The basic blues form is simple: 12-bars consisting of three lines of four bars each; the lyric is a couplet with the first line repeated once (sometimes with slight variations). Each line of the lyric takes about 2.5 bars with the rest of each 4-bar segment being improvised fill, sometimes vocal but usually instrumental on the singer's own guitar or piano. The blues are not played in major or minor keys but in what is known as "blue mode" with off-pitch "blue notes" which cannot be played on the piano and are thought to be descended from African music.
Although the blues had been sung since 1900, the first blues record, a song called "Crazy Blues" by Mamie Smith, was made in 1920. The 1920s are considered the period of "classic blues," featuring female singers such as Bessie Smith with small jazz band accompaniment. These singers often played in northern cities at places like The Cotton Club in New York's fashionable Harlem neighborhood. Of course, many regional styles of rural blues continued to be played in the south from the Mississippi Delta to Texas. During the late 1930s and 1940s, a new blues style, called "electric blues" or "rhythm & blues," began to emerge. This style featured electric guitars, bigger bands, more sophisticated instrumentation and more urban lyrics. In the 1950s, this style of blues contributed to the rise of rock and roll. Also in the 1950s, white musicians like Paul Butterfield, John Koerner, John Hammond and Dave Van Ronk tried playing authentic blues. In the 1960s, the blues and rhythm & blues were major influences on rockers such as The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The blues continue to be played to this day, by both black and white musicians.
The Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes and the Blues
The classic period of the blues coincided with the flowering of black American arts and letters that has become known as the Harlem Renaissance. During the 1920s, black writers found themselves for the first time a significant group in American literature. Harlem became the cultural Mecca and to it flocked such writers as Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. Harlem also became a center of musical entertainment with black and white audiences flocking to the uptown clubs, ballrooms and theaters. There they saw such jazz performers as Louis Armstrong, Mamie Smith and Duke Ellington, black artists such as Paul Robeson performing in the classical European tradition, and blues musicians like Bessie Smith. In fact, millions of black Americans seeking a better way of life migrated to the big northern cities between 1890 and 1920. Taking note of this change in their living patterns, many writers gradually shifted their themes from the Southern Plantation Tradition to the urban experience. A similar move from the country to the city also occurred in the blues. Although they often protested against social and racial injustices, many writers seemed more interested in describing these conditions than in using their pens for social and political reform. Of great importance to many of them was a new spirit of pride in one's race and African heritage, and this new sense of "somebodiness" found its way not only into literature but also into history.
Langston Hughes (1902-1967), whose writing career spanned more than 40 years was the first black man to earn a living by writing. In 1924 he moved to Harlem where he spent the rest of his life. He wrote poetry, essays, plays, songs, short stories and novels about the defeats and triumphs of the people he loved. He was among the earliest African-American writers to re-create black speech and music in literature. Hughes was a gentle spirit whose humor often pervaded much of what he wrote. His writing is essentially urban, and his insight into the lives of ordinary blacks along with his skillful use of their language gained him the title of "Poet Laureate of Black America." Along with jazz, the blues were a major influence on Hughes and references to the "black and laughing, heartbreaking blues" (The Big Sea) abound throughout his work. In fact, Hughes supposedly was first inspired to write poetry after hearing the blues on a Kansas City street corner at the age of nine.2 Hughes viewed the blues as an expression of the "Negro soul," a major theme of his work as well as that of other Harlem Renaissance writers. In his blues poetry, Hughes undertook the difficult task of communicating the poetry of the blues through the written word alone.