“The blues are the roots, everything else is the fruits” -- Willie Dixon

[raul04]

Blues music

I've always loved listening the blues

 

[flea]

The gawds paying homage

 

[IllmaticDelta]

When people talk about what exactly is the "blues", they're refering many times to what people refer to as the "Blues Form". IMO, the form isn't what makes the Blues sound like the Blues or "Bluesy" for example, take look at some of these jazz song descriptions

Riverwalk Blues All Star Revue

More often than not the blues provide common ground for jam sessions at The Landing. On this edition of Riverwalk Jazz, the blues cover a lot of territory from the “C.C. Rider Blues,” a traditional blues that first surfaced in about 1908 to Duke Ellington's 1942 "C Jam Blues" to a dikk Hyman original called “Riverwalk Blues,” composed on the spot during this broadcast.



A formal definition of blues is a song 12 bars long divided into three parts of four bars each where the music—and often the lyrics—follow the form AAB. Songs of this type on today’s broadcast are: "Million Dollar Secret" sung by Stephanie Nakasian, "Incoherent Blues" by Clark Terry and "C. C. Rider Blues" played by Kenny Davern. Some numbers in this jam session do not follow this form but have a blues tonality through the use of ‘blue notes.’ One such example is the 1932 Arlen-Koheler song "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," played by trombone masters Dan Barrett, Bob Havens and Mike Pittsley. Another is the Bessie Smith classic "Muddy Water—A Mississippi Moan" from 1927, performed here in a moving rendition by Carol Woods. The great Benny Carter plays one of his original compositions called "Evening Star.” While not a formal blues, it has a smoky, blue mood.

http://riverwalkjazz.stanford.edu/program/riverwalk-blues-all-star-revue


and these Louis Armstrong jazz songs..

I have transcribed Louis’ playing on the whole recording of each of these as it is also interesting to see what he plays in the ensemble passages. The other musicians on both recordings are Johnny Dodds (clt), John Thomas (tbn), Lil Armstrong (pno), Johnny St Cyr (gtr/bjo), Pete Briggs (tba) and Baby Dodds (dr). The addition of a tuba playing the bass line (generally on beats 1 and 3) really adds something to the ensemble, while Baby Dodds on drums doesn’t really add much except for the classic cymbal hit on beat 4 of the last bar. However, these two recordings are all about Louis, his virtuosity shining through and dominating in both tunes.

‘Wild Man Blues’

opens with a brief 8 bar ensemble passage, before Louis takes over with his solo. Throughout the solo (and Johnny Dodds’ clarinet solo after) the rhythm section play accompanying chords for two bars and then drop out leaving the soloist on their own for two bars. Louis switches seamlessly between a bluesy triplet feel and a faster double time feel (represented by the semiquavers in the transcription), gliding through different registers with ease. Despite the title, the form is not a 12 bar blues, but much of Louis’ playing has a bluesy sound to it (for example, the use of the ‘blue note’ C# in bars 14 and 26). Following Dodds’ clarinet solo an even briefer 4 bar ensemble passage ends the piece.

‘Potato Head Blues’


is also not a 12 bar blues and has a classic Dixieland feel to it. The opening melody is performed by Louis with the clarinet and trombone improvising counter melodies, up to bar 31 where a 2 bar trumpet break leads to a restrained and melodic 16 bar solo from Louis over a new set of chord changes. Dodds then solos over the chords of the initial 32 bar section, before a 4 bar banjo break sets up an explosive solo from Louis over stop time rhythmic accompaniment – this time, a chord played on the first beat of every other bar. This solo is regarded as a classic, and rightly so – Louis plays some beautifully melodic phrases coupled with exciting rhythmic ideas and complete control over his instrument. Then after 32 bars the rest of the ensemble steam in again and Louis powerfully leads everyone home in the final 16 bar section.

https://nickwalters.wordpress.com/2011/02/




Armstrong's "Potatoe Head Blues"doesn't fit the strict definition of the "Blues Form" yet it's soaked in the tonal sounds of the Blues which is what made Louis who he was.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

another example of what I mean by being Blues influenced or Blusey without using the Blues form

Chasin' the Blues: The Jim Cullum Jazz Band in Concert

The first hit record by a self-accompanied bluesman was 'Papa' Charlie Jackson’s 1925 recording of his own composition; an up-tempo, 12-bar blues called "Shake That Thing.” One of the most successful early solo bluesmen, Jackson played a six-string banjo tuned like a guitar.



Most often, we think of blues and jazz as two separate genres of music. Jazz has a wider range than blues, drawing upon popular songs, theater songs, non-blues original

compositions, and a vocabulary and tradition of improvisational melodic ideas other than strictly blues. But it is the jazz musician's inclusion of the blues—both in the formal sense of a 3-part song in 12 bars, and the more general meaning of 'blue' tonal expression—that gives jazz its most defining character.



This week on Riverwalk Jazz, we’ll discover how 'blues' does not always come in '12-bar packages.' Some of the tunes on this week's show, like "Shake That Thing" and "Aunt Hagar's Blues," follow the familiar 12-bar structure of formal blues. Others have a strong blues feeling and even use the word 'blues' in the title, but are based on other song forms. New Orleans-born Topsy Chapman offers her soulful version of "I've Got the Blues for Home Sweet Home," a Tin Pan Alley tune made popular by Susie Edwards, one-half of the famous black vaudeville comedy team Butterbeans and Susie.

"Aunt Hagar's Blues,” composed in 1920 by W.C. Handy, is heard in a new arrangement by clarinetist Ron Hockett that incorporates an opening strain most likely contributed by pioneering cornetist and bandleader, King Oliver. Duke Heitger joins the band on trumpet.



"Take It Slow and Easy" from 1919 follows a very simple, non-blues, 16-bar form. In our version, guests Duke Heitger on trumpet and Clint Baker on guitar recall the hot version recorded in the ‘30s by the legendary interracial recording group led by Eddie Condon known as the Rhythmakers.



No matter what song form is used, The Jim Cullum Jazz Band performs all of their music with a heavy blues inflection, using bent notes, growls, and "blue tonality.”

http://riverwalkjazz.stanford.edu/program/chasin-blues-jim-cullum-jazz-band-concert



Elements of Jazz

A. Tone Colors

Jazz musicians play their instruments utilizing the complete gamut of tone colors (tonal quality) that their instruments will allow.


B. Emotional Expression


Unlike classical players who usually strive for a clear, “pure” tone, jazz players strive for a tone that is generally more “vocal” in nature, i.e., jazz musicians will bend pitches, “growl,” “whine,” play “raunchy,” “dark,” “light,” “airy,” “raspy,” “bluesy,” “throaty,” “nasally” (anything the human voice can do to express emotion and then some) in addition to playing clearly.

http://www.jazzinamerica.org/LessonPlan/11/2/158

Great description of how jazz players can sound "bluesy"even when not playing material in the Blues form. This can be applied to any non-blues form music.

This is called Blues Inflection. The Blues isn't limited to/by a chord progression like many think. It's all about the tonality!

 

[Mr. Negative]

If you can only say Mississippi has only been good for / contributed to one thing....

this is it.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

From another thread

@Stuntone

Good sh*t. Like the first video.

I swear is it mean or is Blues and Gospel very similar? Especially listening to your first video.

Blues and Gospel are somewhat related and Blues is/was said to be Gospels evil twin. Blues influences are all over Gospel music though.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Guitar Lesson 4 - Adding the flat 5th to the Pentatonic scale

Adding the "blues note" to the minor pentatonic scale for the "blues scale".






The Flatted Fifth - The Devil's Interval

The flatted fifth has been called the Devil's interval, and people were actually executed "back in the day" for writing songs that used this interval. The flatted fifth is the chromatic passing note between the four and the five in the scale - the so-called "blues note"


The Flatted Fifth - The Devil's Interval



Diabolus in Musica

This excerpt from mm416 explains the b5 "tritone" in music, once banned or at least very much avoided by religious circles in medieval times.

 

[Dr. Narcisse]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Heavy Metal/Sabbath related



Musical Evolution – Black Sabbath

Well, it just so happens that the tritone is the driving sound behind the blues. In a typical blues song, every single chord has a tritone in it. That’s the gritty sound that makes you say “Hey that sounds bluesy!” In the blues scale, the tritone is actually called the “blues note”. Typically, though, you don’t sit on the blues note when you’re soloing in the blues. You just sort of pass through it. It’s like sprinkling just a bit of red pepper on your food. What Black Sabbath did was just sit right on it. It’s absolutely all over their music and a defining feature of their riffs. Want to go from blues to metal? Just hang a little longer on that blues note, the tritone.

https://tunessence.com/blog/musical-evolution-episode-3-black-sabbath/


From a review on Sabbath:

Black Sabbath's debut album is the birth of heavy metal as we now know it. Compatriots like Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple were already setting new standards for volume and heaviness in the realms of psychedelia, blues-rock, and prog rock. Yet of these metal pioneers, Sabbath are the only one whose sound today remains instantly recognizable as heavy metal, even after decades of evolution in the genre. Circumstance certainly played some role in the birth of this musical revolution -- the sonic ugliness reflecting the bleak industrial nightmare of Birmingham; guitarist Tony Iommi's loss of two fingertips, which required him to play slower and to slacken the strings by tuning his guitar down, thus creating Sabbath's signature style. These qualities set the band apart, but they weren't wholly why this debut album transcends its clear roots in blues-rock and psychedelia to become something more. Sabbath's genius was finding the hidden malevolence in the blues, and then bludgeoning the listener over the head with it. Take the legendary album-opening title cut. The standard pentatonic blues scale always added the tritone, or flatted fifth, as the so-called "blues note"; Sabbath simply extracted it and came up with one of the simplest yet most definitive heavy metal riffs of all time.

Geezer Butler talks about it in the book, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath : The Battle for Black Sabbath

" When you hear a riff of his you know exactly who it is and there are very, very few guitarists you could claim that of. It’s interesting the Heavy Metal label the band has because Billy always said they were a Blues band. They knew all of that old stuff, had a great knowledge of it.”

This observation about Sabbath’s Blues heritage is poignant. Often overlooked it is vital to the understanding of Black Sabbath’s immensely successful formula. They didn’t title their fledgling act The Polka Tulk Blues Band for nothing. Geezer Butler backed this up, taking a momentary dip back into time when asked a question on the musical values of his 1997 solo record ‘Black Science’. “I like to experiment, we all do. When I think of the hours and hours we have spent just jamming along in the studio. That’s how we relax, have a good old blast with your mates and forget about everything else. If we could get paid just for that I would be very happy. Sometimes you forget why you’re there. Oh, we have to make an album? Rehearse for a tour?

Most of our stuff goes back to 12 bar Blues really. Our younger fans find that surprising sometimes. When we were kids we started out playing along to those old records in just the same way people like Jimmy Page did. Back in those days that’s how you leant to play. We taught ourselves. All our early gigs were Blues songs and that is what we were—a Blues band. We would be happy to just jam instrumentally for ages. I suppose the transition to Heavy Metal was through Tony and I developing these very simple three chord Blues riffs into something of our own. It was like, OK, where can we go with this? Alvin Lee of Ten Years After had a big effect on us too. Alvin was doing the same thing, taking the Blues but turning it around into something different. It’s the same for Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull and Deep Purple too, all those bands of that period, just expressed the Blues differently. Its all a tradition of the Blues so give us half the chance and we’ll spend all day playing Willie Dixon. People seem surprised by that but I tell them, Heavy Metal would not exist without the Blues. Black Sabbath would not exist without the Blues.”

http://www.zondabooks.com/titles/sbs-battle/chapter11.htm

 

[Bawon Samedi]

From another thread



Blues and Gospel are somewhat related and Blues is/was said to be Gospels evil twin. Blues influences are all over Gospel music though.

Yeah I see "Blues" as the "darker" or "Devil" version of Gospel.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Yeah I see "Blues" as the "darker" or "Devil" version of Gospel.

Gospel is also more rhythmic and diverse in vocal harmony. They both use melismatic colorings though

 

[R.O. Double]

Subs.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

He's what they sometimes call a "Songster" but there was no distinction by the black musicians themselves between a songster and a bluesman. Technically all of the early Blues guys were songsters. Basically the term was used to try to make a distinction between AfroAmerican folk music than didn't use the 12 bar form and the Blues that did.

The songster tradition both pre-dated and co-existed with blues music, especially in the areas of the Southeast that produced music in the Piedmont style. It began soon after the end of slavery in the south, when African-American musicians became able to travel and play music for a living. Usually a solo musician with a guitar, or occasionally a banjo, the songster would perform songs from a variety of musical styles including gospel, field songs and folk, and later ragtime and blues. Songsters were performers, first and foremost, and maintained the broad repertoire to appeal to a wide range of audiences. Through vehicles like minstrel and medicine shows, the black songsters interacted with white musicians, who would later adopt the black musicians’ songs and use them, along with songs from white sources, as the foundations of early country music. Songster style is closely associated with styles such as Field Recordings, Folk-Blues, Folksongs, Jug Band, Vaudeville Blues, Work Songs, Pre-War Blues, Pre-War Country Blues

http://www.allmusic.com/subgenre/songster-ma0000012093

Songsters had a notable influence on blues music, which developed from around the turn of the 20th century. However, there was also a change in song styles. Songsters often sang composed songs or traditional ballads, frequently about legendary heroes or characters such as "Frankie and Johnny" and "Stagger Lee". Blues singers, in contrast, tended to invent their own lyrics (or recycle those of others) and develop their own tunes and guitar (or sometimes piano) playing styles, singing of their own lives and shared emotional experiences.

Many of the earliest recordings of what is now referred to as the blues were made by songsters who commanded a much wider repertoire, often extending to popular Tin Pan Alley songs of the day as well as the "authentic" country blues. There is a growing view among scholars[5] that the distinction made by experts such as Alan Lomax between "deep" blues singers and "songsters" is an artificial one, and that in fact most of the leading archetypal blues artists, including Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, performed a wide variety of music in public, but recorded only that proportion of their material which was seen by their producers as original or innovative.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

A short docu about Charley Patton included in the box set "The Definitive Charley Patton - 75th Anniversary Edition"


@ 13:28 they talk about the false distinction between early "Bluesman" and "Songsters".

 

[IllmaticDelta]

It was early Bluesmen that put the guitar into popular music

The Unstrung History of the American Guitar: The Guitar and 19th Century American Music


Contemporary rock, country and R&B guitarists can trace their influences, step by step, to unrecorded but highly significant turn-of-the-twentieth-century rural musicians. Rock and R&B guitarists can easily follow the chain of influences back to early African-American rockers like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, who were firmly rooted in the urban blues of slightly older cohorts like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. Waters, Hooker and many other of the best urban blues musicians of their era came from the Mississippi Delta region, where they learned their craft in the rich musical environment that produced the legendary first generation of recorded country blues artists such as Son House and Charlie Patton. These seminal blues figures in turn learned from the previous generation of black musicians like Patton’s mentor Henry Sloan. Sloan belonged to the first generation of rural black musicians to take up the guitar in large numbers.

African-American musicians, especially those in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, played the guitar as early as the 1830s. Mary Reynolds, who was born a slave on a Louisiana plantation, recalled Saturday evenings when musicians “brung fiddles and guitars and come out and play.” Rosa Magnum, born in Mississippi in 1831, remembered some of the happier moments of her childhood: “Us had candy pullings an' water mellon cuttings on de plantation; an us had guitar and fiddle music.” But it wasn’t until the mid-1880s that the guitar surged in popularity with rural black musicians.

The rapid increase in the popularity of the guitar among rural black musicians in the late nineteenth century was driven largely by a maturing transportation infrastructure that made cheap, mass produced instruments more available to musicians in remote areas. Blues historian Dave Evans describes the guitar coming into the rural South as “part of a wave of consumer goods that included other musical instruments, such as the piano, the pump organ, the harmonica, horns, and drums.” These instruments were valued precisely because they were not rural and traditional, and carried an aura of urbanity and upward mobility. According to Evans, “For blacks in particular the guitar also lacked any residual associations with slavery, minstrel music and its demeaning stereotypes, or even with the South.” Guitar makers began using mass production techniques in the 1840s, and by the 1880s inexpensive mass-produced instruments were widely available. Guitars could be bought at small town furniture stores and country general stores, or ordered from a mail order catalog, for only a few dollars.

During the 1880s and 1890s itinerant musicians known variously as “musicianers”, “music physicianers”, and “songsters,” traveled among the towns, plantations and work camps of the South, performing a mixed bag of folk songs, minstrel numbers, religious songs and dance tunes. “With a prized ‘box’ [guitar], perhaps his only property, such a Negro may wander from town to town, from section to section, ... gathering new songs and singing the old ones,” according to sociologist Howard W. Odum, based on his fieldwork in the early twentieth century. They would sing on street corners for nickels, perform in rough jooks, or be hired to provide dance music at picnics, frolics, socials and house parties. Occasionally they might hook up with a traveling medicine show or small minstrel troupe. Some preferred to play for white dances and picnics since the pay was usually better, and they had a full repertoire of popular songs and dances favored by white audiences.

Blues-like music was being played in the Deep South by at least the late 1890s, but rural black guitarists did not think of themselves specifically as blues musicians until the 1920s, when they were pigeonholed as such by record companies. Dave Evans suggests that Charlie Patton’s mentor, Henry Sloan, was one of the first to set the field hollers of black farmers to guitar accompaniment, which was a critical step in the creation of what eventually became the blues. But were we transported back to the Mississippi Delta at the turn of the last century and heard Sloan perform at a frolic or a house party, we’d probably find his style, to our ears, to be as much “hillbilly” as blues. According to Patton’s sister, Viola, Sloan and her brother would play "'Alabama Bound.' 'Rooster crowed and the hen looked around; if you want anything, you got to run me down.' All that kind of song. ... They’d be singing, 'You see my black cow, tell her to hurry home; I ain’t had no milk since the cow been gone.' Lord, I don’t know, just some of everything”

Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas (1874-1955?) was one of the few black guitarists of Sloan’s generation to make commercial recordings. Thomas didn’t record until 1927, but his repertoire extends well into the nineteenth century. A hobo and a street musician, Thomas primarily roamed throughout East Texas, but occasionally he traveled as far as Chicago. Of the 23 recordings he made for Vocalion Records between 1927 and 1929, only four are genuine blues numbers – probably reflecting the very new status of the style during the period when Thomas acquired most of his repertoire. The remainder is a mix of vaudeville and minstrel show tunes, ragtime “c00n” songs, ballads, reels and dance tunes. Thomas’ guitar style is in part derived from nineteenth century banjo performance techniques, and tends towards lively, percussive strumming well-suited for dancing.

Charles Haffer, a Mississippi singer and street evangelist born in the 1870s, linked the new popularity of the guitar among black musicians in the 1890s to the emergence of the blues:

“I used to sing all the old jump up songs. The blues weren’t in style then – we called them reels. … They danced by fiddles in those days and they had fellows they paid to come and call figures for um – I don’t hear talk of than now. ‘Swing your partner, swing your corner.’… Back around that time the guitar came into style, and the first blues I remember originated from a sheriff named Joe Turner. He was a kinda bad man and if he’s go after you, he’d bring you. His blues was very famous….”


As a frame of reference, Joe Turner was a penal officer who transported convicts in Tennessee between 1892 and 1896.

The adoption of the guitar by rural black musicians was encouraged by the growing availability of brighter sounding wire strings. Steel strings were better suited to, and certainly influenced the creation of, the performance techniques of the emerging blues style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stiffer, higher tension wire strings are more resistant than gut to bending, producing a more complex and expressive sound when pushed by the fingers to reach the characteristic blues tones that fall in between the steps of the Western chromatic scale defined by the frets. The more complex overtone pattern and greater “sustain” (i.e. longer decay pattern) of steel strings also made them much better suited for “slide” or “bottleneck” style playing, where a hard object such as the neck of a glass bottle or the dull edge of a pocket knife is pressed against the strings to produce a fluid sound strikingly like the human voice.

The guitar was largely ignored by rural white musicians until around the turn of the twentieth century. The sudden popularity of the instrument among white “hillbilly” musicians probably was due to the fact that – then as now – young whites were attuned to musical trends in the black community and eager to learn the latest black styles. The blues – which was just coming into its own as a distinctive new style – was probably the hottest, most exciting thing those white country boys had ever heard, and the guitar was a key part of that excitement. "My daddy ran a little store, and these section hands would come over from the railroad at noon,” recalled early Grand Ole Opry guitarist Sam McGee of his childhood in Tennessee. "Well, after they finished their lunch, they would play guitars. … That’s where I learned to love the blues tunes. Black people were about the only people that played guitar then.”

The guitar – and along with it the blues – was introduced to white Appalachia by African-American musicians, principally railroad workers, deckhands on river boats, and men coming into the mountains from other parts of the South looking for work in the mines and lumber camps in the early part of the twentieth century. Frank Hutchinson, (1898-1945), a white blues musician from Logan County, West Virginia, first heard a black guitarist with a railroad crew that came through the area when he was seven or eight years old. Norton, Virginia banjo-playing coal miner Moran Lee "Dock" Boggs (1898-1971), as a small boy, was fascinated with the music of a black man named "Go Lightening" who walked along railroad tracks playing his guitar. If Hutchison and Boggs’ memories are reliable, black guitarists were in Appalachia at least as early as the first decade of the twentieth century.