New World Records 481 Eighth Avenue, #835 New York, New York 10001-1820; (212) 290-1680; (212) 290-1685 fax email: [email protected] www.newworldrecords.org Roots of the Blues New World 80252-2 f the United States has a national song form, it the black migratory laborers—who built the lev- I may well be the blues. Wailed by solo singers, ees and the railroads, raised the crops, and the thousands of verses of the blues, borne on a worked in the mills—knew what it was to be so single but endlessly varied haunting cadence, fill economically and culturally underprivileged as to a regular Mississippi River of song that long since be without family, friends, or community. They overflowed its banks into jazz, hillbilly, gospel, sang: opera, pop, and rock.The simplicity of the blues form is as remarkable as its vitality. In this the I'm a poor old boy,jes ain't treated right, blues is like other national song forms—the aus- Freezin' ground was my folding bed last night. tere copla in which Spanish singers have rhymed the whole Iberian experience, the bittersweet They knew total rejection: stornello that since the early Renaissance has I asked my captain what time of day, registered the Italian view of the beauties of He looked at me and walked away. women and the ironies of love. But the blues is not only the national song of the United States; it Now, after depression, war, the breakdown of is creeping into the ear of the whole world and the family and the neighborhood, in gradual disil- may become the first international song style. In lusionment, and helpless in the face of the giant origin the blues is bicultural, Afro-American or institutions that control our destinies, whites also Afro-European: European in that, like the stornel- have the blues, and are trying to sing them. As lo and the copla, it is essentially a rhymed cou- Big Bill Broonzy said: plet set to a compact strophic melody;African in a score of ways descending cadences, flatted sev- It takes a man that has the blues to sing the blues.The enths and thirds (which register the inherited blues is a kind of revenge.That boss actin' so mean and influence of African scales), a polymetered rela- dirty and you want to say somethin', but you can't, so you tion between voice and accompaniment, and a go out behind the wagon, pretend a horse stepped on your foot and say,“Get offa me, god damn it.,,That's like a man, playful singing style changing role from phrase to singing the blues, expressin' what he can't say in a song. phrase. Thus the blues merges two musical lan- guages into an international patois. Big Bill, who in his lifetime turned the ironic The appeal of this new language is that it light of the blues on a hundred subjects, was con- speaks of the modern, urban, alienated experi- tinuing a tradition of his cultural ancestors, the ence. The blues came into being in the period griots of western Sudan.These oral poets, chroni- between 1890 and 1930, as America was chang- clers of daily events, family traditions, and the ing from a rural agricultural to an urban industri- deeds of the kings of Mali and Senegal, often put al nation. In this period the majority of blacks into their verse things that their audiences dared were surplus, often migratory, labor—badly paid, not say; indeed, the greatest kings stood in fear of ill-educated, ghetto-confined, without civil rights, the griots, for their songs could bring the most and subjected to every sort of exploitation and powerful into ridicule and shame that might fol- violence. Long before the rest of Western man, low them through life. There are recorded griot 1 performances that precisely match certain Missis- him. The muezzin summons the faithful and the sippi country-blues records in tempo, relation of priest intones the service in this rubato parlando voice to accompaniment, phrasing, and vocal style; style; it is indeed the canto hondo (the deep song) I am not the first musicologist to conclude that the of the Old World, for gypsy, peasant, and priest all Sudanese griot style is the progenitor of the blues, send their troubles aloft in this way. Such songs are although the precise mode of succession remains heard less often on African recordings, presumably undiscovered. because most African work and religious songs are The roots of the blues may be traced even further performed in concert, with the positive affect of back. There is a distinctively African approach to group song. The few African examples we have the solo-string-accompanied type, heard in these heard, however, are the direct ancestors of the recordings and common elsewhere only in Africa. American Negro holler, which is the main source A rather open voice with playful vocal quality, of the blues (Track 1). often employing rasp, falsetto, and glissando, per- When my father John A. Lomax and I recorded the forms a simple repetitive melody (often one phrase work songs of the South we discovered this rich with variation, in descending cadence) in rich genre of the holler—the individual field call, some- antiphonal and cross-rhythmed interplay with the times with words, sometimes without.These hollers instrument, which sustains a driving rhythm in a proliferated in the postbellum South as the folk simple ostinato pattern under the voice and then scattered out to individual farms, rambled off to breaks out between vocal phrases. This style is take up temporary work on construction gangs, or, found largely in Sudan and East Africa, where the worst of all, were sent off to the chain gang or jail. Oriental influence is apparent. It seems to be a sub- Plowing, getting in the wood, running a mule-drawn style of a very large musical region, embracing the scraper on the levee, swinging an ax or a hoe all Mediterranean and the whole Orient, where virtu- day long under the eye of a guard—these are lonely, osic solo singing with string accompaniment is the heartbreaking tasks. In the holler the isolated work- outstanding, often the dominant, mode. I have er communicates with his friends or family at a dis- termed this the “bardic” manner, for it is in this way tance or complains to the sun and the mules about that the ancient bards performed the epics; it was his hard lot. In some groups we found that every in this manner that, from time immemorial, court man had his own holler—a personal song of one or bards have sung for their masters, as did David for many verses, by which he was known. “That's ol' Saul. Universes of varied musics live within this Bob hollerin' down there in the lowground.” vast region of solo-accompanied song, but the drama common to all is of the individual, standing I'm down in the bottom, [mule) skinning for Johnny Ryan, alone, crying out his troubles or addressing a plea Writin' my 'nitials on that mule's behind. to some powerful figure—the landlord, the emper- I'm down in the bottom, mud up to my knees, or, the gods, or his unattainable ladylove. It is this Workin' for my woman, she so hard to please. last figure to whom, as we shall see, so many blues are sung. Thus one root of the blues runs back to These are verses from a levee-camp holler that the Sudanese kingdoms and through them to a Leadbelly turned into a blues by setting it to a refined, often melancholy or angry, and occasional- dance rhythm. It was this particular process and ly subservient Oriental tradition. The world-weary this free-rhythmed holler style that gave rise to the note that sounds in the blues is ages old, but it is blues. Maybe counterbalanced by the driving, danceable rhythms that are an African contribution. the blues came from Texas, lopin' like a mule. This ancient bardic strain tends strongly toward melodies that are free in form and rhythm and If it did come from Texas, I believe it came from a highly ornamented. One of the song types distinc- Texas levee camp to one in Mississippi. About the tive of the Orient is such melodies—they can be turn of the century, levees were built all along called “complaints,” because of their wailing melan- southern rivers, creating millions of acres of rich choly notes—which are common in cantellations bottom land for farms in eastern Texas, Louisiana, to Yahweh and Allah and in the field where farmers Arkansas, and Mississippi.The ready money and the and herdsmen work at lonely tasks. These field lawless, adventurous life drew thousands of blacks songs too are often religious in character, for the into the levee camps, where it was “all right to kill hard-pressed peasant, weighed down with taxes anybody, if you could work better than him.” and a large family, calls on God and the saints to aid The heart and center of this new frontier was the 2 Yazoo Delta, a huge slice of rich black land lying ance in his face, was subject to immediate intimida- back of the rising levees on both sides of the tion, attack, arrest, and jailing. If he was lucky Mississippi between Memphis and Natchez. This enough to have a white protector, he might get was the country where most bluesmen were born home a bit sooner from the chain gang or out of and raised and where W.