THE BLUES

The “BLUES” emerged from a black cultural melting pot in the American South of the 1890s, drawing on a rich mix of African - American spirituals, traditional songs, European hymns, folk ballands, work songs and hollers, and contemporary dance music. By the 1910s (when the first recorded blues were published as sheet music), the blues had taken the form widely recognized today: 12 bars, AAB lyrical structure, and a distinctive scale with the third and seventh notes flatted.

The story of the blues is the story of African Americans told through the story of their most popular music. The blues is the story of the frustrations of failed Radical Reconstruction, of violence and oppression in the Jim Crow South, of the desperation of the sharecropping system, and of the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. The story of the blues is the story of black culture coming to a position of prominence and influence in American society. It is the story of the women of the classic blues whose early records pointed to a tremendous marked for African - American cultural production, and of the young while liberals and intellectuals who sought out the rural blues as an artifact to American’s vanishing agrarian past. It is the story of the cultural present finding inspiration in the cultural past. But perhaps most fundamentally, the story of the blues is one of American race relations, a document of struggle and conflict on the one hand but also a suggestion of something universally human that just might point the way toward a future more premised on understanding and cooperation.