Did the blues come from slavery? (2023)

Where did blues originate from?

Blues developed in the southern United States after the American Civil War (1861–65). It was influenced by work songs and field hollers, minstrel show music, ragtime, church music, and the folk and popular music of the white population.

The birth of the blues

The majority of blues musicians had descendants from Africa who were transported to America in the slave trade and were forced to work on plantations in the South, and factories in the North. Enslaved people would sing work songs while working the plantations and religious spirituals in church.

The blues emerged from the oppressed, economically disadvantaged African-American communities in the rural southern states of America in the years following the American Civil War (1861–1865). Blues singers were descendants of slaves and elements of their music reach back to African origins.

The Blues really started when African people were taken to America to work as slaves on plantation fields. The slaves would sing songs of their despair and suffering to make the time pass more quickly.

Although many would point to the blues having come from places like the Mississippi Delta, the blues really originates from West Africa. It began with the musical cultures of African people who were brought to American due to the slave trade.

The blues originated on Southern plantations in the 19th Century. Its inventors were slaves, ex-slaves and the descendants of slaves—African-American sharecroppers who sang as they toiled in the cotton and vegetable fields.

Songs were passed down from generation to generation throughout slavery. These songs were influenced by African and religious traditions and would later form the basis for what is known as “Negro Spirituals”.

"The blues" is a secular African-American musical genre that has had broad influence in popular music. Blues songs deal with a variety of topics and emotions, though it is often mistakenly thought that they deal almost exclusively with sorrow and protest.

The belief that blues is historically derived from the West African music including from Mali is reflected in Martin Scorsese's often quoted characterization of Ali Farka Touré's tradition as constituting "the DNA of the blues".

What did slaves do with the blues?

The blues developed from the musical traditions that African slaves brought to America. It was based on two forms of music: spirituals and work songs. Both of these were developed by African American slaves and freedmen. Spirituals were religious songs.

For his efforts in making Blues famous, W.C. Handy is known as the “Father of the Blues.”

Dr. Dina Bennett, senior curator at the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville, said country music can trace its roots back to 17th-century slave ships, where captors made Africans bring instruments from their homeland.

While working in the fields, slaves sang work songs that combined African tribal chants with Christian hymns incorporated from the Southern Baptist Church. Together, these influences created Negro spirituals that had strong, percussive beats and were accompanied by intense physical dancing.

Blues derived from and was largely played by Southern Black men, most of whom came from the milieu of agricultural workers. The earliest references to blues date back to the 1890s and early 1900s.

Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s.

African influences have been apparent in the blues tonality from its beginning; the call and response pattern of the repeated refrain; the falsetto break in the vocal style; and the imitation of vocals by instruments, especially the guitar and harmonica.

The blues emerged from African American folk musical forms, which arose in the southern United States and became internationally popular in the 20th century. Blues styles have been used and adapted extensively throughout country music's recorded history.

The blues are often referred to as the mother of modern musical forms.

The name of this great American music probably originated with the 17th-century English expression “the blue devils,” for the intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal. Shortened over time to “the blues,” it came to mean a state of agitation or depression.

Did blues exist before Jazz?

Both genres originated in the Southern United States around the late 1800s to early 1900s, with blues arriving first, then jazz a little later. Both were inventions of African Americans, who combined African musical concepts with European musical concepts, thus making these both uniquely American music genres.

There were work songs, sung by groups of field hands to coordinate and pace their work. The slave songs not only laid the musical foundations for the most popular forms of music in later American history—including the blues, jazz—they also influenced the practice of American religion.

Jazz music, blues music, and gospel music all grew from African roots. Spirituals, work calls, and chants coupled with makeshift instruments morphed into blues rhythms and ragtime. Ragtime paved the way for jazz, and elements from all these styles influenced rock and roll and hip hop music.

In the English colonies Africans spoke an English-based Atlantic Creole, generally called plantation creole. Low Country Africans spoke an English-based creole that came to be called Gullah. Gullah is a language closely related to Krio a creole spoken in Sierra Leone.

Hip-Hop and rap are musical traditions firmly embedded in African American culture. Like jazz, hip-hop has become a global phenomenon and has exerted a driving force on the development of mass media.

Rhythm and blues, frequently abbreviated as R&B or R'n'B, is a genre of popular music that originated in African-American communities in the 1940s.

Blues is a musical form originated by African Americans in the Southern United States towards the turn of the 19th-20th century, as a genre developed from the roots in African-American work songs and European-American folk music.

Roots in Africa

Their work songs, dance tunes, and religious music—and the syncopated, swung, remixed, rocked, and rapped music of their descendants—would become the lingua franca of American music, eventually influencing Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.

A spiritual is a type of religious folksong that is most closely associated with the enslavement of African people in the American South. The songs proliferated in the last few decades of the eighteenth century leading up to the abolishment of legalized slavery in the 1860s.

African American communities used music and song, sometimes in place of written communication, to discuss life, death, spiritual philosophies, and emotions: all of which helped individuals cope with the traumas that came with being enslaved.

Who invented blues rock?

Precursors to blues rock included the Chicago blues musicians Elmore James, Albert King, and Freddie King, who began incorporating rock and roll elements into their blues music during the late 1950s to early 1960s.

Soul music traces its roots to traditional blues and the gospel music of the Black church. Soul pioneers of the 1950s—such as Ray Charles, Etta James, Sam Cooke, Clyde McPhatter, Little Richard, and Hank Ballard—learned music through performing in gospel groups.

Both genres originated in the Southern United States around the late 1800s to early 1900s, with blues arriving first, then jazz a little later. Both were inventions of African Americans, who combined African musical concepts with European musical concepts, thus making these both uniquely American music genres.

THE FIRST COMMERCIALLY SUCCESSFUL male blues artist, Papa Charlie Jackson sang with a relaxed, confident voice and usually played an unusual six-string guitar-banjo. He began recording for Paramount in 1924 and produced nearly three dozen 78s by 1930.

Having always immersed himself in the African American music of his era, Handy eventually began writing songs describing the hardships he had experienced. In 1912 he published “Memphis Blues,” now considered the first blues song.