The Blues, father of rock and roll, turns 100
by Jean-Louis Santini
WASHINGTON, Sept 30, 2003 (AFP) - This year, the United States celebrates the 100th birthday of the blues, which fathered rock and witnessed the great social upheavals of the US 20th century, from the Depression to racial desegregation. The celebrations -- concerts, radio shows, educational programs and documentaries by Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Charles Burnett and Clint Eastwood -- come with a proclamation from Congress and signed by President George W. Bush, making 2003 the Year of the Blues.
"Blues music is the most influential form of American roots music, with its impact heard around the world in rock and roll, jazz, rhythm and blues, country and even classical music," the proclamation said. "Blues came from heavy labor and discrimination and poverty," according to Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln, who co-authored the proclamation.
"Blues expresses all human emotions: despair, high spirit... in its most immediate expression," Tony Mangiullo an Italian immigrant and owner of the celebrated Blues club Rosa's Lounge.
It is that raw emotion and sexual innuendo that makes even African-Americans shy away from the blues, which many think of as a kind of country music for blacks. It is named for an emotional state of worry, described as "blue." Singing about lost love, friends or money was a kind of therapy. The blues has its roots in Africa. US slaves used the call-and-response pattern for work songs. The leader sang the call, repeated it, and the rest joined in on the third line. That structure, unique to Western music, lives on in today's "12-bar" blues. In the Deep South, after the Civil War, freed slaves with guitars and harmonicas were free to travel with their music.
It was 100 years ago, so the story goes, that W.C. Handy wrote the first blues song, on a railway platform waiting for a train in Tutweiler, Mississippi. Nearby, a man sang and played a song Handy had never heard, making chords with a knife blade across the strings. Handy claimed to be the first ever to score a blues song. By 1912, he popularized it by publishing "Memphis Blues" sheet music. By 1920, the first blues song recorded by a woman -- "Crazy Blues," by Mamie Smith -- sold a million copies. With the Depression of the 1930s, John and Alan Lomax criss-crossed the rural South, recording for the first time Blind Lemon Jefferson and Huddie "Ledbelly" Ledbetter. Bluesmen like Little Willie Jacobs, a Creole who could speak French, followed the railroads north, to St. Louis, Nashville and, most importantly, Chicago. It was there that the acoustic blues of the Mississippi Delta met the drum kit and electrified guitars, bass and harmonica. "Chicago Blues" was born.
It remains a powerful force 100 years later. The basic Chicago blues band -- drums, electric bass, guitar -- became the basis for the rock and roll bands of the 1960s. "The Blues Had a Baby, and They Named it Rock and Roll," as bluesman Muddy Waters, aka McKinley Morgenfield, entitled one of his compositions. Even more important was the blues' I-V-IV chord progression, which it passed on to rock, through Little Richard, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. Blues and rock were not lost on Europe, catching the eyes of the Rolling Stones, who liked to record songs like Willie Dixon's "Little Red Rooster" in their earthy, 12-bar style. Britons John Mayall and Eric Clapton formed bands of black and white musicians, promoting racial harmony and helping put money in the pockets of some bluesmen. Musicians like Robert Cray, Son Seals and Albert Collins drove a blues revival in the 1980s in Chicago. The rise of the compact disc in the 1990s gave record labels the chance to re-engineer and re-release thousands of titles, though today's blues recordings account for less than one percent of US sales. "Never in my lifetime has this kind of opportunity happened for blues music," said Ben Manilla, co-producer of "The House of Blues Radio Hour." "This is the shot in the arm that it needs."
