Blues
Authors: Zhu Fangfang , Tracy Steven Carl , Weaver Damien 
Published: June 2016

The blues is one of America’s great folk, commercial, and roots source music. Combining African modalities, European structures, slave song aesthetics, and general African American racial discriminatory experiences, it speaks to the crack in America’s Liberty Bell regarding the presence of slavery in a putative democracy. It was a slavery that visited a horrible violence upon the subjects, both during slavery and after, when Jim Crow laws helped produce the recoiling from Southern life known as the Great Migration, a massive shift of the African American population from South to North. It brought southern folkways into a northern setting, generating different kinds of blues that reflected the life of the urban scene while still rooted in the African and African American aesthetics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Furthermore, the blues establishes a democratic aesthetic in its counting of each individual participant, performer and audience, as a valuable voice and contributor to the communal whole. It embodies E Pluribus Unum in the creation, performance, and result of the widely known jam session element of blues as well as of many different African American genres. For the study of the blues, broad reference works give an overall outline and briefer discussions of issues that relate to the history of the blues, and they contain important discographical information that provides a concrete accounting of recording sessions that helps to track the movements of performers and the development of the tradition. No better starting place can be found than consulting the music as it was recorded commercially or by folklorists. Historical or contemporary films on DVD provide valuable glimpses of aural and visual performance practices that reflect an important component of the tradition. Scholars have attempted the sometimes difficult task of transcribing old and poorly recorded recordings with thick accents and obscure place names and idioms in order to make sense out of often poetic blues “texts.” Blues histories inevitably begin with some discussion of social and aesthetic backgrounds in Africa, moving on to the distinctive structures and form of blues music and lyrics and the varied regional and chronological manifestations of the tradition. These manifestations are frequently influenced by the dominant styles and personalities of particularly high-profile performers, either located in the community or promoted through the recording industry, making record labels an important conduit for spreading the music. Individual biographies also provide important indicators of popular trends in the blues. The research conducted by aficionados and reported in specialist magazines frequently contains valuable information on both well-known and obscure figures not obtainable elsewhere. Material found here also reflects the worldwide popularity and appreciation of the blues. Of course, one does not want to look at the blues in a vacuum, either musically or socially; thus, the relationship of blues to other music and its status as a reflection of African American culture are also important.