It is hard to bring into line with the romantic, cliché-type image we have today of the blues, but blues has been on Broadway, even from its very official start. It is perhaps even more difficult to imagine, but the first one to publish the word ‘blues’ in a song title was a white man; it was even the son of a German immigrant in America. Published blues was a very white and lucrative business in its formal starting phase.
Let me convince you.
First of all, what does the word ‘blues’ really mean? I think that one can write books about the evolution and meaning of the word. From a quick search I found that the word goes back to 1741, and comes from the adjective “low spirited”. It is an elliptical form of the expression: “blue devils”, which means ‘delirium tremens’. I also remember reading somewhere that when on a boat bringing slaves from Africa to the American continent an officer or captain died, a blue stripe was painted on the outside of the ship as a visual recognition of this painful event (painful for the crew, not the passengers).
At the beginning of the 20th century, blues was a word that was very common in America, though its meaning was not always precisely defined (depressed, bored, unhappy,…). It was part of a slang language, but was not at all explicitly used with reference to music played by black people.
Somewhere in the spring of 1912, a certain Hart Wand, musician, and as said above, son of a German immigrant, published a song named ‘Dallas Blues’, which is considered as the first published music sheet clearly making use of the chord progression of the twelve bar blues. It was an instrumental piece, very much harmonic, and also frequently played (up till now) as Dixieland or Ragtime. If you have the occasion to listen to it, do it : it is a very pleasant song to listen to. Very danceable also.
In the summer of that same year, a black musician, Arthur Seals, published his ‘Baby Seal’s Blues’, and finally in September that very same year, William Christopher Handy published his famous “Memphis Blues”.
These compositions do not correspond at all to what most of us have in mind now when thinking about the old blues songs. They have to be seen within the context of that period, when ragtime was very popular. They were performed at musical revues, not at the juke joints full of smoke, liquor, gambling and women.
These publications cannot be underestimated. They were not recordings; they were sheet music publications, in the line of what is called the Tin Pan Alley (the name Tin Pan Alley refers to a group of buildings nearby Broadway, and is used as the collection of popular music, at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century). I need to study this further, but is my present understanding that those 3 publications (one from a white man, two from black men) were both a reflection of some new music style that had developed in ‘the field’, and that were at the same time a strong stimulus for further development and popularisation of this new music style. They would finally, at the end of the twenties, succeed in bringing in the spots the ‘real’ folk, country blues performed by men as Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton.
Since the secession war (1861-1865), blacks in the South were legally freed as slaves, which lead to a migration movement into the direction of cities (by no means, the cities as we would define them today, only a concentration of people around for instance cotton mills). Both country music and city music changed in style as a result of this change in social fabric.
The process needs to be seen dynamically. In their nature of slaves the black population which was scattered around on the country side (not even along the clans they once had been in Africa) used field hollers and work songs for internal communication. It is highly probable that this music in itself has been strongly influenced by their particular social conditions. After all, they were merely the possession of blank colonists and the latter have done everything in their power (and that was a lot) to keep their music from becoming a means of social protest. It is known for instance that drums were banned because they sounded too ecstatic; it is also recorded that the lyrics of songs had to become ‘meaningless’. Slaves were also not only used for hard work on the plantations, but also as entertainment, and it is not unthinkable that the blank colonists imposed some of their own musical stuff upon them. The origins of the blues in the 19th century were probably a mix of African and European (Scottish and Irish) music. It is too simplistic to put that blues as it evolved was a direct descendant of the music played in Mali and other West African states which made the gross of the deliveries for the slave population. In any case the music whas not at that moment and would never be later on as blues an instrument in a social protest movement, on the contrary.
Crucial to observe is the fact that (as far as the written sources can tell us) in 1912 explicit reference was made in sheet music to the terminology of blues.
The story is well known of W.C. Handy meeting this musician in the train station of Tutwiler in 1903 who delivered this ‘odd kind of music’, that he never heard before. He was not very impressed however and largely ignored it, until one evening: during a break of his orchestra, its audience in a musical show in Cleveland (Mississippi) asked whether some locals could do a performance. Handy agreed, and much to his astonishment he noticed that the audience grew wild with this “local” music. The audience started throwing coins of sheer enthusiasm and the local musicians earned much more during this short break than Handy’s orchestra for the whole evening show. It is only when Handy saw that money could be made out of this ‘wild’, ‘weird’ music that he started to get interested. Blues out of opportunism!
In 1909, Handy published a song with the title ‘Mr Crump’ as a campaign song in the run for mayor ship in Memphis. In the summer of 1912 it was republished as ‘Memphis Blues’, probably inspired by the massive success of ‘Dallas Blues’ and ‘Baby Seal’s Blues’ that year. However, his ‘Memphis Blues’ didn’t turn out to be as successful, and Handy sold the rights to another musician who added words to it. In the following years, Memphis Blues became an enormous success in the musical theatres in the North (can you see the face of Handy who had sold the copyrights?).
What happened then between 1912 and 1920 is hard to grasp by our present comprehension. There was a flood of (mainly) white composers producing songs with ‘blues’ in the title of the song. It was a major success on Broadway where the songs were performed by mainly white women. This success was perfectly in line with the mainstream theme in songs of women being abandoned by their men (America entered World War I in 1917). It was also perfect in harmony with the success of the minstrels (I will blog later on this minstrel phenomenon). Blues : it sold !
But, it didn’t bring the black population very much.
Record companies (the phonograph was invented in 1877, and the recording of sound made feel his impact as from the dawn of the early 20th century) didn’t think about issuing 78’s of black performers. Then, the big bang came in 1920 when a certain Mr Perry Bradford (a black singer-song writer) finally, after much trouble, succeeds in convincing Okeh-records to register on an acetate plate Mamie Smith performing ‘Crazy Blues’. It became a million seller.
But this is an important event which fully justifies a separate blog entry dedicated solely to Perry Bradford, this forgotten hero of the blues, and Mamie Smith.
