Overview
As mentioned in Lesson 1, the 12-bar blues was one of the most popular African American musical forms in the early to mid-twentieth century. In this lesson, we look at the blues as a genre, focusing on two specific types: the rural blues and the urban blues. These two types of blues share many characteristics, but at the same time, they are clearly distinguishable from each other. Early blues recordings also make an excellent case study of race records and the treatment of African American musicians in the recording studio and by the recording industry. In addition, we will see some other blues-inspired music, such as boogie woogie and blues-based or blues-inspired popular songs.
Objectives
- Examine two specific types of blues to understand the musical form, instrumentation, harmony, and lyric content of each
- Examine the listenership of each type of blues music and how these musics were recorded, marketed, and consumed by both white and African American audiences
- Examine the specific aspects that are key to African American music, such as call and response and blue notes
- Identify the 12-bar blues form
- Identify the performers associated with rural blues
- Identify the performers associated with urban blues
Musical and Poetic Form of the 12-Bar Blues
Lyrics to 12-bar blues songs are usually structured as rhymed couplets with the first line repeated, in the form:
A
A
B
Each letter corresponds to roughly 4 measures (bars) of musical material.
The couplet can be a complete episode in itself, or it can be a chapter in an unfolding narrative. Blues lyrics can be introspective, dealing with personal emotions, or they can be narrative, relaying a story or morality tale. Generally speaking, blues lyrics strive to be clever, using wordplay, innuendo, and double entendres. Sexual relations and romantic relationships are a central theme of most blues songs, and musicians took advantage of their lyrical prowess to portray their topics as vividly as possible. Blues lyrics address the deepest and most permanent of human circumstances in areas personal, financial, sexual, and social.
Regardless of a blues songs instrumental accompaniment, its harmonic progression follows a recognizable pattern. The harmonic progression was typically some variation of the following format:
A: I I I I
A: IV IV I I
B: V V I I
Each of the twelve bars in the blues typically had a single chord. Often, blues songs only included a total of three or four different chords.
Blue notesa note found in the blues that is bent in pitch rather than played precisely in tune are another important harmonic and melodic aspect of the blues. Rather than landing precisely in the center of a pitch, performers may smear, scoop, or bend into a pitch, thus creating a "blue note." Singers can achieve blue notes with relative ease, but instrumentalists sometimes need to use special techniques. For example, a guitarist can bend a pitch by pushing the string sideways against the fret, or by sliding a glass bottleneck along the guitar’s strings in what is called a bottleneck technique. Although blue notes vary among different performers and instruments, blue notes serve to create tone color and pitch variation within a melodic or harmonic line.
The blues also features call and responsean aspect of African American music in which one phrase is answered by a contrasting phrase, which is a fundamental aspect of nearly every type of African American music, whether sacred, secular, or popular. Call and response is a sort of conversation that happens in African American music, and it occurs in both instrumental and vocal music. During call and response, one musical or lyrical phrase is answered by a contrasting phrase. It is helpful to think of call and response as a sort of question-and-answer pattern between vocalists and/or instrumentalists. One example of call and response occurs in West End Blues ♫, which was discussed in Lesson 1: during the third chorus, Louis Armstrong and the clarinetist engage in call and response, as if Armstrong poses a question with his voice and the clarinet provides an answer. As we will see, the technique of call and response is found not only in the blues but also in nearly every type of African American music that exists.
