African Roots of the Blues

            The deepest roots of the blues lie in the diverse African musics that came to the United States with African men and women who were brought to America during the slave trade. [1]   Many of the broadly shared features of African musical styles would become integral parts of the earliest blues, and some would be preserved throughout the blues ’ evolution and in other styles as well.

             One feature of many African musics that would have a major impact on the blues and on Western popular music is what Robert Palmer calls a “fondness for muddying … clean sounds;” in many different African cultures, musicians attach sheets of tin with metal rings to their drums or stringed instruments to achieve a buzzing effect. [2]    This fondness for muddy, gritty sounds persisted in the blues and led many early blues recording artists to experiment with recording techniques that created distortion; countless popular styles today that utilize distortion are thus indebted to this African tendency that was perpetuated by blues singers in America.

             Another prominent feature of many African musical styles is their participatory nature. In many communities, one singer leads with a statement, and a group responds in unison. This call-and-response format was preserved in the work songs of African American slaves and their descendants, and thus made its way into the blues, where the responding role was taken over by the guitar (played with a bottleneck slide). Although true antiphony is rarely heard in later styles, the “conversation” between the singer and guitar (or other instrument) that was common in the blues became an integral part of blues-influenced rock and jazz (for example, in Mose Allison’s Young Man a piano riff responds to the vocal refrain). [3]

             Finally, the musical scales that were employed by African and Afro-descendent slaves, although they baffled contemporary observers who tried fruitlessly to understand them in terms of Western harmony, were incorporated into blues melodies and harmonies as “blue notes” in the diatonic scale. [4]   Blues singers lowered the 3rd, 5th, and 7th degrees of the major scale at will, in an expressive, improvisatory manner, and these expressive lowerings, stylistically indebted to the African scales that mixed with diatonic harmony during slavery, became an integral part of later, blues-influenced styles. [5]

      Bibliography

      [1]  Robert Palmer, Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History, from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 25. <p class="MsoFootnoteText">      <span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Arial Unicode MS";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">[2]  Ibid., 30 <p class="MsoNormal">      <span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US; mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">[3]  Mose Allison, recording of “Young Man” on Mose Allison Sings. Prestige PR 7279, 1963, compact disc. <p class="MsoNormal">      <span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US; mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">[4]   Leroi Jones [Amiri Baraka], Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1963), 24. <p class="MsoFootnoteText">      <span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Arial Unicode MS";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">[5]  Ibid., 24-5.