Unit 4 -- Blues and Country Music

The Blues and Country Music

(1910s-1930s)

At the risk of overstating things a little, we might think of jazz and Tin Pan Alley as being styles of music that came from the urban centers. Two other important genres of American popular music had deep roots in rural life—the blues and country music.

The Blues

There are accounts of music resembling what has come to be known as the blues at least as early as the late 19^th century. The blues songwriter W. C. Handy, known for his work in the 20^th century and discussed more below, reported having heard this music during his earlier travels as touring musician. However, it was not until the 1910s through the 1930s that a national audience began to be aware of the blues through Handy’s songs and the recordings of blues singers released in the 1920s and 1930s.

The blues, in its basic form, can be thought of as a type of African-American folk music based on simple song forms. The songs follow certain basic patterns in the lyrics, phrasing and chord structure and often deal with expressions of hardship—broken hearts, poverty, and other forms misery and adversity are common themes. The spiritual is an important source of the blues—its emphasis on the weariness of people in this world and their desire to escape it probably developed into the blues. A critical difference between spirituals and the early folk style of the blues is that spirituals are sacred, while the blues is secular.

Country Blues

The first blues were sung by itinerant, or traveling, musicians—usually men who played the guitar to accompany their singing. These were often working class black men in the South who had jobs on railroads or in other industries that required (or allowed, depending on your perspective) them to travel around. They would often play on street corners or in front of barber shops (important sites of social gathering for African Americans), accepting change from passers-by. Like many Southern blacks, these blues men were often living with poverty and discrimination—and they sang about it.

This type of blues is known as the country blues or folk blues. It was practiced all over the rural South, but one of the most important regions where it developed an influential style was the Mississippi Delta—a region with fertile soil along the Mississippi River extending from Memphis southward to through the state of Mississippi. This area had been a stronghold of slavery and the plantation culture. After the Civil War and into the 20^th Century, the Delta was the home of a huge population of poor blacks who, although no longer slaves, were nonetheless subject to an oppressive and discriminatory culture in which they worked for wealthy white plantations owners under exploitive conditions such as sharecropping, or else found jobs in modern industries such as railroad work. The style of the blues that came out of this hard environment is known the Delta blues.

Robert Johnson

Perhaps the most famous of the Delta blues men was Robert Johnson. Johnson is an enigmatic and figure—only two pictures exist of him, and his life’s story is surrounded by mythology and legend. It was said (and Johnson apparently encouraged the idea) that he had once sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads. You can read more about the life and work of Robert Johnson here.

Johnson’s “Crossroad Blues” is typical example of a country blues song. There were a few common forms of the blues, but the most recognized is the twelve-bar blues. In this form of the blues, each strophe (stanza or verse) of the song consists of three lines of lyric in the form AAB. In “Crossroad Blues,” for example, we get the following:

A – I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees

A – I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees

B – Asked the Lord above, “Have Mercy, save poor Bob if you please.”

The first line introduces an idea, the second line repeats it for emphasis, and the third line introduces a concluding thought. The chords that accompany these lines follow a predictable formula. Each line gets four measures for a total of twelve measures in each verse (hence the name twelve-bar blues. In the following diagram, each Roman numeral represents a measure of music occupied by that chord. The corresponding letter of the lyric that goes with each set of chords is given in parentheses.

(A)   – I         I          I          I

(A)   – IV     IV         I          I

(B)   – V      IV         I          I

If you have the musical background to understand these chord symbols, that’s great. If not, don’t worry. you will eventually recognize the chord sequence by sound, because it is used in many types of music influenced by the blues.

Here’s Robert Johnson singing the “Crossroad Blues.” Listen for the three-line lyric and twelve-bar chord sequence in each verse.

Classic Blues

Although the country blues is essentially part of the old folk tradition of the blues that goes back to the early 20^th century or earlier, recordings of this music, such as those by Robert Johnson, were not made until around the 1930s. The first style of blues that reached a national audience was the type known as the classic blues or city blues.

The classic blues differs from the country blues in several respects. Whereas the country blues is essentially a folk tradition, the classic blues songs were often written and published by professional composers and lyricists. As a result, it is influenced by the more complex forms and harmonies of Tin Pan Alley. Classic blues was often performed in a formal environment, such as on the theatrical stage as part of Vaudeville shows, unlike the country blues which was likely to be heard on a street corner. Whereas the country blues was usually performed by a man accompanying himself on the guitar, the classic blues songs were usually performed by women accompanied by a pianist or a jazz combo.

W.C. Handy

The musician and songwriter W. C. Handy had heard the blues while travelling around the South. In 1912, he published a song called “Memphis Blues,” based on his familiarity with the folk form of the blues. The “Memphis Blues” was a successful song and did much to bring the blues to the attention of a national audience. Handy also may have helped to standardize the form of the blues that has become familiar to us.

Bessie Smith was known as the “Empress of the Blues” and is surely the best-known of the classic blues singers. Her theatrical costumes and expressive singing style typify the classic blues woman. You can read about her life and work here.

Bessie Smith

In the following recording, Bessie Smith sings “St. Louis Blues,” another song by W. C. Handy. She is accompanied by Louis Armstrong on the trumpet (Armstrong’s involvement in this recording demonstrates that jazz and blues were considered closely related forms that significantly influenced each other). Notice that this song uses the same AAB lyric form as Robert Johnson’s “Crossroad Blues.” The twelve-bar chord sequence is a little more complex in Handy’s song, but is still basically recognizable as the twelve-bar blues. However, the song has a more complex construction with multiple sections and different melodies, reflecting the Tin Pan Alley influence that trained songwriters like Handy often brought to these songs. Notice how Smith’s and Armstrong’s performance displays many of the typical traits of African American musical practices we have seen before. There is a kind of call and response between Smith’s vocal and Armstrong’s trumpet (you can hear the call and response between Johnson and his own guitar in “Crossroad Blues” as well). Smith uses pitch-bend (sliding on notes) for expressive effect, creating what are called blue notes--pitches that are a little flat or bent that give the blues its expressive quality.

Race Records

Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues"

In 1920, Mamie Smith recorded the song “Crazy Blues” on what is considered to be the first commercial blues recording. To the recording industry’s surprise, it was a big seller in the black community, establishing the viability of the African American market as a profitable niche for selling records. The branch of the recording industry that catered to black audiences was dubbed race records a name that may sound derogatory today, but was intended in a positive way at the time—a “Race man,” or “Race woman” was a person who took pride in their race. The term race record would continue to be applied to music for the African American market until the end of the 1940s when it was replaced by the term rhythm and blues.

Country Music

Country Music is the music primarily of rural Southerners of British-Isle descent, especially a group known as the Scots-Irish. Country music has its historical origins in British forms of folk music like the ballad and country dances. Early country music took root most deeply in the Southern hill country, particularly in states like Virginia and Tennessee. These Southern whites were different from the wealthy plantations owners of the low-country areas of the South. They were often poor and quite religious. When their music began to be recorded and broadcast on the radio, it was labeled hillbilly music. In contrast to the blues and “race music,” which sold in the black community on recording, country music was popularized and spread around the South by radio broadcast. Country music stations and radio programs like The Grand Ole Opry contributed to the popularity of country music among rural Americans beginning in the 1920s.

The Carter Family

As with the country version of the blues, the earliest recordings of country music are from around the 1930s. The Carter Family is representative of the early country style. Consisting of A. P. “Doc” Carter, his wife Sara, and his sister-in-law Maybelle, the Carter Family was from southwest Virginia and typical of many country groups in being a family act. Like many country musicians, they not only performed from a base of Anglo-American musical traditions, but were also influenced by black music, including the blues. “Can the Circle Be Unbroken” is one of their most famous recordings. The close vocal harmonies and guitar accompaniment with basic chords and a regular rhythm are typical of country style. The song shows the influence of the Anglo-American ballad in its form and narrative quality as well as white Southern gospel music and hymns in its statement of faith and melodic phrasing. Country music also often shows the influence of other sources such as Tin Pan Alley and the blues. The sentimental quality of “Can the Circle Be Unbroken,” with its emphasis on family and faith would have appealed to the experiences and values of many rural Americans.

Read more about the Carter Family here.

Jimmie Rodgers, in some respects, represents a different side of country music than the Carter Family. Whereas the Carters represent the faith and family side of country music, Rodgers typifies the loner, the rough-and-tumble rugged individual. Known as the “Singing Brakeman,” he resembles the country blues men in that he started out as an itinerant worker with a guitar before he was “discovered” by record producers. Rodgers wrote a series of songs called Blue Yodels that demonstrate the extent to which country musicians of the time were interacting with African American musicians and being influenced by their sounds. Listen for the combination of both blues and country influences in Rodgers’s “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas).”

There are tensions and contradictions in the country music of the 1920s and 1930s. The songs are often about traditional life, but the lives of rural people during this time were being upended in many ways—new technologies (including the radio, which spread the music) were bringing about many changes, including mechanized, industrialized farming. In the 1930s, the Great Depression further threatened people’s traditional way of life, causing economic hardships, problems with the banks, and loss of jobs and property. People were forced to leave their homes in search of work. The contrast between the Carter Family’s traditional values and Jimmie Rodgers’s anti-hero image goes hand-in-hand with a tension between tradition and modernism in rural life. This ambivalence about tradition and progress will emerge as a theme in country music that can still be observed today.