Searching For That Authentic Blues

Big Bill Bronzy (Photo by David Gahr)

For many Rock & Roll fans and musicians, Blues is the most authentic form of music ever created. As many of us know that the Blues has its roots to the African-American communities that were formed during the time of slavery. Eventually the genre became popular all over America in 1920s, now even after almost 10 decades the Blues music still exists and many young musicians are still playing that music and spreading it all across the world. Although I must agree that the attraction of young generation towards Rock n’ Roll and Blues isn’t the same anymore as it used to be some 10 or 15 years ago. Still, there are lots of young musicians and music lovers who love the Blues and that good old Rock music more than anything else. Now, when we think about Blues and Rock music, we think about its fusion which is famously known as Blues-Rock music that became popular during the mid 1960s. We talk about all the great records played by Yardbirds, Cream, Bluesbreakers, Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin or guitarists like Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page or Gary Moore. And when we talk about simply the popular Electric or Chicago Blues music we remember the great B.B King, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker and so on. These musicians were almost all guitarists and singers; the Electric Blues musicians like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker inspired the Blues-Rock musicians like John Mayall, Eric Clapton. Their major instrument being the electric guitar in which they performed slidings, bends and dozens of other guitar tricks using the blues notes and blues chord progressions. When they played their electric guitars using effects and guitar styles with an amplifier it seemed like the guitars came to life and were singing along. This was an imitation of the old call-and-response pattern where the singer first spoke the melodious words and then his guitar hit the synchronized melodious notes. This tradition influenced almost all popular genres we listen to now.

The Blues had always been sad music. It was supposed to be a music that expressed sorrows and grief of the African-Americans who were living as slaves and later became victims of racial discrimination, segregation laws and injustice. It is no secret that the Blacks were terrorized by the society while the government never cared for it. They realized that the African-Americans cannot walk side by side with Caucasians and the other Whites. Furthermore, the landlords and entrepreneur still considered them slaves and labors. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, the Negros became victim of lynch mobs and racist tribes; they considered that the Blacks were a threat to their so called developed civilization. So they began hunting for the Negros who fought for his rights. The lynching became so terrible that ultimately the federal states passed the Jim Crow laws that stated that the Blacks and Whites should be segregated. In the reconstruction period, after the civil war, the Blacks were isolated from the rest of the ethnic groups. The Blacks had no power, no money, no land, no education and thus they became victim of poverty, police brutality, illiteracy, gambling, alcoholism and diseases (mostly STDs). After the segregation, most of the Negros built their small civilization in different towns and villages across the state. The African-Americans were densely populated in the southern states of America, for instance Mississippi and Texas. In these lands, the White landlords ruled the society, there was no law, the landlords were the law and they maintained order by suppressing the Negros. The landlords had lots and lots of acres of lands and many of the landlords had cotton farms. The cotton farming was certainly the most popular cash crops farming in those days. The cotton picking job required many labors, so the landlords employed the new emancipated Negros to pick cottons but they never paid them, some of them gave the Negros a place to live but they never paid them a dime. But not all of them were greedy and cruel, few landlords paid the Negros but very less and the Negros instead of saving the little money preferred gambling with it or getting drunk. The Negros were very vigorous people, even in such suppression they had somehow succeeded to grow, they built their houses, cultivated in their lands, built churches and schools too. They were skilled farmers and labors, they were active and fast people and almost all of them were good dancers and singers. They had their old African traditions of singing and dancing, the field-hollers were the most famous, and they used to sing along in group while they worked for the Whites in the fields. They performed all kinds of labor; they were in the mines, in the railway tracks, in woods chopping trees, in cotton farms, constructions, ships and so on. In every kind of work they performed, they used to perform it while singing in groups. 

The Blues in general is not completely field hollers, it is actually songs sung by these people while they felt blue; hence the name of the genre is Blues. It was a message, an expression of their sorrows, the words and lyrics were of great importance, and the blue notes were important too. The Blacks were obviously influenced by the Western music style, their rules and the formation of major and minor scales. So, the Negros made the Blues scales where they added three extra notes in the scales which they called blue notes. In music, the blue notes are b3, b5, b7 of any major or minor scale (where b means flatted). These notes were mostly played in acoustic guitars and harmonicas and many of them lowered the tuning, though many musicians made songs in the standard EBGDAE tuning. They never wrote songs, their whole life was a sad song itself and they just cried out their sorrows through their songs. Now, when we think of sad songs we think of popular songs like Let It Be by Beatles or Change is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke. They are really sad songs; if you are a instrument player then you will realize that making songs in minor scales will give you that sad feeling. However, while we listen to Blues like Crossroads by Cream, we won’t feel that sadness, we will rather enjoy the awesome solos played by Eric Clapton. But what the rest of the world (except for blues and rock fans) doesn’t know is that the song is not composed preliminarily by Cream, they just covered that song which was originally made by Robert Johnson in the 1930s which was named Crossroad Blues. The fact is that Robert Johnson did this song in up-tempo too, it wasn’t a slow song but what was missing in Cream’s version was that voice and those hollers that Robert Johnson performed and it was unique, it is still unique. He was using those blues notes while he was singing too, he had that feeling that made other people sing in that same blue mood. The fact is that the Blues music drastically changed in the 60s. However, the bluesmen who had their roots to the Delta like Muddy Waters, BB King kept that tradition of singing with that same old feeling while in Blues Rock that style was replaced by the popularity of Boogie-Woogie in the 50s and the Rock n Roll. It is not that old Blues in the 30s were sad songs, many songs by the early blues singers like Ma Rainey, Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith were not all sad songs, the Robert Johnson’s Sweet Home Chicago was a unique song too. Many old Delta Blues music was later covered by Blues Rock bands and musicians but they couldn’t express that same old Delta Music vibe. It is true that they focused on guitars and they labeled themselves as Blues-Rock musicians but still they played the Blues and many musicians who followed like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmy Vaughan and others trailed that Blues-Rock tradition but they were the most talented guitarists. The popularity of soul music made famous by Sam Cooke and Otis Redding became the sad songs and they made you cry but the old Delta Music, the Chicago Blues by Muddy Waters, Big Bill Bronzy or Howlin’ Wolf made you sing from your heart in sorrow. That was the authentic blues. 

In the new era, many Blues musicians tried to keep the old Delta Blues vibe alive by playing the slow blues which was inspired by BB King and they were in slow tempo. Few of the musicians succeeded like Gary Moore, Eric Clapton. Clapton even tried to remaster many old Delta songs by Robert Johnson and played few authentic Delta Blues in his Unplugged album in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the old African-American bluesmen made Boogie-Woogie and R&B records too. The slow blues tradition was carried on by new blues guitarists like the John Mayer and his band John Mayer Trio and Robert Cray etc.  

B.B King

Jimi Hendrix