MSC 110 Final Project

2022-2023 Fall Semester

Serhan Dağlı
21803401

Origins of Blues Music and Its Adaptation to White Music Culture

There are lots of approaches to the emergence of blues music, and this writing is not
enough to cover all of these. The aim is to capture and mention the main characteristics of the
origins of blues music, and evaluate them in terms of their transition and transformation to
the music created by white musicians, thereby the blues characteristics in rock music.

We can deal with the issue mainly by two ways: the cultural and musical
characteristics. In terms of the latter, it is not inclusive enough to say that whenever a song is
played in twelve-bars form it is blues music. The reason is that most of the African-American
musicians that were categorized as blues musicians were not playing their songs in
twelve-bars form. B.B. King, for instance, has used much more complex patterns in his
music. Thus, it is said by the experts that the standard blues form can have twelve, eight, or
sixteen bars (Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues). A more
successfully defining property of blues music is the use of “blue notes” in the music. These
notes are created by flattening certain notes in the scale and gives the music a very unique
and stylistic feature that is filled with a deep feeling of “blueness”. This unique way of
perception comes from the cultural characteristics that the creators of such music have
experienced. Blues is originally an African-American music and the cultural context behind it
has emotional, opposing, and insubordinate features that the black people went through with
in the nineteenth-twentieth centuries. However, the origins of this music can be traced back to
much older times, to the African music that was created especially in West Africa. The
characteristics appearing in the origins is actually common to the usual African music: It has
been performed in a call-and-response style and vocalized melismatically. One can infer that
it is the characteristics that are filled with opposition and insubordination within the cultural
context that gave rise to the above-mentioned style in the musical context. However, due to
certain mechanisms in marketing of music, the pieces we see under the category of blues
were not classified according to the mentioned properties. Especially before the 1950's, all
the songs composed by African-American musicians which cannot be associated with the
popular black music genres of those times, such as classical, jaz, gospel, etc. were directly
attributed to blues music by the marketers. After the 1950’s, because of the fact that genres
such as rock, R&B, and soul became much more popular, although the performes of such
genres used “blue notes” in their instruments or when vocalizing, their production was not
classified as blues music. This disposition towards the music market is at the core of the
question of how blues music evolved after the 1950’s, especially when some particular white
musicians followed the path driven by the old-school black musicians.

Blues music was already very popular starting from the 1920's but was divided into
labels through the race of the performers due to the socio-political circumstances of those
times in the United States. It was hence called “race music” by the record companies, and
white people were listening to white musicians only. It was not appropriate for a white person
to attend a concert conducted by black musicians. It was especially popular in Southern parts
of the U.S. in which it was born. Starting from the 1950’s, things started to change. There was
a literal interest in the blues music from white listeners, and some of the most influential
musicians were among them. Especially the musicians such as Muddy Waters and B.B. King
were gathering popularity among the public, and this was not specific to U.S., their popularity
reached the United Kingdom as well. This was a cornerstone of the upcoming white
musicians’ touch in blues music and thereby the rise of rock music. Perhaps one of the most
influential guitar players of the twentieth century, Eric Clapton, was in the mentioned group
of musicians who were influenced by black musicians performing blues music. We can see
the traces of two main features of those times that allowed blues music to be also performed
by white people in his life. First, his childhood was one that was mournful and lonesome; his
father left his family during the babyhood of Eric. This caused him to search for ways in
which he could find some peace, and blues music was the perfect candidate. For, it has served
well for decades many black people who were also hurt by loneliness; the vast majority of the
public left them alone just as Eric’s father left him. Thus, Eric could empathize with the
feelings that were present in blues music. Second, like many of his contemporaries, Eric was
also fairly neutral towards race in his childhood. With his own words: “I didn't even know
that it [blues] was black music. I didn't know about black and white being different stuff. But
something about it got me. Something stirred me.Without me even being aware of it. It took
all the pain away. Well, obviously when I got to the age to buy records, I went and bought
them.”(Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars). Eric Clapton was not the only one who was stirred by
blues, contemporaries of his such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Elvis Presley, John Mayall and
many others followed the same path. Their music was not the exact same music of course,
they incorporated the “bluesy” melodies and harmonies into their own style, and this was the
main drivers of the rise of rock music. This transition was not smoothless though. Many of
the black musicians criticized them by claiming that they cannot “appreciate” what blues
music was for: White people did not go through what black people did, and although they can
mimic black people’s music, they cannot fully comprehend it and hence cannot give the same
sensation to the audience.

When it comes to music, it is not the “comprehend” or “give” the same sensation, it is
about creating your own and exhibiting it. Blues music has its roots in the tough times that
black people went through, but it has given rise to a much more inclusive genre that not only
captures the feeling of love, but also the feeling of resistance to every kind of social and
political constraint. Neither blues nor rock music belongs to a single race now, and all
humanity benefits from it.

REFERENCES

Wald, Elijah. “The World That Johnson Knew .” Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the
Invention of the Blues, Amistad, New York, 2012.
Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars. Directed by Lili Fini Zanuck, The Zanuck Company, 2017.