Folk Blues

Folk music is communicated orally or aurally, it is taught through performance and learned by ear rather than from written material. This is the type of music is found all over the world, intensely participative and using the same musical devices (rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre) but varying in detail with different cultures.

The music is usually performed by community members who are not trained professionals. It is closely related to life activities - work, religion, love, despair and child rearing. Folk songs are passed from singer to singer, constantly changing reflecting differences in creativity, faulty memory and other variables. A folk song therefore tends to develop gradually over time. Many people participate in determining the shape of a folk song, it is a communal creation. Folk music is also influenced by nearby cultures.

The Blues are so deeply ingrained in African rhythm and jazz they form the 'backbone' of the evolution of jazz and popular music, feeding in characteristic sounds to all genres.

!n 1867 a collection of 137 songs was published as 'Slave Songs of the United States', but they were mainly spirituals not Blues.

In the late 1800s the Blues were developing as a musical genre in the rural South, a process complete by 1910.

Folk Blues / Country Blues -

* riveting laments of the rural South, from the fields and the hollers, to the churches and the line outs  

* the blues migrated from the fields to the churches and to the cities with the jobs

* most experts agree that the blues form evolved from the formal structure of the folk ballad, using African rhythms and melodies combined with European harmonies. The European aspects of the folk ballad and harmonies provided a structure in which the African stylistic aspects could grow

* church and work fed a music which became a powerful antidote to Jim Crow laws - a strange mix 'the devil's music', with roots in field songs, spirituals and the Irish / English / Scottish ballads, (the flip side of black gospel)

* initially the blues were a melancholy compliment to a hard life expressing the slaves' views on oppression through music, a distinction that is a trademark of the blues - but the vehicle was so flexible it appeared and reappeared everywhere for every mood, including 'good time' music of the 'Saturday Night Function'  

* playing the blues removes the pain of life, the stories are as important as the music

* the blues inspired the fusion of the New Orleans dance hall bands with the hot parade bands

* the blues inspired country music and all jazz, always staying close to popular taste - boogie woogie, rhythm & blues, rock 'n' roll, soul, rock, gospel and hip hop - a continuous golden thread throughout the 20th century

* guitar accompaniment, not banjo, finger picking repetitive driving rhythmic patterns, jumping a 5th and slowly descending

* banjos for dance rhythms but the singing guitar for the  blues, the guitar could sing back to the vocalist

* tonic and dominant, the big notes, both with flattened 3rds, with a less dramatic subdominant in the second stanza, essentially rhythmic not harmonic

* feeling and technique, you can do a lot with the blues because it is simple ... plenty of space ... the whites were impressed but the black blues was hard to catch on paper

* the white Minstrels claimed authenticity in imitating black music but they didn't catch the blues - the black singing was irregular, not clear part singing, but nobody appeared to sing the same thing, delicate intonations and subtle rhythms impossible to imitate or write down

* the iambic pentameter is ubiquitous, di DUM di DUM di DUM di DUM id DUM, familiar from Renaissance authors and may have been absorbed by blues singers through their often limited schooling. But a line like 'I got the blues and can't be satisfied' would never be sung by a blues singer in a strictly metrical manner. Instead, its accents would be displaced, giving life and strength to syllables and words that would otherwise have a weak impact on the listener.

From this we can infer that although some of the basic fundamentals of the genre are derived from European roots, they are ultimately a product of the African slaves in America.

Starting in the rural south, in the first decade of the century folk blues remained hidden in black culture, heard maybe on street corners and after midnight in the dance dives but of no interest to music publishers or recording companies. Eventually the treasures were tapped by a handful of black song writers who pushed them onto Tin Pan Alley.

Folk blues crystallised into the 3 chord 3 stanza form and the classic blues became a specific song form. Usually a 12 bar structure with the 3 chord trick. 4 bar phrases AAB. Attack and descending phrases. Fattened third and seventh.

When the blues migrated to the city of New Orleans and the horn men started playing, the blues feeling became the essential ingredient of jazz. The 'pomp' of the military brass bands was replaced by the soul of the blues, vibrato, dirt and emotion.

Robert Johnson (1898 - 1937) - died at 27! A guitarist. Influenced by Son House he himself was the influence on Muddy Waters, the classic Mississippi blues, the delta style took root ... eventually running into Chuck Berry and The Beatles ... ? & particularly Eric Clapton & The Rolling Stones. It's all sex, unfaithfulness, the devil & lonely travelin'.

A loner driftin' down the sun baked road from town to town, from girl to girl - 'Hellhound on my Trail'

Huddie Ledbetter - came out of prison & dropped folk songs for blues - 'Goodnight Irene'