It's music called the blues. But it's not a sound that makes John Cephas sad. This is a happy music, the longtime blues musician might tell you. It's a sound that comes from the native music of Africa, he added. Africans migrated to northern cities in the United States as well as the South, and they merged their ancestral sounds with influences of European, especially Scottish and Irish music, Cephas said.
Blues is influenced in their music.
But I sure got a lot of them blues. The blues is really the happy music, though it talks about some of the unhappy things in life. For Cephas, a resident of Woodford, Va., singing the blues is simply a way of life. It's what he's been doing for the past 50 years. One string was picked out at a time.