Origins of the blues
[6] This pre-blues music was adapted from the field shouts and hollers performed during slave times, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content".
The use of melisma and a wavy, nasal intonation also suggests a connection between the music of West and Central Africa and the blues.
The Kora is played by a professional caste of praise singers for the rich and aristocracy (called griots or jalis) and is not considered folk music.
[9] African-American economist and historian Thomas Sowell also notes that the southern, black, ex-slave population was acculturated to a considerable degree by and among their Scots-Irish "redneck" neighbors.
Additionally, there are theories that the four-beats-per-measure structure of the blues might share its origins with the Native American tradition of pow wow drumming.
According to Kubik, "the vocal style of many blues singers using melisma, wavy intonation, and so forth is a heritage of that large region of West Africa that had been in contact with the Islamic world via the Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries.
[11] While many were pressured to convert to Christianity, the Sahelian slaves were allowed to maintain their musical traditions, adapting their skills to instruments such as the fiddle and guitar.
[13] Field hollers, cries and hollers of the slaves and later sharecroppers working in cotton fields, prison chain gangs, railway gangs (Gandy dancers) or turpentine camps were the precursor to the call and response of African American spirituals and gospel music, to jug bands, minstrel shows, stride piano, and ultimately to the blues, rhythm and blues, jazz and African American music in general.
[11] The most important American antecedent of the blues was the spiritual, a form of religious song with its roots in the camp meetings of the Great Awakening of the early 19th century.
[15] Blues has evolved from an unaccompanied vocal music of poor black laborers into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States.
[4][16] The first appearance of the blues is not well defined and is often dated between 1870 and 1900, a period that coincides with the emancipation of the slaves and the transition from slavery to sharecropping and small-scale agricultural production in the southern United States.
Several scholars characterize the early 1900s development of blues music as a move from group performances to a more individualized style.
According to Lawrence Levine,[17] "there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the popularity of Booker T. Washington's teachings, and the rise of the blues."
[19] African American composer W. C. Handy wrote in his autobiography of the experience of sleeping on a train traveling through (or stopping at the station of) Tutwiler, Mississippi around 1903, and being awakened by: ... a lean, loose-jointed Negro who had commenced plucking a guitar beside me while I slept.
Blues later adopted elements from the "Ethiopian (here, meaning "black") airs" of minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment.
[22] The style also was closely related to ragtime, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music".
[35] The standard 12-bar blues form is noted in uncorroborated oral histories as appearing communities throughout the region along the lower Mississippi River during the decade of the 1900s (and performed in New Orleans at least since 1908).
At the time, there was no clear musical division between "blues" and "country", except for the race of the performer, and even that sometimes was documented incorrectly by record companies.
