The Birth of the Blues

Early Sightings in the Deep South

A common misconception holds that in the years leading up to the American Civil War, slaves in the Deep South invented and performed blues songs. Contemporaneous accounts from that era do describe slaves using a variety of field hollers and work songs to set the pace of their labors. However, to my knowledge no compelling evidence has surfaced that they performed 12- and 8-bar blues music as we know it today.

More likely, the first strains of blues music echoed across the American South around the beginning of the twentieth century. The music’s exact origins are lost amid a swirling milieu of slave songs, spirituals, work chants, street cries, country ballads, European parlor guitar, minstrel songs, ragtime, jazz, and Hawaiian steel guitar.

Buddy Bolden is said to have improvised a lowdown “blues”—probably a field holler played instrumentally—on his clarinet in 1894. Three years later, a Columbia cylinder catalog listed a song called “The Charleston Blues,” played by Charles P. Lowe on xylophone with piano accompaniment. While this is perhaps the earliest known recording with “blues” in the title, it’s unknown whether the song had a blues structure, since no copies of the cylinder are known to have survived. Around this same time, W.C. Handy claimed, “shabby street guitarists” were picking a version of “East St. Louis” comprised entirely of strung-together stanzas such as, “I walked all the way from old East St. Louis/And I didn’t have but one po’ measly dime.”

Thanks to Charles Peabody of Harvard University, an account exists of workers performing Mississippi Delta music at the turn of the century. During the summers of 1901 and 1902, Peabody oversaw the excavation of an Indian mound in Coahoma County, Mississippi. He was impressed with the songs of his crew, which consisted of nine to fifteen Black men from Clarksdale, some fifteen miles distant. In an article in the Journal Of American Folk-Lore, Peabody noted that while digging and wheeling on the mound, his men sang unaccompanied tunes to assist their physical labor “in the same way as that of sailors tugging ropes or of soldiers invited to march by drum and band.” Peabody characterized these songs as Methodist hymns and “ragtime” melodies picked up from itinerant minstrel troupes, “Molly Brown” and “Googoo Eye” being particular favorites. His men described one famous singer who was beseeched by fellow workers not to sing a certain song that made them work too hard.

More interesting, Peabody claimed, were the two-line improvisations on themes having to do with hard work, hard luck, love, and “other events of Negro life.” His examples could easily have been cast as blues songs:

“They had me arrested for murder and I never harmed a man”

“I don’t gamble but I don’t see how my money gets away from me”

“The reason I loves my baby so, ’cause when she gets five dollars she gives me fo’”

“In their refrains ending on the tonic,” Peabody described, “they sometimes sang the last note somewhat sharp. So frequent was this that it seemed intentional or unavoidable, not merely a mistake in pitch.” Peabody praised the consistency of their tempo.

Sometimes the men in the trenches used refrains to convey hints to their employers. On Saturday—typically a half-day’s work—someone would cry out, “Mighty long half day, Capta-i-n.” Most of the men were mediocre singers in Peabody’s estimation, although the leaders had fine voices.

While relaxing in their quarters, the workers sang to guitar music Peabody described as “mostly ragtime with the instrument seldom venturing beyond the inversions of the three chords of a few major and minor keys. . . . Occasionally we would get them to sing to us with the guitar, but the spontaneity was lacking and the repertoire was limited. They have, however, the primitive characteristics of patience under repetition, and both in the trench and out of it kept up hours-long ululation of little variety.” Chances are, Peabody was hearing one of the earliest forms of blues music.

Peabody was especially taken with the unaccompanied songs of a mule driver who lived near the mound and sang from sunrise to sunset. Some of his lyrics praised God or cursed the mule, while “other directions intoned to him melted into strains of apparently genuine African music, sometimes with words, sometimes without. Long phrases there were without apparent measured rhythm, singularly hard to copy in notes.” When these melodies were simple enough to notate, Peabody found them “based for the most part on the major or minor triad.”

The most enduring of Charles Peabody's musical memories from the Delta were the song of a Black woman singing her baby to sleep—“weird in interval and strange in rhythm; particularly beautiful”—and the vocalizing of an elderly Black man from John Stovall’s plantation. “His voice as he sang had a timbre resembling a bagpipe played pianissimo or a Jew’s harp played legato, and to some indistinguishable words he hummed a rhythm of no regularity and notes apparently not more than three or more in number at intervals within a semi-tone. The effect again was monotonous but weird, not far from Japanese. I have not heard that kind again nor of it.” The white men of the region, Peabody concluded, “seem not to be able to throw off their sorrows in songs as are the true sons of the torrid zone, the Negroes.”

A year after Peabody published his research, bandleader W.C. Handy witnessed what was likely a bona-fide blues performance. In his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues, Handy wrote of visiting the Mississippi Delta in 1903. One night while waiting for a train, he fell asleep in the Tutwiler station. A strange sound unlike any he had heard before suddenly awoke him. “A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept,” Handy wrote. “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 of the guitar in a manner popularized by the Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly: ‘Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog.’ The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.”

The unidentified musician Handy observed was singing about Moorhead, Mississippi, where the Southern Railroad crossed the Yazoo-Delta Railroad, nicknamed “the Yellow Dog.”

Around the same time Handy made his observations in Moorhead, Ma Rainey encountered blues music for the first time while performing in a small Missouri town. As John Work and Sterling Brown, who interviewed her, wrote in 1940’s American Negro Song, “She tells of a girl from the town who came to the tent one morning and began to sing about the ‘man’ who had left her. The song was so strange and poignant that it attracted much attention. Ma Rainey became so interested in it that she learned the song from the visitor and used it soon afterward in her act as an encore. The song elicited such response from the audience that it won a special place in her act.” Rainey explained that a 1905 fire had destroyed clippings describing her singing these strange songs and that although they were not yet called blues, she frequently heard similar songs during her travels.

Rev. Gary Davis claimed 1905 as the year he heard songs like “Candy Man” and “Cocaine Blues,” calling them “that old-fashioned picking.” “Ain’t Nobody’s Business What I Do” and “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor" both predate1910, while “Joe Turner Blues” and “Hesitation Blues” came soon afterwards.

Within a few years blues music had proliferated across the American South. Early commentators observed that it was most popular along the Mississippi River, where it was spread by riverboats and medicine shows and soon resounded in Black communities of all sizes. Perry Bradford, who in 1920 composed and oversaw the recording of the first blues hit by a Black singer, wrote in his 1965 autobiography, Born with the Blues, that “the South was especially crazy about the blues, a cry of a broken heart that echoed from every levee and bayou up and down the Mississippi River.” All along, Bradford claimed, he was certain Southerners of both races would buy blues 78s: “They understand blues and jazz songs, for they’ve heard blind men on street corners in the South playing guitars and singing ’em for nickels and dimes ever since their childhood days.”

On the surface, the blues seemed simple enough. The songs, Handy wrote, “consisted of simple declarations expressed usually in three lines and set to a kind of earth-born music that was familiar throughout the Southland.” In the traditional twelve-bar blues Handy describes, two identical or similar vocal lines were typically answered by a third line. The whole verse was sung with passion over a pattern involving three chords set to a straightforward or propulsive rhythm.

There were many variations as well, as heard in such classic eight-bar blues as “Key to the Highway,” “Sitting on Top of the World,” and “Trouble in Mind.” When the spirit moved them, early blues guitarists such as Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson would play elaborate solos that extended beyond a strict bar count, just as their disciples Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, and others would in the years after World War II.

Unlike the field hollers and work songs, the earliest blues songs were often music of leisure. Unlike ballads, they allowed the singer complete self-expression. A bluesman could brag, nag, howl at heaven, dis those he labored for, or seduce with passionate come-ons. He could fashion himself into a hero, victim, or savior.

But despite their popularity, blues songs were not always accepted by members of the communities in which they were performed. To many, especially preachers and “churchified” folk, the blues was sometimes deemed “devil’s music,” fit only for field workers and totally unacceptable in polite company. As Johnny Shines, a bluesman who traveled with Robert Johnson in the 1930s, recalled, “When I was a kid, if a person heard you singing the blues and recognized your voice, you couldn’t go down to their house, around their daughters.”

To some, even the guitar itself was taboo. When young W. C. Handy proudly brought one home, his father forced him to swap it for a dictionary. Even in high society, the blues had its detractors. Handy recounted how, in 1936, the eminent critic Deems Taylor introduced the Paul Whiteman Orchestra’s performance of “St. Louis Blues” by quipping, “There are two schools of thought regarding the invention of the blues. One regards it as an event equal in importance to Edison’s invention of the incandescent light. The other is inclined to classify it rather with Lincoln’s assassination.”

Many first-generation bluesmen lived in a dangerous and unforgiving environment. This was especially true in the American South, where long hours of backbreaking labor, low pay, and the easily rigged sharecropping system kept plantation hands in virtual servitude. In the land of Jim Crow laws, even the slightest infraction (such as a Black male attempting to use a “white’s only” drinking fountain, failing to step off the sidewalk to make way for a white woman, or gazing too long in the “wrong direction”) could lead to torture and death by lynching. Against these impossible odds, bluesmen found shelter, relief, and an unsurpassed means for self-expression in their music. In the process, they created an enduring musical form that continues to enrich us all.

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An earlier and abbreviated version of this article appeared in my book Early Blues: The First Stars of Blues Guitar.

For more coverage of pre-war blues, check out these Talking Guitar articles: The Birth of the Blues, The First Blues Recordings, The Atlanta Blues, The Origins of Spanish and Vestapol Tunings, The Great 1930 Mississippi Delta Blues Session, Barbecue Bob, Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller and Rev. Gary Davis, Son House and Willie Brown, Mississippi John Hurt, Papa Charlie Jackson, Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Memphis Minnie, Ma Rainey, Johnny Shines, Victoria Spivey and Lonnie Johnson, Curley Weaver, Booker “Bukka” White, Rev. Robert Wilkins, Talking Blues With Keith Richards, and “You Gotta Move”: The Country Blues Roots of the Rolling Stones.

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