From the history of blues: from plantations to studio

Blues, like everything that has stunning success, has been an underground musical movement for decades. This is understandable, because white society could not accept the music of African Americans working on the plantations, and even listening to it was shameful for them.

Such music was considered radical and even inciting violence. The hypocrisy of society disappeared only in the 20s of the last century. The history of the blues, like its creators, is characterized by a negative and depressive character. And, just like melancholy, the blues is simple to the point of genius.

Many performers were engaged in hard physical labor until their death; they were vagabonds and had odd jobs. This is exactly how most of the black population in the United States lived at the beginning of the twentieth century. Among such free musicians who left the brightest mark on the history of the blues are Huddy “Leadbelly” Ledbetter and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Musical and technical features of blues

Along with the simplicity of character of the improvisers who created this movement, the blues is not musically complicated. This music is a framework on which solo parts of other instruments seem to be strung. In the latter, you can hear a “dialogue”: the sounds seem to echo each other. A similar technique is usually visible in blues lyrics – poems are structured according to a “question-answer” structure.

No matter how simple and impromptu the blues may seem, it has its own theory. Most often, the composition form is 12 bars, this is the so-called:

• Four measures in tonic harmony;
• Two measures in the subdominant;
• Two bars in the tonic;
• Two measures in the dominant;
• Two bars in the tonic.

The instrument used to express the depressed mood of the blues is traditionally the acoustic guitar. Naturally, over time the ensemble began to be supplemented with drums and keyboards. This is the sound that is becoming familiar to the ears of our contemporary people.

Note that African-American workers were sometimes not hindered by the lack of musical instruments (plantation conditions), and the blues were simply sung. Instead of a game, there are only rhythmic shouts, similar to those made by workers on the field.

Blues in the modern world

The history of the blues reached its apogee in the mid-twentieth century, when a tired world was waiting for something new and unusual. That’s when he burst into the recording studio. The blues had a serious influence on the main pop trends of the 70s: rock and roll, metal, jazz, reggae and pop.

But much earlier, the blues was appreciated by academic composers who wrote classical music. For example, echoes of the blues can be heard in the piano concerto of Maurice Ravel, and George Gershwin even called one of his works for piano and orchestra “Rhapsody in Blue.”

The blues has survived to this day as an unchanged, ideal and perfect template. However, it is still quite relevant and has many followers. It still carries a serious spiritual load: in the notes of even the freshest compositions one can hear the heaviness of fate and endless sadness, even if the language of the poems is not clear. That’s the amazing thing about blues music – talking to the listener.