It was W. C. Handy, as much as anybody, who was responsible for gifting us with the mythology of Mississippi as ground zero for the blues. America’s Musical Life: A History. It was recorded in its debut year by Paul Whiteman (with vocals by Jack Fulton, Charles Gaylord and Austin "Skin" Young), Harry Richman, and The Revelers. Southern African Americans developed blues music in the decades that followed the end of slavery. Blues and early jazz were inextricably linked as they developed concurrently late in the nineteenth century. Chicago #6. Guitars had been in the Americas since the earliest Spanish settlement of St. Augustine, Florida, in the late sixteenth century. Sharecroppers and laborers on prison chain gangs, railroads, and levees continued this practice after the end of slavery. Become A Better Singer In Only 30 Days, With Easy Video Lessons! I Was Sorta Wonderin' 10. Black and white musicians freely borrowed songs and musical ideas from each other, resulting in a shared common stock repertoire. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. She added that the blues were not so named then, and that she frequently heard similar songs in her travels. The term “blues” as a description for melancholia is rooted in the “blue devils” of sixteenth-century British literature. Banjo expert Bill Knopf plays his interpretation of the Ray Henderson jazz classic. These songsters, or musicianers, played a wide variety of music, including fiddle tunes, minstrel songs, spirituals, and narrative ballads. So while I've only heard half of the tracks that are on this set, I can at least contribute a little info. His song, too, struck me instantly. Sings and Laurindo Almeida Plays, Sammy Davis Jr. Handy was living in Memphis, Tennessee in 1912 when he published the sheet music for his composition “The Memphis Blues.” It was one of the first published blues songs, and sales of the sheet music soared. The effect was unforgettable. Drumming was strictly limited or outlawed in America by white governments and overseers who were fearful of the potential use of drums to communicate and coordinate slave revolts. This Spanish rhythm was popular in Cuba in the nineteenth century. While spirituals find solace in God and the promise of salvation, blues songs remain focused on the earthly realm. Both spirituals and blues often convey feelings of struggle or sorrow. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. Forced into segregated “separate but equal” public accommodations, African Americans were more isolated from mainstream American society than they had been under slavery. San Antonio Rose 16. Alan Lomax recorded this example of a holler by Walter “Tangle Eye” Jackson at Mississippi State Penitentiary (1947). W.C. It was even more successful than “The Memphis Blues,” and it carried blues music around the world. Wald, Elijah. Bing Crosby founds the first white Dixieland band in Birth of the Blues, a tuneful turn-of-the-century tale--if highly suspect as musical history.Borrowing hot licks from black musicians (Eddie "Rochester" Anderson comments, "Our music sure has gone highbrow"), Bing and his players struggle to invade the straight-laced clubs, succeeding only after songbird Mary Martin joins … When You and I Were Young, Maggie 08. Among them were black musicians. Sings Mel Tormé's "California Suite", Sammy Davis Jr. Blue devils were evil spirits thought to cause depression. African Americans continued singing call and response work songs on American plantations and other group work environments, including railroad and levee building. Rhythmic inventiveness is central to blues and other African American musical forms, including ragtime, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, and hip hop. The Birth of the Blues has apparently been released in a few versions: this 4-CD box set, a single disc CD that's also available here, and the 2-CD set that I just came across at a discount store. This show is at Kiel Opera House in St Louis in June 1965 when Johnny Carson hosted the Tonight Show. This article focuses on the early development of blues and its emergence as popular music in the 1910s. The blues that emerged as popular music built on earlier folk forms, but it was new and different. Ma Rainey became so interested that she learned the song from the visitor and used it soon afterwards in her act as an encore. Do Right Daddy Blues It was used in the Broadway revue George White's Scandals of 1926. Blues music employs a range of melodic practices from West Africa. ( Shout out the wonderful news! ) Others wandered due to restlessness. All the blues recordings of this period were performed by white vaudeville singers and dance orchestras with varied repertoires. The singing often incorporated call and response, a technique in which a leader sings or chants a line, and the group echoes or answers it with a reply. In the example below, listen specifically to the chord changes that occur in bars 5, 7, 9, 10, and 11. Spirituals are generally sung as a community, whereas blues is the expression of an individual. Blind Lemon Jefferson “Black Snake Moan” (1926). The Birth of the Blues A7 Bridge: C C/B E7 Dm6 E7 From a whippoorwill, out on a hill, Dm6 Bm7/5- E7 Bm7/5- They took a new note, E7 A7 A7sus4 A7 Pushed it through a … "The Saint Louis Blues" also features a lyric pattern that is frequently employed in twelve-bar blues songs. Birth of the Blues (1941) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more. Jazz lovers, go out and rent Birth of the Blues; even if you don't like old movies, it might become one of your favorites. He enjoyed their company, he enjoyed working with them, just couldn't get enough. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999. They also employed the West African-derived vocal, rhythmic, and melodic devices that would become common to blues. Among My Souvenirs 11. These include melodies that build on a five-note pentatonic “blues scale.” The flatted 3rd and 7th pitches of these scales are commonly called “blue notes.” Europeans and Euro-Americans often describe songs built on these scales as having a mournful sound. “Livery Stable Blues,” recorded by the Original Dixieland Jass Band in 1917, is widely regarded as the first jazz recording to be released commercially. Sings the Complete 'Dr. Although rooted in African American folk forms, white, professional songwriters wrote most of the published blues compositions of the 1910s. Jones, Leroi. Blues ballads were similar in structure to the narrative ballads that British colonists brought to the New World, but they told stories relevant to contemporary African American life. Through spirituals, enslaved African Americans applied call and response and other West African musical practices to Christian hymn singing. Twelfth Street Rag 17. "The Birth of the Blues" is a popular 1926 song composed by Ray Henderson, with lyrics by Buddy DeSylva and Lew Brown. W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Gave birth to the blues! It also revealed the symbiotic relationship between blues and another burgeoning form of American music: jazz. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. Wald, Elijah. Notable artists include Al Bernard, Marion Harris, and Marie Cahill. “The Saint Louis Blues,” or “St. Black brass bands in New Orleans played blues-inflected jazz music on European marching band instruments, including the clarinet, trumpet, trombone, and tuba. I Left My Heart in San Francisco #3. Sure, some of this plot may be rather fictionalized; but that's not what really matters. Ma Rainey may be the first singer to gain success as a blues specialist. The Rat Pack were playing Vegas but visited Carson for this wonderfully entertaining performance. African American musicians played fiddle, banjo, mandolin, quills, pianos, and increasingly in the 1890s, the guitar. Medley: Volare/On an Evening in Roma #4. Ma Rainey told folklorist John W. Work about encountering blues music for the first time in a small town in Missouri in 1902. Countless artists have performed and recorded it, including Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Glenn Miller, and the Boston Pops Orchestra. "The Saint Louis Blues" was written with a chord structure that became very common in blues music. Many times she was asked what kind of song it was, and one day she replied, in a moment of inspiration, "It's the blues...". The song was so strange and poignant that it attracted much attention. In the absence of drums, enslaved African Americans created complex rhythms through singing, hand-clapping, foot-stomping, as well as instrumental techniques used in playing banjo, fiddle, bones, spoons, piano, and other instruments. Blues became widely-known in the 1910s when it emerged as a modern trend in popular music. Original Dixieland Jass Band: "Livery Stable Blues" (1917). White Southerners severely limited African Americans’ abilities to participate in the political process through discriminatory voting laws and terror organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Pale Faces. The Music of Black Americans: A History. While African Americans had been singing on sound recordings since the start of the recording industry in 1890, they mainly performed self-deprecating “coon songs” (see Ragtime: About the Genre) and minstrel show material. The painting is in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. With her husband, William “Pa” Rainey, they appeared in vaudeville theaters, circuses, and tent shows throughout the southeastern United States. Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music, 2009. Loosely based on real events, Bing Crosby plays someone who, despite his classical training, has jazz in his veins and insists on playing a new kind of music. He told the following story about a song he heard at a train station in the Delta hamlet of Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903. Both were essential ingredients in jazz. As Work told her story: A girl from town... came to the tent one morning and began to sing about the man who had left her. Many compositions included both words blues and ragtime, or rag, in the title or description. Gradually, blues songs gained more and more prominence in Rainey’s repertoire. It launched black performers to new levels of success, finally singing music that was their own. Learn to play guitar by chord / tabs using chord diagrams, transpose the key, watch video lessons and much more. The Blues: A Very Short Introduction. Handy's original composition, as well as several of his other pieces, includes a section with a habanera rhythm. Amazon.com. In 1914, after several years with the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, Ma and Pa Rainey performed with a traveling circus, billing themselves as “Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues.” Ma Rainey was also billed as “Mother of the Blues,” a recognition that has persisted to this day. The music industry marketed and sold records and sheet music primarily to mainstream, middle-class, white consumers. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. Reconstruction governments offered political power, access to public schools, and jobs building railroads and roads. Their distinctive vocal textures are evident in the style of many blues singers, including Blind Lemon Jefferson, Skip James, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Tommy Johnson. Handy picked up musical ideas and styles from the locales he visited. Coming up with Paul Whiteman, Bing met and worked with some of the greatest musicians in history. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta. White performers in blackface makeup dominated minstrelsy, but an increasing number of black minstrel troupes, also in blackface, toured after the Civil War. A lean, loose-jointed negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. The slow time and mournful nature of the hollers bear a close resemblance to blues, though blues songs are more structured. New York: Amistad, 2004. The Development of Blues in the Postwar South, Blues Queens and Race Records in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. The genres shared many musical qualities, including the use of rhythmic syncopation, but blues was on the rise in the 1910s while ragtime was in decline. Call and response is evident between Robert Johnson's vocal and guitar in "Cross Road Blues" (1936). Gave birth to the blues! As the term for a type of music, blues probably came into use around the turn of the twentieth century. "The Birth of the Blues" is a popular 1926 song composed by Ray Henderson, with lyrics by Buddy DeSylva and Lew Brown. The twelve-bar form indicates a specific relationship among chords that are played across twelve measures (or bars) and repeat throughout a song. “The Memphis Blues” started a national craze for blues music. This gestation period birthed forms of American music that would take the national stage in the first decades of the twentieth century, including blues and country. Regional songs and styles emerged, though traveling musicians picked up and spread influences throughout the South. Palmer, Robert. Goody Goody #5. Birth of the Blues is a 1941 American musical film directed by Victor Schertzinger and starring Bing Crosby, Mary Martin and Brian Donlevy. In West Africa, people sang group work songs as they carried out jobs and tasks. You watch this film for the song and dance numbers. The plot loosely follows the origins and breakthrough success of the Original Dixieland Jass Band in New Orleans. Traveling on foot, horseback, or train, they exercised their new freedom to do what was denied them for so long. Emancipation brought new hope for African American people in the South. A visitor to a plantation in the South described a holler in his observation of a man who “raised such a sound as I never heard before: a long, loud, musical shout, rising and falling and breaking into falsetto.” Field hollers could be wordless, or they might include improvised phrases and pieces of existing songs. Starting in the mid-1890s, he toured extensively as a professional entertainer, singing with minstrel troupes, playing cornet and trumpet, leading choruses, and directing black dance bands. Milward, John. Handy published his next blues, “The Saint Louis Blues,” in 1914. She began performing as a teenager in the first decade of the twentieth century. They did not view African Americans as potential customers, so they marketed records by black artists to white audiences. Minstrel and coon songs performed by black singers sold to white record buyers because the material supported the dominant racial stereotypes and did not threaten the prevailing power structure. For a general overview that follows the evolution of blues music from its origins through its contemporary forms, see Blues: About the Genre. In blues music, call and response often occurs between a singer and a musical instrument. ‘Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog.’ The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard. I hate to see the evening sun go downI hate to see the evening sun go downIt makes me think I'm on my last go 'round, Bessie Smith, with Louis Armstrong: "The Saint Louis Blues" (1925). 1965 in St. Louis Please Be Kind #8. African and African American singers and instrumentalists slide, glide, and quiver between pitches. Music Makin' Mama from Memphis 09. In the 1910s, blues became a sensation throughout the United States. Review by Bob Joseph ★★½ This is a boring quasi-biopic about the birth of Jazz (not the blues, as the title confusingly states), or better yet, about the moment when Jazz became popular with white musicians and audiences. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Rhythmic, melodic, and stylistic characteristics of blues are evident in the music of plantation workers of the antebellum South. You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You #9. Morton Harvey’s recording of the song in 1915 was the first blues sung on record. Professional songwriters and musicians composed and performed the music, and it reflected up-to-date trends in theater and vaudeville. [2], Sammy Davis Jr. Belts the Best of Broadway, What Kind of Fool Am I and Other Show-Stoppers, Sammy Davis Jr. Salutes the Stars of the London Palladium, Sammy Davis Jr. Neither the singer in Handy’s story, nor in Rainey’s, identified the music they were singing as blues. Birth Of The Blues. Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock ’n’ Roll. The sheet music for “The Memphis Blues” indicated that it was “A Southern Rag,” referring to ragtime music, which had been very popular since the mid-1890s. Their popularity increased dramatically during the 1890s when companies, including Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, started making inexpensive models available by mail order. Bing Crosby founds the first white Dixieland band in Birth of the Blues, a tuneful turn-of-the-century tale--if highly suspect as musical history. The Birth of the Blues Chords by Frank Sinatra. Writer(s): desylva/brown/henderson Oh, they say some people long ago Were searching for a diff'rent tune One that they could croon Frank Sinatra - Birth Of The Blues Lyrics | MetroLyrics Louis Blues,” has since become a standard. The rat pack - Birth of the blues full comedy act and song. The withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877 marked the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of white Redemption. This video of “Birth of the Blues” is supposedly the only time Johnny Carson sang in public. The blues that emerged as popular music built on earlier folk forms, but it was new and different. Lyrics to Birth Of The Blues by Frank Sinatra from the Ultimate Sinatra [Four-Disc] album - including song video, artist biography, translations and more! Confused with the Blues 18. It became integrated into the African American music of New Orleans, as musicians regularly ferried between the city and Havana. [1] Sings the Big Ones for Young Lovers, Sammy Davis Jr. It was recorded in its debut year by Paul Whiteman (with vocals by Jack Fulton, Charles Gaylord and Austin "Skin" Young), Harry Richman, and The Revelers. For the music and not much else, except Bing Crosby seemingly very proud to present the Birth of the Blues (1941). Crawford, Richard. In 1908, New Orleans produced the first published blues composition - "I Got the Blues," written by an Italian American named Antonio Maggio. Southern, Eileen. Golden River 13. Personal statements by individuals superseded the communal music that was dominant during slavery. View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 1993 CD release of "The Birth Of The Blues" on Discogs. The Birth of the Blues has apparently been released in a few versions: this 4-CD box set, a single disc CD that's also available here, and the 2-CD set that I just came across at a discount store. Handy was an African American bandleader, songwriter, and music teacher who became known as “Father of the Blues” for his role in making blues a popular music sensation. Birth of the Blues was a labor of love for Bing Crosby and it showed. The success of Handy's compositions prompted other composers to jump on the blues bandwagon, and the music grew in popularity throughout the decade. Borrowing hot licks from black musicians (Eddie "Rochester" Anderson comments, "Our music sure has gone highbrow"), Bing and his players struggle to invade the straight-laced clubs, succeeding only after songbird Mary Martin joins the band. 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