Music Lane

It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes.

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RE: "Blues" is a key ingredient

Posted by rbolaw on April 16, 2015 at 09:32:54:
IMHO, that is largely because the American music industry was racially segregated for decades. Not until the late 60s did it become widely acceptable to present popular music in an undiluted, unsterilized African-American tradition to the white, middle class mainstream audience. Elvis had almost singlehandedly established blues and gospel in pop music for the white American audience in the 50s, but even he significantly whitened his act.

By the late 60s, the blues tradition was an old one. Eric Clapton acknowledged his debt to Robert Johnson, who was born in 1911 and killed by a jealous husband in 1938. Lightnin' Hopkins, born in 1912, went back to the same era.

Even Johnson and Hopkins were later generation bluesmen carrying on an already old tradition that went back at least to the turn of the century and probably much earlier. But the first blues record was not made until 1920 by an actress and vaudevillian from Cincinnati (not the Mississippi delta) named Mamie Smith. The band backing her sounds to me more like Dixieland jazz than authentic blues. And that record was made mainly for black consumers. True, it's huge popularity encouraged record companies in the 1920s to search for blues musicians to record. But the Depression apparently caused that trend to fade away.

As late as the early 60s, Duane and Greg Allman were literally crossing the tracks in their hometown of Daytona Beach to buy blues records in the black neighborhood. So given all that history, it's surprising that the authentic blues tradition has had as much as an influence on American music as it has.