256
D
espite the economic and educational advances won by some African
Americans by the turn of the twentieth century, many others continued
to live in poverty and isolation. In one of the most remarkable develop-
ments in American music, blacks in the poorest region of the United States—the
rural South—created the blues, a new kind of music that could express a wide
range of powerful emotions. Blues music would infl uence nearly every style of
music that developed in its wake.
Around the same time that blues artists were making their fi rst records, rural
white southerners began playing a new kind of music on radio and on records.
At fi rst called “hillbilly” and eventually relabeled country music, the new genre
was eclectic from the start, borrowing freely not only from older Anglo-American
folk styles but also from the blues.
The infl uence of the blues extended beyond the South to New York City’s dual
centers of the popular music industry, Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. There, a new
type of song, introduced in musical comedy but transcending its theatrical origin,
added the vocabulary of blues to earlier popular idioms, bringing a new expres-
siveness to popular music, in what has been called a golden era of popular song.THE BLUES
The beginnings of the blues have been traced to the Deep South: to small towns
and rural regions, Mississippi Delta plantations, and industries that demanded
heav y manual labor. Lacking education, property, and political power in a segre-
gated society, the creators of blues music led lives of hardship in rural isolation.
Yet their songs take a resilient attitude toward separation and loss, with emo-
tional responses that run the gamut from despair to laughter. The blues tradition
is one of confrontation and improvisation.
Blues music took shape in oral tradition. The work song may be an ancestor; fi eld
hollers, sung by solitary workers, were also an infl uence. Apparently developed dur-
ing the 1890s, early blues was accompanied by instruments, especially guitar, which
provided a foundation of harmony and rhythm. Several performing techniquesCHAPTER
11
BLUES, COUNTRY, AND
POPULAR SONGS AFTER
WORLD WAR I
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