No one decides to sing the blues: if blues is in you, it has to come out. Blues is one of the few genres of music to inspire other art forms, from plays, paintings, and essays to the poetry of current... [more]

No one decides to sing the blues: if blues is in you, it has to come out. Blues is one of the few genres of music to inspire other art forms, from plays, paintings, and essays to the poetry of current writers such as Michael S. Harper and Robert Creeley. Historian Robert M. Baker claims the roots of blues are grounded in slave songs "filled with words telling of their extreme suffering and privation. One of the many responses to their oppressive environment resulted in the field holler. The field holler gave rise to the spiritual, and the blues." Composer and trumpeter W.C. Handy became the first popular blues musician with his "Memphis Blues" (1912) and "St. Louis Blues" (1914). According to Brian Priestly, Mamie Smith's recording of "Crazy Blues" (1920) was the first vocal blues song captured on wax. Blues was a national music that developed regionally; singers from deep in the Mississippi Delta, where songs emerged from the blacks laboring in construction camps and prisons, began working the Chitlin' Circuit early in the century. Artists such as Robert Johnson, Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, Leadbelly, and others traveled through the deep South, up into Tennessee and to the coast of Virginia. During the diaspora of the 1930s and '40s, blacks took the music to the North, with Chicago and Detroit becoming hotbeds and producing such stars as Junior Wells, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Willie Dixon. During the '40s and '50s, the Delta sound also spread to the big bands. Later, Texas would produce T-Bone Walker and Lightnin' Hopkins, and, of course, Memphis would give us B.B. King. [show less]