2.  Exploring The Blues

 The Blues [blooz] noun

1. A state of depression or melancholy.
2. A style of music that evolved from southern African-American secular songs and is usually distinguished by a strong 4/4 rhythm, flatted thirds and sevenths, a 12-bar structure, and lyrics in a three-line stanza in which the second line repeats the first: “The blues is an expression of anger against shame and humiliation” (B.B. King).

America has long had the blues, but not until African Americans set the blues to music did we know what to do with them. Actually, the first "blues" in America were "blue devils," which were low spirits brought over from England. Washington Irving in 1807 wrote of a man "under the influence of a whole legion of the blues," and a young U. S. Grant wrote in 1846, "I came back to my tent and to drive away, what you call the Blues, I took up some of your old letters."

African Americans had better reasons than most to feel the blues. So perhaps it is not surprising that they were the ones to make the most of the blues by setting them to music. Although the exact history is unknown, most experts agree that the Blues came into being a few years ahead of jazz (1913), to which it is related, thanks to W.C. Handy, the African American leader of a dance orchestra. (As some have argued, it clearly has its roots in Africa, and later, the songs of the slaves of the American South.)  Its fame was spread by his "Memphis Blues," published in 1912, followed in 1914 by the even more famous "St. Louis Blues." Following his lead, Americans of all colors have been hearing and singing the blues ever since.

There's another interesting story about the birth of the Blues.  It was a lonely night in 1903.  W.C. Handy got stuck waiting for a train in Tutwiler, Mississippi. With hours to kill and nowhere else to go, Handy fell asleep on a hard wooden bench at the empty train depot. When he awoke, a ragged black man was sitting next to him, singing about "goin' where the Southern cross the Dog" and sliding a knife against the strings of a guitar. The musician repeated the line three times and answered with his instrument.  Intrigued, Handy asked what the line meant. It turned out that the tracks of the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad, which locals called the Yellow Dog, crossed the tracks of the Southern Railroad in the town of Moorehead, where the musician was headed, and he'd put it into a song. It was, Handy later said, "the weirdest music I had ever heard."

From its origins with African-American slave songs, the blues has achieved popularity of its own, but it also influenced later American and Western popular music: It is credited with helping to inspire ragtime, jazz, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, country, and pop songs.  As Willie Dixon said, "The blues are the roots; everything else is the fruits."