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Comment by BUGGY (C) on November 6, 2013 at 11:50am

Comment by BUGGY (C) on November 6, 2013 at 11:50am

Comment by BUGGY (C) on November 6, 2013 at 11:47am

The blues were around long before African Americans put them to music.

The expression originates in the belief of early English settlers that “blue devils,” or mean spirits, had followed them to their new land.

These devils were thought to be the cause of sadness, and so a bout of depression was called “the blues.”

Because no one could have been sadder than the black slaves, their raw expression of the mood in a unique and brilliant musical form became known as “the blues.”

Comment by BUGGY (C) on November 6, 2013 at 11:44am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_blues

Comment by BUGGY (C) on November 6, 2013 at 11:43am

Mamie Smith, more a vaudeville performer than a blues artist, was the first African- American to record a blues in 1920; her "Crazy Blues" sold 75,000 copies in its first month.^[30]

Comment by BUGGY (C) on November 6, 2013 at 11:42am

The most important American antecedent of the blues was the spiritual, a form of religious song with its roots in the camp meetings of the Great Awakening of the early 19th century. Spirituals were a passionate song form, that "convey(ed) to listeners the same feeling of rootlessness and misery" as the blues.^[5] Spirituals, however, were less specifically concerning the performer, instead about the general loneliness of mankind, and were more figurative than direct in their lyrics.^[5] Despite these differences, the two forms are similar enough that they can not be easily separated — many spirituals would probably have been called blues had that word been in wide use at the time.^[10]

Comment by BUGGY (C) on November 6, 2013 at 11:42am

Comment by BUGGY (C) on November 6, 2013 at 11:39am

Copied from wicapedia:

African American composer W. C. Handy wrote in his autobiography of the experience of sleeping on a train traveling through (or stopping at the station of) Tutwiler, Mississippi around 1903, and being awakened by:

... a lean, loose-jointed Negro [who] had commenced plucking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings in a manner popularised by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. ... The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly... The singer repeated the line ("Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog") three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.

Handy had mixed feelings about this music, which he regarded as rather primitive and monotonous,^[15] but he used the "Southern cross' the Dog" line in his 1914 "Yellow Dog Rag", which he retitled "Yellow Dog Blues" after the term blues became popular.^[16] "Yellow Dog" was the nickname of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad.

Blues later adopted elements from the "Ethiopian (here, meaning "black") airs" of minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment.^[17] The style also was closely related to ragtime, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music".^[18]

Since the 1890s, the American sheet music publishing industry had produced a great deal of ragtime music. The first published ragtime song to include a 12-bar section was "One o' Them Things!" in 1904. Written by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, it was published in St. Louis, Missouri, by Jos. Plachet and Son.^[19] Another early rag/blues mix was "I Got The Blues" published in 1908 by Anthony Maggio of New Orleans ^[20]

In a long interview conducted by Alan Lomax in 1938, Jelly Roll Morton recalled that the first blues he had heard, probably around 1900, was played by a singer and prostitute, Mamie Desdunes, in Garden District, New Orleans. Morton sang the blues: "Can’t give me a dollar, give me a lousy dime/ You can’t give me a dollar, give me a lousy dime/ Just to feed that hungry man of mine". The interview was released as The Complete Library of Congress Recordings.^[21]

Comment by Clock The Wolf on November 6, 2013 at 11:21am

"One explanation for the origin of the "blues" is that it derived from mysticism involving blue indigo, which was used by many West African cultures in death and mourning ceremonies where all the mourner's garments would have been dyed blue to indicate suffering. This mystical association towards the indigo plant, grown in many southern US slave plantations, combined with the West African slaves who sang of their suffering as they worked on the cotton that the indigo dyed eventually resulted in these expressed songs being known as "the Blues." The term may also have come from the term "blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness; an early use of the term in this sense is found in George Colman's one-act farce Blue Devils (1798). Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to since 1912, when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition. In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood."
                                                                                                                                           ---Bugipedia

Comment by Ron "Oily" Sprague on November 6, 2013 at 6:52am

Well, sometimes I see red, or turn green with envy...

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