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2.6.8Blues Music: What It Is Musically and Where It Came From
Origins
After the emancipation, African Americans found themselves shut out of mainstream society, living in nightmarish conditions of poverty and racial segregation. The Ku Klux Klan organized lynch mobs that murdered thousands of African Americans, beginning in the 1880s and continuing into the 1960s.
The blues began in the Mississippi delta in the late 1880s or early 1890s, with former slaves and their progeny singing about their tragic lives of discrimination, broken dreams, shattered families, and alienation. And disappointment with lovers. And satisfaction with lovers. And ambiguity about lovers.
Unlike jazz, the blues was mainly rural in origin. It began as a wholly African American folk music genre.
With voice, guitar, and harmonica, blues musicians combined pentatonic and diatonic scales to create blues scales—hybrid scales with “blue” notes (see Chapters 4 and 5). This black folk/country music didn’t sound much like either jazz or white country music.