Essay on A Brief History Of The Blues

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A Brief History of the Blues

A Brief History
of the Blues

Joseph Machlis says that the blues
is a native American musical and verse form, with no direct European and

African antecedents of which we know. (p. 578) In other words, it is a
blending of both traditions. Something special and entirely different from
either of its parent traditions. (Although Alan Lomax cites some examples
of very similar songs having been found in Northwest Africa, particularly
among the Wolof and Watusi. p. 233)

The word 'blue' has been associated
with the idea of melancholia or depression since the Elizabethan era. The

American writer, Washington Irving is credited with coining the term 'the
blues,' as it is now defined, in 1807. (Tanner 40) The earlier (almost
entirely Negro) history of the blues musical tradition is traced through
oral tradition as far back as the 1860s. (Kennedy 79)

When African and European music first
began to merge to create what eventually became the blues, the slaves sang
songs filled with words telling of their extreme suffering and privation.
(Tanner 36) One of the many responses to their oppressive environment resulted
in the field holler. The field holler gave rise to the spiritual, and the
blues, "notable among all human works of art for their profound despair
. . . They gave voice to the mood of alienation and anomie that prevailed
in the construction camps of the South," for it was in the Mississippi

Delta that blacks were often forcibly conscripted to work

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