Scott Ainslie

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Copyright © 2002
Cattail Music, Inc.

Last modified: April 09, 2004

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Meet The Blues

The term Blues has roots that predate the music we know as Blues by at least two centuries. In the time of William Shakespeare [1564-1616], people believed in fairies and sprites -- invisible, magical beings that could assist or worry people as they went about their daily lives. In the context of this superstition, when someone became irritable or depressed for no obvious external reason, people would say that "the blue fairies", or "the blues" were bothering them, like a cloud of gnats or mosquitoes might worry us today.

By Thomas Jefferson's time [1743-1826], the notion of invisible fairies had fallen into disrepute. But the expression of 'having the blues' can be found in Jefferson's writings, and was still a common expression for those less-than-happy emotions to which we are all prone.

Blues and other African-American art forms often show their deep African roots in what are known as African Retentions---parts of African traditions that we still find embedded in American and African-American music, art and culture. In Blues, the easiest of these to identify include:

The Blues developed differently in different regions of the country so that people speak of 'Texas Blues', 'Louisiana Blues', 'Chicago Blues' and the like. But the music can be divided most broadly into two distinct styles: Delta Blues from the Mississippi Delta and Piedmont Blues, also known as East Coast Blues, which were played in the more eastern states, from Washington, DC all the way to Florida.

The Delta Blues

Delta Blues stayed very close to their African roots, retaining many African musical values. [A Delta is an alluvial deposit that occurs at the mouth of a river where it enters a larger body of water, slows down and releases it's load of sediment in a triangular deposit. The name comes from the symbol for the Greek letter 'delta', a triangle.] The Mississippi Delta is a leaf shaped plain that stretches from Memphis in the North to Vicksburg in the South and is bounded by the hill country of Mississippi to the East and Arkansas to the West.

In the early 1800's, the Mississippi Delta was both an inviting, and forbidding place. The Mississippi---a river that drains fully 41% of the continental United States (including all or part of 31 states!) and is superseded in size only by the Congo and the Amazon---has been spreading out regularly over the land surrounding it for eons. [Topsoil in the Delta has average thickness of more than 132 feet!] The river made the Delta an agriculturally perfect farm land that was nearly too dangerous to work. As settlers did risk the floods of the Mississippi to reap the rewards of cotton, huge plantations were set up. The cotton in the Delta could grow as tall as a man and produce yields two and three times that of other soils. The land holdings were large---2,500-3,000 acres—and would have 250-300   sharecropping families on them.

Towns in the Delta were far apart and, after the Civil War, plantation owners set up the Share Cropping system, whereby black labor would remain on the plantations in the Delta and work. In exchange for their labor, the land owners continued to provide food, supplies and shelter, and at the end of the planting season they would theoretically 'share' the crop.

As the land owner could read and write, this typically worked out in their favor. Plantation owners usually stocked a commissary on the place and allowed their workers to take out goods on credit, against their share of the crop. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, after the harvest and sale of the cotton, share croppers would be called into the land owner's office to settle accounts. Land owners generally charged outrageous prices for the goods in the commissary---even taking out rent for the share cropper's shacks (built by their forebearers)---leaving many share cropping families heavily in debt at the end of a year working the fields. [This quickly became an economic extension of slavery. There are many accounts of share croppers being as much as $700 dollars in debt to the land owners at the end of a season–the equivalent of a great deal more today!].

These circumstances in the Delta worked to isolate Delta sharecroppers and musicians---economically, geographically, socially, politically and musically— leaving them very much to their own devices for survival, and for their entertainments. Delta Blues grew in this dark soil, retaining much of its African character, but on the East Coast things were different.  While the Delta simmered in its own juices, the rest of the country was dancing to ragtime.

The Piedmont Blues

Piedmont Blues, also known as East Coast Blues, were played in the coastal Southern states, from Washington, DC, all the way to Florida. At the turn of the century---when Blues started to develop and be noticed -- Ragtime music was king. In 1900, the Black composer Scott Joplin published "The Maple Leaf Rag" and sold one million copies of it, in a country of only a little over 75 million! Joplin's rags and John Philip Sousa's marches were immensely popular and influenced dance and music styles all over the country, except in the Delta and other severely isolated regions. In Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Florida, Black guitarists and musicians heard and responded to Ragtime and Piedmont Blues grew to a different beat and dance style than the Delta music.

Unlike the Delta, land holdings were much smaller on the East Coast and towns were closer together. Share croppers could get into town to get their own supplies and hear the music of the time. From around 1900 until World War II, the east coast reverberated to this ragtime-influenced blues, which came to be named for the region in which many of its most famous and popular recording stars were based.

Up until 1942, when the city outlawed street music and one of its most respected musicians, Blind Boy Fuller, died, Durham, North Carolina was home to Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Boy Fuller (Fulton Allen was his given name), harmonica great Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.