Category: Blues

  • Origins of Jazz

    Content/Trigger warning: Racist imagery and lyrics. Among the origins of jazz are several overlapping musical genres that were popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Black musical theater, which, around the turn of the twentieth century, crossed color lines to become popular with white as well as black audiences. Marti Newland singing “Swing Along,”…

  • Authenticity, part V: Tribute or Appropriation?

    As John Lomax was the first to record Lead Belly, so Alan Lomax was the first to record Muddy Waters. Muddy Waters (1915-1983) was born McKinley Morganfield, the son of sharecroppers, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, also the homeplace of blues greats Son House and Robert Johnson. He moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration in…

  • An Introductory Blues Playlist

    Examples of the blues from the 1920s to the 1960s, from the Mississippi Delta to Texas to Chicago. As you listen, keep in mind the great themes of the genre: betrayal, unhappiness in love, poverty, mistreatment, hard work, crime, violence, addiction. A woman’s unique perspective on the fate of a prisoner: Robert Johnson (1911-1938), the…

  • North and South: The Great Migration and the Lomaxes’ Southern Journey

    The early twentieth-century white folklorist Dorothy Scarborough once interviewed composer and bandleader W.C. Handy (1873- 1958), known as the Father of the Blues, about the origin of the blues. Handy, of course, was not the inventor of the blues, but he was the first musician to notate the folk music that he heard while traveling…

  • Authenticity (part IV: Black Metal)

    Read “The Unexpected Rise of Zeal and Ardor’s Spiritual Black Metal Blues.” and listen to the embedded audio. Listen to the song “Row, Row,” from his album Devil is Fine: Listen to Furry Lewis’s “Furry’s Blues”: The lyrics: I believe I’ll buy me a graveyard of my own Believe I’ll buy me a graveyard of my…

  • Authenticity, part III: White Tears

    As you know by now, White Tears is the story (among other things!) of Seth, a young, white, college-educated sound engineer, who accidentally records a line from an old blues song while picking up ambient sounds in Washington Square Park. His business partner Carter, the scion of a wealthy family whose riches come from running…

  • Fare Thee Well/Careless Love

    In his memoirs, John Lomax described collecting “Dink’s Song” in Texas in 1904, at a work-camp for skilled black builders from Mississippi who were constructing a levee on the Brazos River. Dink was one of a group of women imported from Memphis by the camp overseers to keep the workers happy and discourage them from…

  • Call and Response

    Call-and-response form is a structure imported to the Americas by enslaved African people in the seventeenth century. A brief history: A prison work song: (“Hammer, Ring,” Jesse Bradley and group, State Penitentiary, Huntsville, Texas, 1930s) A spiritual: “Talking ‘Bout a Good Time” (Moving Star Hall Singers, 1967) A sharecroppers’ work song: (“Arwhoolie,” Thomas J. Marshall,…

  • “Crazy” Blues?

    In the book Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition, Adam Gussow devotes an entire chapter to Mamie Smith’s 1920 blues hit “Crazy Blues.” The song is believed to be the first blues recording ever released, and was entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1994. Gussow’s main concern, however, is not…