AppId is over the quota
When did blues emerge? Perhaps you may have heard the mythic "the blues been here since time began, since the first lyin' woman met the first cheatin' man." The simplest and clearest definition of blues is the one used by musicians, as when they say, "Let's play a blues." This is a certain sequence of chords, commonly known as the twelve-bar blues, and there have been literally thousands of songs composed in this pattern. This commercial definition uses the word as a grab-bag term for all sorts of older African-American music that cannot be filed elsewhere: The rule seems to be that if a black person played it before 1950 then it must be the blues. Genres and categories are not however descriptions of music; they are ways of grouping and marketing music. Or, to put it another way, such divisions do not deal with how music sounds, but how it is perceived. Our present day idea of blues has been largely determined by people who had little if anything to do with the culture that produced the music, and who codified their definitions after blues had ceased to be part of the mainstream black pop scene. No one involved in the blues world at the time was calling their music art. It was working-class pop music, and its purveyors were looking for immediate sales, with no expectation that their songs would be remembered once the blues vogue had passed.
Since the coming of the folk-blues revival in the late 1950s, hundreds of middleclass white kids (and some black kids as well) have built themselves this image of work shirts or overalls, hunching over guitars and mumbling Mississippi field inflections. It is important to remember that these musicians were practiced professionals, some with many years of stage experience, and that they presented themselves as not pure, down home blues women or men, but as successful stars. Their costumes were famously gaudy, and they were known for having an uncanny control over their audiences. As commercial entertainers they were keenly aware of the current trends and once they became established as recording stars they used many of the same sorts of sale gimmicks as the vaudevillians who preceded them. If some of these artists are now remembered purely as blues players it is only due to the commercial strictures of the recording scouts. The songs that blues artists played in the studio not only failed to represent their day to day repertoires, but were often created specifically for the recording session and never performed before or since.
Black Southerners had a deep tradition of private and communal singing, much of it with roots reaching back to Africa. Histories of the blues frequently begin with a discussion of this music, the "work songs," "moans," and "field hollers," and treat the commercial blues compositions as an outgrowth of this folk tradition. However the blues that was being sold as sheet music and on recordings, performed on street corners, theaters, rent parties or picnics was not simply a commercialization of the styles that black Southerners had sung to ease the burdens of work, sorrow, or boredom. The problem was that of familiarity, the people who were buying records were not spending their hard earned cash just to hear the same stuff they listened to or sang during their workdays in the fields. To folklorists, this music was fascinating, but to blues buyers it was not even music. Especially during the 1920s and 1930s, the peak period of black migration to the urban North, the blues records coming in from New York and Chicago were seen by a lot of Southern blacks as representing the antithesis of old time field songs. Blues was the music of the present and future, not of the oppressive plantation past.
No comments:
Post a Comment