166 Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the Presentvagaries of interpersonal relationships and the predica-
ment of being socially marginalized (i.e., as outcasts and
outlaws). Incorporating musical elements from traditional
African American music genres (especially from fi eld hol-
lers and spirituals), blues music was performed informally
in public settings (i.e., on the street for tip money from
passersby or at neighborhood gatherings) or more formally
as entertainment in more exclusive social gatherings (for
instance, in small clubs known as “juke joints” or at private
parties).
Before World War I, blacks traveling across the South
usually performed the blues as solo musicians, singing their
interpretations of locally traditional or self-composed blues
lyrics to variations of the blues tune form; such perfor-
mances were generally self-accompanied on one of several
instruments—initially on the fi ddle, the banjo, or the one-
stringed diddley bow (an Africa-derived instrument) and,
with increasing frequency by the World War I years, on
the piano, the harmonica, and especially the guitar. With
its fl exibility and portability, the guitar by the 1920s be-
came the instrument most commonly associated with the
blues. Guitar techniques utilized by blues players included
fi nger-picking the strings in various tunings (oft en minor-
keyed with unfretted “drone” strings); “bending” strings to
produce blue notes; and using a slide (usually a bottleneck
or a knife) on the strings to create a whining sound. Th e
instrumental part on the blues guitar was oft en performed
to sound like a second vocal.
In the early 20th century, blues musicians migrating
across the Deep South transported the genre to new set-
tings, ultimately yielding several subregional traditions of
rural blues (later termed by scholars “country blues”). In
east Texas, for instance, blues performed on guitar com-
bined accentuated notes on the bass strings with fl oating,
improvised note patterns on the high strings, whereas the
blues that proliferated in the piedmont areas of Georgia,
South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia emphasized
a highly syncopated, intricate fi nger-picking style on the
guitar and a more upbeat and harmonic approach to sing-
ing than found elsewhere in the South.
By World War I, several professional black musicians in
the South had begun to compose new songs infl uenced by
the blues. Th e most noteworthy among such musicians was
bandleader and composer W. C. Handy, a native of Florence,
Alabama, who achieved considerable commercial success
through publishing his original blues compositions. Aft erBibliography
Tallmadge, William. “Blue Notes and Blue Tonality.” Th e Black
Perspective in Music 12, no. 2 (Autumn 1984):155–65.
Weisenthaunet, Hans. “Is Th ere Such a Th ing as the ‘Blue Note’?”
Popular Music 20, no. 1 (January 2001):99–116.
Blues Music
During the 1890s, a new form of secular African American
folk music—blues music—emerged among blacks in the
rural areas and small towns of the Deep South, particularly
on large plantations and at industrial sites in the Mississippi
River valley. Initially, the blues was a highly localized music
that served blacks in the aforementioned areas as a means
of expressing, and possibly curtailing, their “blue” feelings
as well as a mode of protest against their social margin-
alization during the most restrictive period of Jim Crow
laws. Eventually, the blues would revolutionize American
music, inspiring commercial forms of the blues and fun-
damentally infl uencing such 20th-century popular music
genres as jazz, country music, rhythm and blues, and rock
‘n’ roll.
Uninitiated listeners have sometimes characterized
blues music as possessing a predictable, simple structure,
yet the genre is in fact subtly complex; performances of
the blues generally balance musical articulation that is
both improvisational and idiosyncratic with lyrics that
exhibit a high degree of verbal creativity, individuality,
emotional directness, and realism. Historically, an im-
portant component of blues music was the “blue note”
(a musical note expressed with a slight deviation from
its standard temperament), a distinctive musical element
that would have a profound impact on virtually every
genre of American music, whether traditional, popular, or
classical.
Th e originators of blues music were blacks born
shortly aft er emancipation. Many fi rst-generation blues
musicians had left small, family-owned, agriculturally un-
derproducing plots of land to take temporary jobs as paid
laborers on large cotton farms or as industrial workers.
To express their feelings of alienation and frustration
from living an insecure, nomadic existence, these musi-
cians wrote lyrics that refl ected the everyday experiences
of blacks in the South, exploring such themes as the