy has led to the suggestion of an Igbo origin for blues, because of the reputation the Igbo had throughout plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and outlook on life when they were enslaved.[15][16] Other historians have argued that there is little evidence of Sub-Sahelian influence in the blues as "elaborate polyrhythm, percussion on African drums (as opposed to European drums), [and] collective participation" which are characteristic of West-Central African music below the savannah, are conspicuously absent. According to the historian Paul Oliver, "the roots of the blues were not to be found in the coastal and forest regions of Africa. Rather... the blues was rooted in ... the savanna hinterland, from Senegambia through Mali, Burkina Faso, Northern Ghana, Niger, and northern Nigeria". Additionally, ethnomusicologist John Storm Roberts has argued that "The parallels between African savanna-belt string-playing and the techniques of many blues guitarists are remarkable. The big kora of Senegal and Guinea are played in a rhythmic-melodic style that uses constantly changing rhythms, often providing a ground bass overlaid with complex treble patterns, while vocal supplies a third rhythmic layer. Similar techniques can be found in hundreds of blues records".[17]
The lyrics often relate troubles experienced within African American society. For instance Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Rising High Water Blues" (1927) tells of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927:
Backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time
I said, backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time
And I can't get no hearing from that Memphis girl of mine
Although the blues gained an association with misery and oppression, the lyrics could also be humorous and raunchy:[18]
Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,
Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,
It may be sending you baby, but it's worrying the hell out of me.[19]
Hokum blues celebrated both comedic lyrical content and a boisterous, farcical performance style.[20] Tampa Red and Georgia Tom's "It's Tight Like That" (1928)[21] is a sly wordplay with the double meaning of being "tight" with someone, coupled with a more salacious physical familiarity. Blues songs with sexually explicit lyrics were known as dirty blues. The lyrical content became slightly simpler in postwar blues, which tended to focus on relationship woes or sexual worries. Lyrical themes that frequently appeared in prewar blues, such as economic depression, farming, devils, gambling, magic, floods and drought, were less common in postwar blues.[22]
The writer Ed Morales claimed that Yoruba mythology played a part in early blues, citing Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues" as a "thinly veiled reference to Eleggua, the orisha in charge of the crossroads".[23] However, the Christian influence was far more obvious.[24] The repertoires of many seminal blues artists, such as Charley Patton and Skip James, included religious songs or spirituals.[25] Reverend Gary Davis[26] and Blind Willie Johnson[27] are examples of artists often categorized as blues musicians for their music, although their lyrics clearly belong to spirituals.
Form
The blues form is a cyclic musical form in which a repeating progression of chords mirrors the call and response scheme commonly found in African and African-American music. During the first decades of the 20th century blues music was not clearly defined in terms of a particular chord progression.[28] With the popularity of early performers, such as Bessie Smith, use of the twelve-bar blues spread across the music industry during the 1920s and 1930s.[29] Other chord progressions, such as 8-bar forms, are still considered blues; examples include "How Long Blues", "Trouble in Mind", and Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway". There are also 16-bar blues, such as Ray Charles's instrumental "Sweet 16 Bars" and Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man". Idiosyncratic numbers of bars are occasionally used, such as the 9-bar progression in "Sitting on Top of the World", by Walter Vinson.
Chords played over a 12-bar scheme: Chords for a blues in C:
I I or IV I I7
IV IV I I7
V V or IV I I or V
C C C C7
F F C C7
G G C C
The basic 12-bar lyric framework of many blues compositions is reflected by a standard harmonic progression of 12 bars in a 4/4 time signature. The blues chords associated to a twelve-bar blues are typically a set of three different chords played over a 12-bar scheme. They are labeled by Roman numbers referring to the degrees of the progression. For instance, for a blues in the key of C, C is the tonic chord (I) and F is the subdominant (IV).
The last chord is the dominant (V) turnaround, marking the transition to the beginning of the next progression. The lyrics generally end on the last beat of the tenth bar or the first beat of the 11th bar, and the final two bars are given to the instrumentalist as a break; the harmony of this two-bar break, the turnaround, can be extremely complex, sometimes consisting of single notes that defy analysis in terms of chords.
Much of the time, some or all of these chords are played in the harmonic seventh (7th) form. The use of the harmonic seventh interval is characteristic of blues and is popularly called the "blues seven".[30] Blues seven chords add to the harmonic chord a note with a frequency in a 7:4 ratio to the fundamental note. At a 7:4 ratio, it is not close to any interval on the conventional Western diatonic scale.[31] For convenience or by necessity it is often approximated by a minor seventh interval or a dominant seventh chord.
A minor pentatonic scale; playⓘ
In melody, blues is distinguished by the use of the flattened third, fifth and seventh of the associated major scale.[32]
Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and call-and-response, and they form a repetitive effect called a groove. Characteristic of the blues since its Afro-American origins, the shuffles played a central role in swing music.[33] The simplest shuffles, which were the clearest signature of the R&B wave that started in the mid-1940s,[34] were a three-note riff on the bass strings of the guitar. When this riff was played over the bass and the drums, the groove "feel" was created. Shuffle rhythm is often vocalized as "dow, da dow, da dow, da" or "dump, da dump, da dump, da":[35] it consists of uneven, or "swung", eighth notes. On a guitar this may be played as a simple steady bass or it may add to that stepwise quarter note motion from the fifth to the sixth of the chord and back.
History
Origins
Main article: Origins of the blues
Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" was published in 1912; W.C. Handy's "The Memphis Blues" followed in the same year. The first recording by an African American singer was Mamie Smith's 1920 rendition of Perry Bradford's "Crazy Blues". But the origins of the blues were some decades earlier, probably around 1890.[36] This music is poorly documented, partly because of racial discrimination in U.S. society, including academic circles,[37] and partly because of the low rate of literacy among rural African Americans at the time.[38]
Reports of blues music in southern Texas and the Deep South were written at the dawn of the 20th century. Charles Peabody mentioned the appearance of blues music at Clarksdale, Mississippi, and Gate Thomas reported similar songs in southern Texas around 1901–1902. These observations coincide more or less with the recollections of Jelly Roll Morton, who said he first heard blues music in New Orleans in 1902; Ma Rainey, who remembered first hearing the blues in the same year in Missouri; and W.C. Handy, who first heard the blues in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903. The first extensive research in the field was performed by Howard W. Odum, who published an anthology of folk songs from Lafayette County, Mississippi, and Newton County, Georgia, between 1905 and 1908.[39] The first non-commercial recordings of blues music, termed proto-blues by Paul Oliver, were made by Odum for research purposes at the beginning of the 20th century. They are now lost.[40]
Musicologist John Lomax (left) shaking hands with musician "Uncle" Rich Brown in Sumterville, Alabama
Other recordings that are still available were made in 1924 by Lawrence Gellert. Later, several recordings were made by Robert W. Gordon, who became head of the Archive of American Folk Songs of the Library of Congress. Gordon's successor at the library was John Lomax. In the 1930s, Lomax and his son Alan made a large number of non-commercial blues recordings that testify to the huge variety of proto-blues styles, such as field hollers and ring shouts.[41] A record of blues music as it existed before 1920 can also be found in the recordings of artists such as Lead Belly[42] and Henry Thomas.[43] All these sources show the existence of many different structures distinct from twelve-, eight-, or sixteen-bar.[44][45] The social and economic reasons for the appearance of the blues are not fully known.[46] The first appearance of the blues is usually dated after the Emancipation Act of 1863,[37] between 1860s and 1890s,[2] a period that coincides with post-emancipation and later, the establishment of juke joints as places where African-Americans went to listen to music, dance, or gamble after a hard day's work.[47] This period corresponds to the transition from slavery to sharecropping, small-scale agricultural production, and the expansion of railroads in the southern United States. Several scholars characterize the development of blues music in the early 1900s as a move from group performance to individualized performance. They argue that the development of the blues is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the enslaved people.[48]
According to Lawrence Levine, "there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the popularity of Booker T. Washington's teachings, and the rise of the blues." Levine stated that "psychologically, socially, and economically, African-Americans were being acculturated in a way that would have been impossible during slavery, and it is hardly surprising that their secular music reflected this as much as their religious music did."[48]
There are few characteristics common to all blues music, because the genre took its shape from the idiosyncrasies of individual performers.[49] However, there are some characteristics that were present long before the creation of the modern blues. Call-and-response shouts were an early form of blues-like music; they were a "functional expression ... style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure".[50] A form of this pre-blues was heard in slave ring shouts and field hollers, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content".[51]
Blues has evolved from the unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves imported from West Africa and rural blacks into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States. Although blues (as it is now known) can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and the African call-and-response tradition that transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar,[52][53] the blues form itself bears no resemblance to the melodic styles of the West African griots.[54][55] Additionally, there are theories that the four-beats-per-measure structure of the blues might have its origins in the Native American tradition of pow wow drumming.[56] Some scholars identify strong influences on the blues from the melodic structures of certain West African musical styles of the savanna and sahel. Lucy Durran finds similarities with the melodies of the Bambara people, and to a lesser degree, the Soninke people and Wolof people, but not as much of the Mandinka people.[57] Gerard Kubik finds similarities to the melodic styles of both the west African savanna and central Africa, both of which were sources of enslaved people.[58]
No specific African musical form can be identified as the single direct ancestor of the blues.[59] However the call-and-response format can be traced back to the music of Africa. That blue notes predate their use in blues and have an African origin is attested to by "A Negro Love Song", by the English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, from his African Suite for Piano, written in 1898, which contains blue third and seventh notes.[60]
The Diddley bow (a homemade one-stringed instrument found in parts of the American South sometimes referred to as a jitterbug or a one-string in the early twentieth century) and the banjo are African-derived instruments that may have helped in the transfer of African performance techniques into the early blues instrumental vocabulary.[61] The banjo seems to be directly imported from West African music. It is similar to the musical instrument that griots and other Africans such as the Igbo[62] played (called halam or akonting by African peoples such as the Wolof, Fula and Mandinka).[63] However, in the 1920s, when country blues began to be recorded, the use of the banjo in blues music was quite marginal and limited to individuals such as Papa Charlie Jackson and later Gus Cannon.[64]
Blues music also adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs", minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment.[65] The style also was closely related to ragtime, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music".[66]
The musical forms and styles that are now considered the blues as well as modern country music arose in the same regions of the southern United States during the 19th century. Recorded blues and country music can be found as far back as the 1920s, when the record industry created the marketing categories "race music" and "hillbilly music" to sell music by blacks for blacks and by whites for whites, respectively. At the time, there was no clear musical division between "blues" and "country", except for the ethnicity of the performer, and even that was sometimes documented incorrectly by record companies.[67][68]
Though musicologists can now attempt to define the blues narrowly in terms of certain chord structures and lyric forms thought to have originated in West Africa, audiences originally heard the music in a far more general way: it was simply the music of the rural south, notably the Mississippi Delta. Black and white musicians shared the same repertoire and thought of themselves as "songsters" rather than blues musicians. The notion of blues as a separate genre arose during the black migration from the countryside to urban areas in the 1920s and the simultaneous development of the recording industry. Blues became a code word for a record designed to sell to black listeners.[69]
The origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of Afro-American community, the spirituals. The origins of spirituals go back much further than the blues, usually dating back to the middle of the 18th century, when the slaves were Christianized and began to sing and play Christian hymns, in particular those of Isaac Watts, which were very popular.[70] Before the blues gained its formal definition in terms of chord progressions, it was defined as the secular counterpart of spirituals. It was the low-down music played by rural blacks.[24]
Depending on the religious community a musician belonged to, it was more or less considered a sin to play this low-down music: blues was the devil's music. Musicians were therefore segregated into two categories: gospel singers and blues singers, guitar preachers and songsters. However, when rural black music began to be recorded in the 1920s, both categories of musicians used similar techniques: call-and-response patterns, blue notes, and slide guitars. Gospel music was nevertheless using musical forms that were compatible with Christian hymns and therefore less marked by the blues form than its secular counterpart.[24]
Pre-war blues
The American sheet music publishing industry produced a great deal of ragtime music. By 1912, the sheet music industry had published three popular blues-like compositions, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley adoption of blues elements: "Baby Seals' Blues", by "Baby" Franklin Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews); "Dallas Blues", by Hart Wand; and "The Memphis Blues", by W.C. Handy.[71]
Sheet music from "Saint Louis Blues" (1914)
Handy was a formally trained musician, composer and arranger who helped to popularize the blues by transcribing and orchestrating blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers. He became a popular and prolific composer, and billed himself as the "Father of the Blues"; however, his compositions can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Cuban habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime;[23][72] Handy's signature work was the "Saint Louis Blues".
In the 1920s, the blues became a major element of African American and American popular music, also reaching white audiences via Handy's arrangements and the classic female blues performers. These female performers became perhaps the first African American "superstars", and their recording sales demonstrated "a huge appetite for records made by and for black people."[73] The blues evolved from informal performances in bars to entertainment in theaters. Blues performances were organized by the Theater Owners Booking Association in nightclubs such as the Cotton Club and juke joints such as the bars along Beale Street in Memphis. Several record companies, such as the American Record Corporation, Okeh Records, and Paramount Records, began to record African-American music.
As the recording industry grew, country blues performers like Bo Carter, Jimmie Rodgers, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red and Blind Blake became more popular in the African American community. Kentucky-born Sylvester Weaver was in 1923 the first to record the slide guitar style, in which a guitar is fretted with a knife blade or the sawed-off neck of a bottle.[74] The slide guitar became an important part of the Delta blues.[75] The first blues recordings from the 1920s are categorized as a traditional, rural country blues and a more polished city or urban blues.
Country blues performers often improvised, either without accompaniment or with only a banjo or guitar. Regional styles of country blues varied widely in the early 20th century. The (Mississippi) Delta blues was a rootsy sparse style with passionate vocals accompanied by slide guitar. The little-recorded Robert Johnson[76] combined elements of urban and rural blues. In addition to Robert Johnson, influential performers of this style included his predecessors Charley Patton and Son House. Singers such as Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller performed in the southeastern "delicate and lyrical" Piedmont blues tradition, which used an elaborate ragtime-based fingerpicking guitar technique. Georgia also had an early slide tradition,[77] with Curley Weaver, Tampa Red, "Barbecue Bob" Hicks and James "Kokomo" Arnold as representatives of this style.[78]
The lively Memphis blues style, which developed in the 1920s and 1930s near Memphis, Tennessee, was influenced by jug bands such as the Memphis Jug Band or the Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers. Performers such as Frank Stokes, Sleepy John Estes, Robert Wilkins, Joe McCoy, Casey Bill Weldon and Memphis Minnie used a variety of unusual instruments such as washboard, fiddle, kazoo or mandolin. Memphis Minnie was famous for her virtuoso guitar style. Pianist Memphis Slim began his career in Memphis, but his distinct style was smoother and had some swing elements. Many blues musicians based in Memphis moved to Chicago in the late 1930s or early 1940s and became part of the urban blues movement.[79][80]
Bessie Smith, an early blues singer, known for her powerful voice
Urban blues
City or urban blues styles were more codified and elaborate, as a performer was no longer within their local, immediate community, and had to adapt to a larger, more varied audience's aesthetic.[81] Classic female urban and vaudeville blues singers were popular in the 1920s, among them "the big three"—Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Lucille Bogan. Mamie Smith, more a vaudeville performer than a blues artist, was the first African American to record a blues song, in 1920; her second record, "Crazy Blues", sold 75,000 copies in its first month.[82] Ma Rainey, the "Mother of Blues", and Bessie Smith each "[sang] around center tones, perhaps in order to project her voice more easily to the back of a room". Smith would "sing a song in an unusual key, and her artistry in bending and stretching notes with her beautiful, powerful contralto to accommodate her own interpretation was unsurpassed".[83]
In 1920, the vaudeville singer Lucille Hegamin became the second black woman to record blues when she recorded "The Jazz Me Blues",[84] and Victoria Spivey, sometimes called Queen Victoria or Za Zu Girl, had a recording career that began in 1926 and spanned forty years. These recordings were typically labeled "race records" to distinguish them from records sold to white audiences. Nonetheless, the recordings of some of the classic female blues singers were purchased by white buyers as well.[85] These blueswomen's contributions to the genre included "increased improvisation on melodic lines, unusual phrasing which altered the emphasis and impact of the lyrics, and vocal dramatics using shouts, groans, moans, and wails. The blues women thus effected changes in other types of popular singing that had spin-offs in jazz, Broadway musicals, torch songs of the 1930s and 1940s, gospel, rhythm and blues, and eventually rock and roll."[86]
Urban male performers included popular black musicians of the era, such as Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy and Leroy Carr. An important label of this era was the Chicago-based Bluebird Records. Before World War II, Tampa Red was sometimes referred to as "the Guitar Wizard". Carr accompanied himself on the piano with Scrapper Blackwell on guitar, a format that continued well into the 1950s with artists such as Charles Brown and even Nat "King" Cole.[75]
A typical boogie-woogie bass line Playⓘ
Boogie-woogie was another important style of 1930s and early 1940s urban blues. While the style is often associated with solo piano, boogie-woogie was also used to accompany singers and, as a solo part, in bands and small combos. Boogie-woogie style was characterized by a regular bass figure, an ostinato or riff and shifts of level in the left hand, elaborating each chord and trills and decorations in the right hand. Boogie-woogie was pioneered by the Chicago-based Jimmy Yancey and the Boogie-Woogie Trio (Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis).[87] Chicago boogie-woogie performers included Clarence "Pine Top" Smith and Earl Hines, who "linked the propulsive left-hand rhythms of the ragtime pianists with melodic figures similar to those of Armstrong's trumpet in the right hand".[81] The smooth Louisiana style of Professor Longhair and, more recently, Dr. John blends classic rhythm and blues with blues styles.
Another development in this period was big band blues. The "territory bands" operating out of Kansas City, the Bennie Moten orchestra, Jay McShann, and the Count Basie Orchestra were also concentrating on the blues, with 12-bar blues instrumentals such as Basie's "One O'Clock Jump" and "Jumpin' at the Woodside" and boisterous "blues shouting" by Jimmy Rushing on songs such as "Going to Chicago" and "Sent for You Yesterday". A well-known big band blues tune is Glenn Miller's "In the Mood". In the 1940s, the jump blues style developed. Jump blues grew up from the boogie-woogie wave and was strongly influenced by big band music. It uses saxophone or other brass instruments and the guitar in the rhythm section to create a jazzy, up-tempo sound with declamatory vocals. Jump blues tunes by Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner, based in Kansas City, Missouri, influenced the development of later styles such as rock and roll and rhythm and blues.[88] Dallas-born T-Bone Walker, who is often associated with the California blues style,[89] performed a successful transition from the early urban blues à la Lonnie Johnson and Leroy Carr to the jump blues style and dominated the blues-jazz scene at Los Angeles during the 1940s.[90]
1950s
The transition from country blues to urban blues that began in the 1920s was driven by the successive waves of economic crisis and booms that led many rural blacks to move to urban areas, in a movement known as the Great Migration. The long boom following World War II induced another massive migration of the African-American population, the Second Great Migration, which was accompanied by a significant increase of the real income of the urban blacks. The new migrants constituted a new market for the music industry. The term race record, initially used by the music industry for African-American music, was replaced by the term rhythm and blues. This rapidly evolving market was mirrored by Billboard magazine's Rhythm & Blues chart. This marketing strategy reinforced trends in urban blues music such as the use of electric instruments and amplification and the generalization of the blues beat, the blues shuffle, which became ubiquitous in rhythm and blues (R&B). This commercial stream had important consequences for blues music, which, together with jazz and gospel music, became a component of R&B.[91]
John Lee Hooker
After World War II, new styles of electric blues became popular in cities such as Chicago,[92] Memphis,[93] Detroit[94][95] and St. Louis. Electric blues used electric guitars, double bass (gradually replaced by bass guitar), drums, and harmonica (or "blues harp") played through a microphone and a PA system or an overdriven guitar amplifier. Chicago became a center for electric blues from 1948 on, when Muddy Waters recorded his first success, "I Can't Be Satisfied".[96] Chicago blues is influenced to a large extent by Delta blues, because many performers had migrated from the Mississippi region.
Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Jimmy Reed were all born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. Their style is characterized by the use of electric guitar, sometimes slide guitar, harmonica, and a rhythm section of bass and drums.[97] The saxophonist J. T. Brown played in bands led by Elmore James and by J. B. Lenoir, but the saxophone was used as a backing instrument for rhythmic support more than as a lead instrument.
Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) and Sonny Terry are well known harmonica (called "harp" by blues musicians) players of the early Chicago blues scene. Other harp players such as Big Walter Horton were also influential. Muddy Waters and Elmore James were known for their innovative use of slide electric guitar. Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters were known for their deep, "gravelly" voices.
The bassist and prolific songwriter and composer Willie Dixon played a major role on the Chicago blues scene. He composed and wrote many standard blues songs of the period, such as "Hoochie Coochie Man", "I Just Want to Make Love to You" (both penned for Muddy Waters) and, "Wang Dang Doodle" and "Back Door Man" for Howlin' Wolf. Most artists of the Chicago blues style recorded for the Chicago-based Chess Records and Checker Records labels. Smaller blues labels of this era included Vee-Jay Records and J.O.B. Records. During the early 1950s, the dominating Chicago labels were challenged by Sam Phillips' Sun Records company in Memphis, which recorded B. B. King and Howlin' Wolf before he moved to Chicago in 1960.[98] After Phillips discovered Elvis Presley in 1954, the Sun label turned to the rapidly expanding white audience and started recording mostly rock 'n' roll.[99]
In the 1950s, blues had a huge influence on mainstream American popular music. While popular musicians like Bo Diddley[94] and Chuck Berry,[100] both recording for Chess, were influenced by the Chicago blues, their enthusiastic playing styles departed from the melancholy aspects of blues. Chicago blues also influenced Louisiana's zydeco music,[101] with Clifton Chenier[102] using blues accents. Zydeco musicians used electric solo guitar and cajun arrangements of blues standards.
In England, electric blues took root there during a much acclaimed Muddy Waters tour in 1958. Waters, unsuspecting of his audience's tendency towards skiffle, an acoustic, softer brand of blues, turned up his amp and started to play his Chicago brand of electric blues. Although the audience was largely jolted by the performance, the performance influenced local musicians such as Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies to emulate this louder style, inspiring the British Invasion of the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds.[103]
In the late 1950s, a new blues style emerged on Chicago's West Side pioneered by Magic Sam, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush on Cobra Records.[104] The "West Side sound" had strong rhythmic support from a rhythm guitar, bass guitar and drums and as perfected by Guy, Freddie King, Magic Slim and Luther Allison was dominated by amplified electric lead guitar.[105][106] Expressive guitar solos were a key feature of this music.
Other blues artists, such as John Lee Hooker, had influences not directly related to the Chicago style. John Lee Hooker's blues is more "personal", based on Hooker's deep rough voice accompanied by a single electric guitar. Though not directly influenced by boogie-woogie, his "groovy" style is sometimes called "guitar boogie". His first hit, "Boogie Chillen", reached number 1 on the R&B charts in 1949.[107]
By the late 1950s, the swamp blues genre developed near Baton Rouge, with performers such as Lightnin' Slim,[108] Slim Harpo,[109] Sam Myers and Jerry McCain around the producer J. D. "Jay" Miller and the Excello label. Strongly influenced by Jimmy Reed, swamp blues has a slower pace and a simpler use of the harmonica than the Chicago blues style performers such as Little Walter or Muddy Waters. Songs from this genre include "Scratch my Back", "She's Tough" and "I'm a King Bee". Alan Lomax's recordings of Mississippi Fred McDowell would eventually bring him wider attention on both the blues and folk circuit, with McDowell's droning style influencing North Mississippi hill country blues musicians.[110]
1960s and 1970s
Blues legend B.B. King with his guitar, "Lucille"
By the beginning of the 1960s, genres influenced by African American music such as rock and roll and soul were part of mainstream popular music. White performers such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles had brought African-American music to new audiences, within the U.S. and abroad. However, the blues wave that brought artists such as Muddy Waters to the foreground had stopped. Bluesmen such as Big Bill Broonzy and Willie Dixon started looking for new markets in Europe. Dick Waterman and the blues festivals he organized in Europe played a major role in propagating blues music abroad. In the UK, bands emulated U.S. blues legends, and UK blues rock-based bands had an influential role throughout the 1960s.[111]
Blues performers such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters continued to perform to enthusiastic audiences, inspiring new artists steeped in traditional blues, such as New York–born Taj Mahal. John Lee Hooker blended his blues style with rock elements and playing with younger white musicians, creating a musical style that can be heard on the 1971 album Endless Boogie. B. B. King's singing and virtuoso guitar technique earned him the eponymous title "king of the blues". King introduced a sophisticated style of guitar soloing based on fluid string bending and shimmering vibrato that influenced many later electric blues guitarists.[112] In contrast to the Chicago style, King's band used strong brass support from a saxophone, trumpet, and trombone, instead of using slide guitar or harp. Tennessee-born Bobby "Blue" Bland, like B. B. King, also straddled the blues and R&B genres. During this period, Freddie King and Albert King often played with rock and soul musicians (Eric Clapton and Booker T & the MGs) and had a major influence on those styles of music.
The music of the civil rights movement[113] and Free Speech Movement in the U.S. prompted a resurgence of interest in American roots music and early African American music. As well festivals such as the Newport Folk Festival[114] brought traditional blues to a new audience, which helped to revive interest in prewar acoustic blues and performers such as Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and Reverend Gary Davis.[113] Many compilations of classic prewar blues were republished by the Yazoo Records. J. B. Lenoir from the Chicago blues movement in the 1950s recorded several LPs using acoustic guitar, sometimes accompanied by Willie Dixon on the acoustic bass or drums. His songs, originally distributed only in Europe,[115] commented on political issues such as racism or Vietnam War issues, which was unusual for this period. His album Alabama Blues contained a song with the following lyric:
I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me,
I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me.
You know they killed my sister and my brother
and the whole world let them peoples go down there free
Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, 1983
White audiences' interest in the blues during the 1960s increased due to the Chicago-based Paul Butterfield Blues Band featuring guitarist Michael Bloomfield and singer/songwriter Nick Gravenites, and the British blues movement. The style of British blues developed in the UK, when musicians such as Cyril Davies, Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, the Rolling Stones, Animals, the Yardbirds, Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation,[116] Chicken Shack,[117] early Jethro Tull, Cream and the Irish musician Rory Gallagher performed classic blues songs from the Delta or Chicago blues traditions.
In 1963, Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, was the first to write a book on the social history of the blues in Blues People: The Negro Music in White America. The British and blues musicians of the early 1960s inspired a number of American blues rock performers, including Canned Heat, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, the J. Geils Band, Ry Cooder, and the Allman Brothers Band. One blues rock performer, Jimi Hendrix, was a rarity in his field at the time: a Black man who played psychedelic rock. Hendrix was a skilled guitarist, and a pioneer in the innovative use of distortion and audio feedback in his music.[118] Through these artists and others, blues music influenced the development of rock music. Later in the 1960s, British singer Jo Ann Kelly started her recording career. In the US, from the 1970s, female singers Bonnie Raitt and Phoebe Snow performed blues.[119]
In the early 1970s, the Texas rock-blues style emerged, which used guitars in both solo and rhythm roles. In contrast with the West Side blues, the Texas style is strongly influenced by the British rock-blues movement. Major artists of the Texas style are Johnny Winter, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Fabulous Thunderbirds (led by harmonica player and singer-songwriter Kim Wilson), and ZZ Top. These artists all began their musical careers in the 1970s but they did not achieve international success until the next decade.[120]
1980s to the present
Italian singer Zucchero is credited as the "Father of Italian Blues", and is among the few European blues artists who still enjoy international success.[121]
Since the 1980s there has been a resurgence of interest in the blues among a certain part of the African-American population, particularly around Jackson, Mississippi and other deep South regions. Often termed "soul blues" or "Southern soul", the music at the heart of this movement was given new life by the unexpected success of two particular recordings on the Jackson-based Malaco label:[122] Z. Z. Hill's Down Home Blues (1982) and Little Milton's The Blues is Alright (1984). Contemporary African-American performers who work in this style of the blues include Bobby Rush, Denise LaSalle, Sir Charles Jones, Bettye LaVette, Marvin Sease, Peggy Scott-Adams, Mel Waiters, Clarence Carter, Dr. "Feelgood" Potts, O.B. Buchana, Ms. Jody, Shirley Brown, and dozens of others.
Eric Clapton performing at Hyde Park, London, in June 2008
During the 1980s blues also continued in both traditional and new forms. In 1986 the album Strong Persuader announced Robert Cray as a major blues artist. The first Stevie Ray Vaughan recording Texas Flood was released in 1983, and the Texas-based guitarist exploded onto the international stage. John Lee Hooker's popularity was revived with the album The Healer in 1989. Eric Clapton, known for his performances with the Blues Breakers and Cream, made a comeback in the 1990s with his album Unplugged, in which he played some standard blues numbers on acoustic guitar.
However, beginning in the 1990s, digital multitrack recording and other technological advances and new marketing strategies including video clip production increased costs, challenging the spontaneity and improvisation that are an important component of blues music.[123] In the 1980s and 1990s, blues publications such as Living Blues and Blues Revue were launched, major cities began forming blues societies, outdoor blues festivals became more common, and[124] more nightclubs and venues for blues emerged.[125] Tedeschi Trucks Band and Gov't Mule released blues rock albums. Female blues singers such as Bonnie Raitt, Susan Tedeschi, Sue Foley and Shannon Curfman also recorded albums.
In the 1990s, the largely ignored hill country blues gained minor recognition in both blues and alternative rock music circles with northern Mississippi artists R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough.[110] Blues performers explored a range of musical genres, as can be seen, for example, from the broad array of nominees of the yearly Blues Music Awards, previously named W.C. Handy Awards[126] or of the Grammy Awards for Best Contemporary and Traditional Blues Album. The Billboard Blues Album chart provides an overview of current blues hits. Contemporary blues music is nurtured by several blues labels such as: Alligator Records, Ruf Records, Severn Records, Chess Records (MCA), Delmark Records, NorthernBlues Music, Fat Possum Records and Vanguard Records (Artemis Records). Some labels are famous for rediscovering and remastering blues rarities, including Arhoolie Records, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (heir of Folkways Records), and Yazoo Records (Shanachie Records).[127]
Musical impact
Blues musical styles, forms (12-bar blues), melodies, and the blues scale have influenced many other genres of music, such as rock and roll, jazz, and popular music.[128] Prominent jazz, folk or rock performers, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Bob Dylan have performed significant blues recordings. The blues scale is often used in popular songs like Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night", blues ballads like "Since I Fell for You" and "Please Send Me Someone to Love", and even in orchestral works such as George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Concerto in F". Gershwin's second "Prelude" for solo piano is an interesting example of a classical blues, maintaining the form with academic strictness. The blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music and informs many modal frames, especially the ladder of thirds used in rock music (for example, in "A Hard Day's Night"). Blues forms are used in the theme to the televised Batman, teen idol Fabian Forte's hit, "Turn Me Loose", country music star Jimmie Rodgers' music, and guitarist/vocalist Tracy Chapman's hit "Give Me One Reason".
"Blues singing is about emotion. Its influence on popular singing has been so widespread that, at least among males, singing and emoting have become almost identical—it is a matter of projection rather than hitting the notes."[129]
—Robert Christgau, 1972
Early country bluesmen such as Skip James, Charley Patton, Georgia Tom Dorsey played country and urban blues and had influences from spiritual singing. Dorsey helped to popularize Gospel music.[130] Gospel music developed in the 1930s, with the Golden Gate Quartet. In the 1950s, soul music by Sam Cooke, Ray Charles and James Brown used gospel and blues music elements. In the 1960s and 1970s, gospel and blues were merged in soul blues music. Funk music of the 1970s was influenced by soul; funk can be seen as an antecedent of hip-hop and contemporary R&B.
R&B music can be traced back to spirituals and blues. Musically, spirituals were a descendant of New England choral traditions, and in particular of Isaac Watts's hymns, mixed with African rhythms and call-and-response forms. Spirituals or religious chants in the African-American community are much better documented than the "low-down" blues. Spiritual singing developed because African-American communities could gather for mass or worship gatherings, which were called camp meetings.
Edward P. Comentale has noted how the blues was often used as a medium for art or self-expression, stating: "As heard from Delta shacks to Chicago tenements to Harlem cabarets, the blues proved—despite its pained origins—a remarkably flexible medium and a new arena for the shaping of identity and community."[131]
Duke Ellington straddled the big band and bebop genres. Ellington extensively used the blues form.[132]
Before World War II, the boundaries between blues and jazz were less clear. Usually, jazz had harmonic structures stemming from brass bands, whereas blues had blues forms such as the 12-bar blues. However, the jump blues of the 1940s mixed both styles. After WWII, blues had a substantial influence on jazz. Bebop classics, such as Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time", used the blues form with the pentatonic scale and blue notes.
Bebop marked a major shift in the role of jazz, from a popular style of music for dancing to a "high-art", less-accessible, cerebral "musician's music". The audience for both blues and jazz split, and the border between blues and jazz became more defined.[132][133]
The blues' 12-bar structure and the blues scale was a major influence on rock and roll music. Rock and roll has been called "blues with a backbeat"; Carl Perkins called rockabilly "blues with a country beat". Rockabillies were also said to be 12-bar blues played with a bluegrass beat. "Hound Dog", with its unmodified 12-bar structure (in both harmony and lyrics) and a melody centered on flatted third of the tonic (and flatted seventh of the subdominant), is a blues song transformed into a rock and roll song. Jerry Lee Lewis's style of rock and roll was heavily influenced by the blues and its derivative boogie-woogie. His style of music was not exactly rockabilly but it has been often called real rock and roll (this is a label he shares with several African American rock and roll performers).[134][135]
Many early rock and roll songs are based on blues: "That's All Right Mama", "Johnny B. Goode", "Blue Suede Shoes", "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On", "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", and "Long Tall Sally". The early African American rock musicians retained the sexual themes and innuendos of blues music: "Got a gal named Sue, knows just what to do" ("Tutti Frutti", Little Richard) or "See the girl with the red dress on, She can do the Birdland all night long" ("What'd I Say", Ray Charles). The 12-bar blues structure can be found even in novelty pop songs, such as Bob Dylan's "Obviously Five Believers" and Esther and Abi Ofarim's "Cinderella Rockefella".
Early country music was infused with the blues.[136] Jimmie Rodgers, Moon Mullican, Bob Wills, Bill Monroe and Hank Williams have all described themselves as blues singers and their music has a blues feel that is different, at first glance at least, from the later country-pop of artists like Eddy Arnold. Yet, if one looks back further, Arnold also started out singing bluesy songs like 'I'll Hold You in My Heart'. A lot of the 1970s-era "outlaw" country music by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings also borrowed from the blues. When Jerry Lee Lewis returned to country music after the decline of 1950s style rock and roll, he sang with a blues feel and often included blues standards on his albums.
In popular culture
The music of Taj Mahal for the 1972 movie Sounder marked a revival of interest in acoustic blues.
Like many other genres, blues has been called the "devil's music" or "music of the devil", even of inciting violence and other poor behavior.[137] In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable, especially as white audiences began listening to the blues during the 1920s.[72] The close association with the devil was actually a well known characteristic of blues lyrics and culture between the 1920s and 1960s. The devil's connection to the blues has faded from popular memory since then for a number of reasons, other than in the narrow sense of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads. A study of the devil's role in the blues was published in 2017 called Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil & The Blues Tradition.[138]
During the blues revival of the 1960s and 1970s, acoustic blues artist Taj Mahal and Texas bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins wrote and performed music that figured prominently in the critically acclaimed film Sounder (1972). The film earned Mahal a Grammy nomination for Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture and a BAFTA nomination.[139] Almost 30 years later, Mahal wrote blues for, and performed a banjo composition, claw-hammer style, in the 2001 movie release Songcatcher, which focused on the story of the preservation of the roots music of Appalachia.
Perhaps the most visible example of the blues style of music in the late 20th century came in 1980, when Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi released the film The Blues Brothers. The film drew many of the biggest living influencers of the rhythm and blues genre together, such as Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, and John Lee Hooker. The band formed also began a successful tour under the Blues Brothers marquee. 1998 brought a sequel, Blues Brothers 2000 that, while not holding as great a critical and financial success, featured a much larger number of blues artists, such as B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Erykah Badu, Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Charlie Musselwhite, Blues Traveler, Jimmie Vaughan, and Jeff Baxter.
In 2003, Martin Scorsese made significant efforts to promote the blues to a larger audience. He asked several famous directors such as Clint Eastwood and Wim Wenders to participate in a series of documentary films for PBS called The Blues.[140] He also participated in the rendition of compilations of major blues artists in a series of high-quality CDs. Blues guitarist and vocalist Keb' Mo' performed his blues rendition of "America, the Beautiful" in 2006 to close out the final season of the television series The West Wing.
The blues was highlighted in season 2012, episode 1 of In Performance at the White House, entitled "Red, White and Blues". Hosted by Barack and Michelle Obama, the show featured performances by B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Gary Clark Jr., Jeff Beck, Derek Trucks, Keb Mo, and others.[141]
The American folk music revival began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Josh White, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, John Jacob Niles, Susan Reed, Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Cisco Houston had enjoyed a limited general popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. The revival brought forward styles of American folk music that had in earlier times contributed to the development of country and western, blues, jazz, and rock and roll music.
Overview
Pete Seeger entertaining Eleanor Roosevelt, honored guest at a racially integrated Valentine's Day party marking the opening of a canteen for the United Federal Workers of America, a trade union representing federal employees, in then-segregated Washington, D.C. Photographed by Joseph Horne for the Office of War Information, 1944.[1]
Early years
The folk revival in New York City was rooted in the resurgent interest in square dancing and folk dancing there in the 1940s as espoused by instructors such as Margot Mayo, which gave musicians such as Pete Seeger popular exposure.[2][3][4] The folk revival more generally as a popular and commercial phenomenon begins with the career of The Weavers, formed in November 1948 by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert of People's Songs, of which Seeger had been president and Hays executive secretary. People's Songs, which disbanded in 1948–49, had been a clearing house for labor movement songs (and in particular the CIO, which at the time was one of the few if not the only union federation that was racially integrated), and in 1948 had thrown all its resources to the failed presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, a folk-music aficionado (his running mate was a country-music singer-guitarist). Hays and Seeger had formerly sung together as the politically activist Almanac Singers, a group which they founded in 1941 and whose personnel often included Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Lead Belly, Cisco Houston, and Bess Lomax Hawes. The Weavers had a big hit in 1950 with the single of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene". This was number one on the Billboard charts for thirteen weeks.[5] On its flip side was "Tzena, Tzena, Tzena", an Israeli dance song that concurrently reached number two on the charts. This was followed by a string of Weaver hit singles that sold millions, including ""So Long It's Been Good to Know You" ("Dusty Old Dust") (by Woody Guthrie) and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine". The Weavers' career ended abruptly when they were dropped from Decca's catalog because Pete Seeger had been listed in the publication Red Channels as a probable subversive. Radio stations refused to play their records and concert venues canceled their engagements. A former employee of People's Songs, Harvey Matusow, himself a former Communist Party member, had informed the FBI that the Weavers were Communists, too, although Matusow later recanted and admitted he had lied. Pete Seeger and Lee Hays were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. Despite this, a Christmas Weaver reunion concert organized by Harold Leventhal in 1955 was a smash success and the Vanguard LP album of that concert, issued in 1957, was one of the top sellers of that year, followed by other successful albums.
Folk music, which often carried the stigma of left-wing associations during the 1950s Red Scare, was driven underground and carried along by a handful of artists releasing records. Barred from mainstream outlets, artists like Seeger were restricted to performing in schools and summer camps, and the folk-music scene became a phenomenon associated with vaguely rebellious bohemianism in places like New York (especially Greenwich Village) and San Francisco's North Beach, and in the college and university districts of cities like Chicago, Boston, Denver, and elsewhere.
Ron Eyerman and Scott Baretta speculate that:
[I]t is interesting to consider that had it not been for the explicit political sympathies of the Weavers and other folk singers or, another way of looking at it, the hysterical anti-communism of the Cold War, folk music would very likely have entered mainstream American culture in even greater force in the early 1950s, perhaps making the second wave of the revival nearly a decade later [i.e., in the 1960s] redundant.[6]
The media blackout of performers with alleged communist sympathies or ties was so effective that Israel Young, a chronicler of the 1960s Folk Revival who was drawn into the movement through an interest in folk dancing, communicated to Ron Eyerman that he himself was unaware for many years of the movement's 1930s and early '40s antecedents in left-wing political activism.[7]
In the early and mid-1950s, acoustic-guitar-accompanied folk songs were mostly heard in coffee houses, private parties, open-air concerts, and sing-alongs, hootenannies, and at college-campus concerts. Often associated with political dissent, folk music now blended, to some degree, with the so-called beatnik scene, and dedicated singers of folk songs (as well as folk-influenced original material) traveled through what was called "the coffee-house circuit" across the U.S. and Canada, home also to cool jazz and recitations of highly personal beatnik poetry. Two singers of the 1950s who sang folk material but crossed over into the mainstream were Odetta and Harry Belafonte, both of whom sang Lead Belly and Josh White material. Odetta, who had trained as an opera singer, performed traditional blues, spirituals, and songs by Lead Belly. Belafonte had hits with Jamaican calypso material as well as the folk song-like sentimental ballad "Scarlet Ribbons" (composed in 1949).
The revival at its height
The Kingston Trio in 1958
The Kingston Trio, a group originating on the West Coast, were directly inspired by the Weavers in their style and presentation and covered some of the Weavers' material, which was predominantly traditional. The Kingston Trio avoided overtly political or protest songs and cultivated a clean-cut collegiate persona. They were discovered while playing at a college club called the Cracked Pot by Frank Werber, who became their manager and secured them a deal with Capitol Records. Their first hit was a rewritten rendition of an old-time folk murder ballad, "Tom Dooley", which had been sung at Lead Belly's funeral concert. This went gold in 1958 and sold more than three million copies. The success of the album and the single earned the Kingston Trio a Grammy award for Best Country & Western Performance at the awards' inaugural ceremony in 1959. At the time, no folk-music category existed in the Grammy's scheme. The next year, largely as a result of The Kingston Trio album and "Tom Dooley",[8] the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences instituted a folk category and the Trio won the first Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording for its second studio album At Large. At one point, The Kingston Trio had four records at the same time among the top 10 selling albums for five consecutive weeks in November and December 1959 according to Billboard magazine's "Top LPs" chart, a record unmatched for more than 50 years[9][10][11][12][13][14] and noted at the time by a cover story in Life magazine. The huge commercial success of the Kingston Trio, whose recordings between 1958 and 1961 earned more than $25 million for Capitol records[15] or about $220 million in 2021 dollars,[16] spawned a host of groups that were similar in some respects like the Brothers Four, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Limeliters, The Chad Mitchell Trio, The New Christy Minstrels, and more. As noted by critic Bruce Eder in the All Music Guide, the popularity of the commercialized version of folk music represented by these groups emboldened record companies to sign, record, and promote artists with more traditionalist and political sensibilities.[17]
The Kingston Trio's popularity would be followed by that of Joan Baez, whose debut album Joan Baez reached the top ten in late 1960 and remained on the Billboard charts for over two years. Baez's early albums contained mostly traditional material, such as the Scottish ballad "Mary Hamilton", as well as many covers of melancholy tunes that had appeared in Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, such as "The Wagoner's Lad" and "The Butcher Boy". She did not try to imitate the singing style of her source material, however, but used a rich soprano with vibrato. Her popularity (and that of the folk revival itself) would place Baez on the cover of Time magazine in November 1962. Unlike the Kingston Trio, Baez was openly political, and as the civil rights movement gathered steam, she aligned herself with Pete Seeger, Guthrie and others. Baez was one of the singers with Seeger, Josh White, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan who appeared at Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington and sang "We Shall Overcome", a song that had been introduced by People's Songs. Harry Belafonte was also present on that occasion, as was Odetta, whom Martin Luther King introduced as "the queen of folk music" when she sang "Oh, Freedom". (Odetta Sings Folk Songs was one of 1963's best-selling folk albums). Also on hand were the SNCC Freedom Singers, the personnel of which went on to form Sweet Honey in the Rock.
The critical role played by Freedom Songs in the voter registration drives, freedom rides, and lunch counter sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and early '60s in the South gave folk music tremendous new visibility and prestige.[18] The peace movement was likewise energized by the rise of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the UK, protesting the British testing of the H-bomb in 1958, as well as by the ever-proliferating arms race and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War. Young singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, playing acoustic guitar and harmonica, had been signed and recorded for Columbia by producer John Hammond in 1961. Dylan's record enjoyed some popularity among Greenwich Village folk-music enthusiasts, but he was "discovered" by an immensely larger audience when Peter, Paul & Mary had a hit with a cover of his song "Blowin' in the Wind". That trio also brought Pete Seeger's and the Weavers' "If I Had a Hammer" to nationwide audiences, as well as covering songs by other artists such as Dylan and John Denver.
It was not long before the folk-music category came to include less traditional material and more personal and poetic creations by individual performers, who called themselves "singer-songwriters". As a result of the financial success of high-profile commercial folk artists, record companies began to produce and distribute records by a new generation of folk revival and singer-songwriters—Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Eric von Schmidt, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Dave Van Ronk, Judy Collins, Tom Rush, Fred Neil, Gordon Lightfoot, Billy Ed Wheeler, John Denver, John Stewart, Arlo Guthrie, Harry Chapin, and John Hartford, among others. Some of this wave had emerged from family singing and playing traditions, and some had not. These singers frequently prided themselves on performing traditional material in imitations of the style of the source singers whom they had discovered, frequently by listening to Harry Smith's celebrated LP compilation of forgotten or obscure commercial 78rpm "race" and "hillbilly" recordings of the 1920s and 30s, the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music (1951). A number of the artists who had made these old recordings were still very much alive and had been "rediscovered" and brought to the 1963 and 64 Newport Folk Festivals. For example, traditionalist Clarence Ashley introduced folk revivalists to the music of friends of his who still actively played the older music, such as Doc Watson and The Stanley Brothers.
Archivists, collectors, and re-issued recordings
See also: John Lomax, Alan Lomax, Robert Winslow Gordon, Ralph Rinzler, Izzy Young, Kenneth S. Goldstein, Archive of Folk Culture, and American Folklife Center
During the 1950s, the growing folk-music crowd that had developed in the United States began to buy records by older, traditional musicians from the Southeastern hill country and from urban inner-cities. New LP compilations of commercial 78-rpm race and hillbilly studio recordings stretching back to the 1920s and 1930s were published by major record labels. The expanding market in LP records increased the availability of folk-music field recordings originally made by John and Alan Lomax, Kenneth S. Goldstein, and other collectors during the New Deal era of the 1930s and 40s. Small record labels, such as Yazoo Records, grew up to distribute reissued older recordings and to make new recordings of the survivors among these artists. This was how many urban white American audiences of the 1950s and 60s first heard country blues and especially Delta blues that had been recorded by Mississippi folk artists 30 or 40 years before.
In 1952, Folkways Records released the Anthology of American Folk Music, compiled by anthropologist and experimental film maker Harry Smith. The Anthology featured 84 songs by traditional country and blues artists, initially recorded between 1927 and 1932, and was credited with making a large amount of pre-War material accessible to younger musicians. (The Anthology was re-released on CD in 1997, and Smith was belatedly presented with a Grammy Award for his achievement in 1991.)[19]
Artists like the Carter Family, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Clarence Ashley, Buell Kazee, Uncle Dave Macon, Mississippi John Hurt, and the Stanley Brothers, as well as Jimmie Rodgers, the Reverend Gary Davis, and Bill Monroe came to have something more than a regional or ethnic reputation. The revival turned up a tremendous wealth and diversity of music and put it out through radio shows and record stores.
Living representatives of some of the varied regional and ethnic traditions, including younger performers like Southern-traditional singer Jean Ritchie, who had first begun recording in the 1940s, also enjoyed a resurgence of popularity through enthusiasts' widening discovery of this music and appeared regularly at folk festivals.
Ethnic folk music
See also: List of North American folk music traditions
Ethnic folk music from other countries also had a boom during the American folk revival. The most successful ethnic performers of the revival were the Greenwich Village folksingers, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, whom Billboard magazine listed as the eleventh best-selling folk musicians in the United States.[20] The group, which consisted of Paddy Clancy, Tom Clancy, Liam Clancy, and Tommy Makem, predominantly sang English-language, Irish folk songs, as well as an occasional song in Irish Gaelic. Paddy Clancy also started and ran the folk-music label Tradition Records, which produced Odetta's first solo LP and initially brought Carolyn Hester to national prominence.[21] Pete Seeger played the banjo on their Grammy-nominated 1961 album, A Spontaneous Performance Recording,[22][23] and Bob Dylan later cited the group as a major influence on him.[24] The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem also sparked a folk-music boom in Ireland in the mid-1960s, illustrating the world-wide effects of the American folk-music revival.[25][26][27][28][29]
Books such as the popular best seller, the Fireside Book of Folk Songs (1947), which contributed to the folk song revival, featured some material in languages other than English, including German, Spanish, Italian, French, Yiddish, and Russian. The repertoires of Theodore Bikel, Marais and Miranda, and Martha Schlamme also included Hebrew and Jewish material, as well as Afrikaans. The Weavers' first big hit, the flipside of Lead Belly's "Good Night Irene", and a top seller in its own right, was in Hebrew ("Tzena, Tzena, Tzena") and they, and later Joan Baez, who was of Mexican descent, occasionally included Spanish-language material in their repertoires, as well as songs from Africa, India, and elsewhere.
The commercially oriented folk-music revival as it existed in coffee houses, concert halls, radio, and TV was predominantly an English-language phenomenon, though many of the major pop-folk groups, such as the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Chad Mitchell Trio, The Limeliters, The Brothers Four, The Highwaymen, and others, featured songs in Spanish (often from Mexico), Polynesian languages, Russian, French, and other languages in their recordings and performances. These groups also sang many English-language songs of foreign origin.
Rock subsumes folk
See also: Folk rock
The British Invasion of the mid-1960s helped bring an end to the mainstream popularity of American folk music as a wave of British bands overwhelmed most of the American music scene, including folk. Ironically, the roots of the British Invasion were in American folk, specifically a variant known as skiffle as popularized by Lonnie Donegan; however, most of the British Invasion bands had been extensively influenced by rock and roll by the time their music had reached the United States and bore little resemblance to its folk origins.
After Bob Dylan began to record with a rocking rhythm section and electric instruments in 1965 (see Electric Dylan controversy), many other still-young folk artists followed suit. Meanwhile, bands like The Lovin' Spoonful and the Byrds, whose individual members often had a background in the folk-revival coffee-house scene, were getting recording contracts with folk-tinged music played with a rock-band line-up. Before long, the public appetite for the more acoustic music of the folk revival began to wane.
"Crossover" hits ("folk songs" that became rock-music-scene staples) happened now and again. One well-known example is the song "Hey Joe", copyrighted by folk artist Billy Roberts and recorded by rock singer/guitarist Jimi Hendrix just as he was about to burst into stardom in 1967. The anthem "Woodstock", which was written and first sung by Joni Mitchell while her records were still nearly entirely acoustic and while she was labeled a "folk singer", became a hit single for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young when the group recorded a full-on rock version.
Legacy
By the late 1960s, the scene had returned to being more of a lower-key, aficionado phenomenon, although sizable annual acoustic-music festivals were established in many parts of North America during this period. The acoustic music coffee-house scene survived at a reduced scale. Through the luminary young singer-songwriters of the 1960s, the American folk-music revival has influenced songwriting and musical styles throughout the world.
Major figures
Woody Guthrie is best known as an American singer-songwriter and folk musician whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children's songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists displayed on his guitar. His best-known song is "This Land Is Your Land". Many of his recorded songs are archived in the Library of Congress.[30] In the 1930s Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California while learning, rewriting, and performing traditional folk and blues songs along the way. Many of the songs he composed were about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression, earning him the nickname the "Dust Bowl Balladeer".[31] Throughout his life, Guthrie was associated with United States communist groups, though he never formally joined the Party.[32] During his later years Guthrie served as a prominent leader in the folk movement, providing inspiration to a generation of new folk musicians, including mentor relationships with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan. Such songwriters as Dylan, Phil Ochs, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Joe Strummer and Tom Paxton have acknowledged their debt to Guthrie as an influence. Guthrie's son Arlo broke into the folk scene near the end of Woody's life and had significant success of his own.
The Almanac Singers Almanac members Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie began playing together informally in 1940; the Almanac Singers were formed in December 1940.[32] They invented a driving, energetic performing style, based on what they felt was the best of American country string band music, black and white. They evolved towards controversial topical music. Two of the regular members of the group, Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, later became founding members of The Weavers.
Burl Ives – as a youth, Ives dropped out of college to travel around as an itinerant singer during the early 1930s, earning his way by doing odd jobs and playing his guitar and banjo. In 1930 he had a brief local radio career on WBOW radio in Terre Haute, Indiana, and in the 1940s he had his own radio show The Wayfaring Stranger, titled after one of the ballads he sang. The show was very popular, and in 1946 Ives was cast as a singing cowboy in the film Smoky. Ives went on to play parts in other popular films as well. His first book, also titled The Wayfaring Stranger, was published in 1948.
Pete Seeger had met and been influenced by many important folk musicians and singer-songwriters with folk roots such as Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly. Seeger had labor movement involvements, and he met Guthrie at a "Grapes of Wrath" migrant workers' concert on March 3, 1940, and the two thereafter began a musical collaboration that included the Almanac Singers. In 1948 Seeger wrote the first version of his now-classic How to Play the Five-String Banjo, an instructional book that many banjo players credit with starting them off on the instrument.
The Weavers were formed in 1947 by Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, and Fred Hellerman. After they debuted at the Village Vanguard in New York in 1948, they were then discovered by arranger Gordon Jenkins and signed with Decca Records, releasing a series of successful but heavily orchestrated single songs. The group's political associations in the era of the Red Scare forced them to break up in 1952; they re-formed in 1955 with a series of successful concerts and album recordings on Vanguard Records. A fifth member, Erik Darling, sometimes sat in with the group when Seeger was unavailable and ultimately replaced Seeger in The Weavers when the latter resigned from the quartet in a dispute about its commercialism in general and its specific agreement to record a cigarette commercial.[33]
Josh White was an authentic singer of rural blues and folk music, a man who had been born into abject conditions in South Carolina during the Jim Crow years. As a young black singer, he was initially dubbed "the Singing Christian" (he sang some Gospel songs, and was the son of a preacher), but he also recorded blues songs under the name Pinewood Tom. Later discovered by John H. Hammond and groomed for both stage performance and a major-label recording career, his repertoire expanded to include urban blues, jazz, and gleanings from a broad folk repertoire, in addition to rural blues and gospel. White gained a very wide following in the 1940s and had a huge influence on later blues artists and groups, as well as the general folk-music scene. His pro-justice and civil-rights stances provoked harsh treatment during the suspicious HUAC era, seriously harming his performing career in the 1950s and keeping him off television until 1963. In folk-music circles, however, he retained respect and was admired both as a musical hero and a link with the Southern rural-blues and gospel traditions.
Harry Belafonte, another influential performer inspired in part by Paul Robeson, started his career as a club singer in New York to pay for his acting classes. In 1952, he signed a contract with RCA Victor and released his first record album, Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites. His breakthrough album Calypso (1956) was the first LP to sell over a million copies. The album spent 31 weeks at number one, 58 weeks in the top ten, and 99 weeks on the US charts. It introduced American audiences to Calypso music, and Belafonte was dubbed the "King of Calypso". Belafonte went on to record in many genres, including blues, American folk, gospel, and more. Odetta sang "Water Boy" and performed a duet with Belafonte of "There's a Hole in My Bucket" that hit the national charts in 1961.[34]
Odetta Holmes – Starting in 1953 singers Odetta and Larry Mohr recorded some songs, with the LP being released in 1954 as Odetta and Larry, an album that was partially recorded live at San Francisco's Tin Angel bar. Odetta enjoyed a long and respected career, with a repertoire of traditional songs (e.g., spirituals) and blues until her death in 2008, becoming known as "the Voice of the Civil Rights Movement", and "the Queen of American Folk Music" (Martin Luther King Jr.).[34]
The Kingston Trio was formed in 1957 in the Palo Alto, California area by Bob Shane, Nick Reynolds, and Dave Guard, who were just out of college. They were greatly influenced by the Weavers, the calypso sounds of Belafonte, and other semi-pop folk artists such as the Gateway Singers and The Tarriers. The unexpected and surprising influence of their hit record "Tom Dooley" (which sold almost four million units and is often credited with initiating the pop music aspect of the folk revival)[35] and the unprecedented popularity and album sales of this group from 1957 to 1963, including fourteen top ten and five number-one LPs on the Billboard charts[36]), were significant factors in creating a commercial and mainstream audience for folk-style music where little had existed prior to their emergence.[17] The Kingston Trio's success was followed by other highly successful 60s pop-folk acts, such as The Limeliters and The Highwaymen (whose version of "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore" reached #1 on the U.S. hit parade in September 1961).
Dave Van Ronk was a mainstay of the scene, the so-called "Mayor of Macdougal Street". He was a mentor and inspiration for Tom Paxton, Christine Lavin, Joni Mitchell, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Bob Dylan (who described Van Ronk as "the king who reigned supreme" in the Village)[37]
The Brothers Four: Their first album, The Brothers Four, released toward the end of the year, made the top 20. Other highlights of their early career included singing their fourth single, "The Green Leaves of Summer", from the John Wayne movie The Alamo, at the 1961 Academy Awards. Their third album, BMOC: Best Music On/Off Campus, was a top 10 LP. They also recorded the title song for the Hollywood film Five Weeks in a Balloon in 1962 and the theme song for the ABC television series Hootenanny.
Phil Ochs is most known for his topical songs such as "I Ain't Marching Anymore" and "Draft Dodger Rag", but he can also be credited as one of the major figures in the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War. Ochs started a rally in Los Angeles and penned War is Over detailing the cause. He also wrote a gentler and more poetic tunes such as "When I'm Gone" and "Changes".
Joan Baez’s career got started in 1958 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where at 17 she gave her first coffee-house concert. She was invited to perform at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival by pop-folk star Bob Gibson, after which Baez was sometimes called "the barefoot Madonna", gaining renown for her clear voice and three-octave range. She recorded her first album for an established label the following year – a collection of laments and traditional folk ballads from the British Isles, accompanying the songs with guitar. Her second LP release went gold, as did her next (live) albums. One record featured her rendition of a song by the then-unknown Bob Dylan. In the early 1960s, Baez moved into the forefront of the American folk-music revival. Increasingly, her personal convictions – peace, social justice, anti-poverty – were reflected in the topical songs that made up a growing portion of her repertoire, to the point that Baez became a symbol for these particular concerns.
Bob Dylan often performed and sometimes toured with Joan Baez, starting when she was a singer of mostly traditional songs. As Baez adopted some of Dylan's songs into her repertoire and introduced Dylan to her avid audiences, it helped the young songwriter to gain initial recognition. By the time Dylan recorded his first LP (1962), he had developed a style reminiscent of Woody Guthrie. He began to write songs that captured the "progressive" mood on the college campuses and in the coffee houses. Though by 1964 there were many new guitar-playing singer-songwriters, it is arguable that Dylan eventually became the most popular of these younger folk-music-revival performers.
Peter, Paul, and Mary debuted in the early 1960s and were an American trio who ultimately became one of the biggest musical acts of the 1960s. The trio was composed of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers. They were one of the main folk music torchbearers of social commentary music in that decade. During the 1960s, they won five Grammy Awards. As the decade passed, their music incorporated more elements of pop and rock.
Judy Collins, sometimes known as ""Judy Blue Eyes"" debuted in the early 1960s. At first, she sang traditional folk songs or songs written by others – in particular the protest poets of the time, such as Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan. She also recorded her own versions of important songs from the period, such as Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man", Ian Tyson's "Someday Soon", and Pete Seeger's "Turn, Turn, Turn". Collins eventually started writing her own songs, several of which became hits both for herself and for other artists.
The Smothers Brothers, composed of Tom and Dick Smothers, used comedy to promote folk music on their CBS-TV variety series (1967–1969), along with social protest against the Vietnam War et al. They had many notable music guests such as blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger.
Gallery
Woody Guthrie in 1943
Woody Guthrie in 1943
Burl Ives in 1955
Burl Ives in 1955
Pete Seeger in 1955
Pete Seeger in 1955
Josh White, Café Society (Downtown), New York, N.Y., c. June 1946
Josh White, Café Society (Downtown), New York, N.Y., c. June 1946
Harry Belafonte speaking at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C
Harry Belafonte speaking at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C
Odetta, 1961
Odetta, 1961
Joan Baez playing at the March on Washington in August 1963
Joan Baez playing at the March on Washington in August 1963
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at the March on Washington, 1963
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at the March on Washington, 1963
Bob Dylan in November 1963
Bob Dylan in November 1963
Peter, Paul and Mary
Peter, Paul and Mary
Judy Collins performing on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, 1967
Judy Collins performing on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, 1967
The Smothers Brothers in 1967
The Smothers Brothers in 1967
Other performers
Eric Andersen
Leon Bibb
David Blue
David Bromberg
Bud & Travis
Guy Carawan
Johnny Cash
Harry Chapin
Sam Charters
Guy Clark
Paul Clayton
John Cohen
Leonard Cohen
Shawn Colvin
Elizabeth Cotten
Karen Dalton
Barbara Dane
Erik Darling
John Denver
Donovan
Ramblin' Jack Elliott
Logan English
Even Dozen Jug Band
Mimi Fariña
Richard Fariña
Jackson C. Frank
The Freedom Singers
Gale Garnett
Gateway Singers
Bob Gibson
Cynthia Gooding
The Greenbriar Boys
David Grisman
Stefan Grossman
John P. Hammond
Tim Hardin
Richie Havens
Lee Hays
John Herald
Carolyn Hester
Joe Hickerson
The Highwaymen (folk band)
David Holt (musician)
The Holy Modal Rounders
Cisco Houston
Janis Ian
Skip James
Joe and Eddie
Lisa Kindred
Kossoy Sisters
Peter La Farge
Bruce Langhorne
Gordon Lightfoot
The Lovin' Spoonful
Ewan MacColl
Ed McCurdy
Roger McGuinn
Maria Muldaur
Geoff Muldaur
Jo Mapes
Joni Mitchell
Bob Neuwirth
New Lost City Ramblers
Tom Paxton
Malvina Reynolds
Fritz Richmond
Gil Robbins
The Rooftop Singers
Dick Rosmini
Tom Rush
Tony Saletan
John Sebastian
Mike Seeger
Peggy Seeger
The Serendipity Singers
Simon & Garfunkel
Patrick Sky
Rosalie Sorrels
The Tarriers
Artie Traum
Happy Traum
Ian and Sylvia
Eric Von Schmidt
The Washington Squares
Doc Watson
Gillian Welch
Hedy West
Robin and Linda Williams
Glenn Yarborough
Managers
Albert Grossman
Harold Leventhal
Victor Maymudes
Fred Weintraub
Frank Werber
Venues
The Bitter End
Cafe Au Go Go
Caffè Lena