Little is known about the exact origin of the music now known as the blues.Southern, p. 332 No specific year can be cited as its origin, largely because the style evolved over a long period but blues is inarguably a Black American art form as it is noted "it is impossible to say exactly how old blues is - certainly no older than the presence of black people in the United States. It is native American Music, the product of the Black in this Country or to put it more exactly the way I have come to think about it, blues could not exist if African Captives had not become American Captives".Baraka 1999 pg 17 Ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik traces the roots of many of the elements that were to develop into the blues back to the African continent, the "cradle of the blues".Kubik, Gerhard (1999). Africa and the Blues. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. One important early mention of something closely resembling the blues comes from 1901, when an archaeologist in Mississippi described the songs of black workers which had lyrical themes and technical elements in common with the blues.Southern, p. 334
Precursive African elements of Black American blues Blues historians such as Paul Oliver and Samuel Charters have suggested that the essential elements of the blues originated in the Sahel region of West Africa, brought over by Africans via the slave trade. Whereas the African Slaves brought to South America and the Caribbean were largely from Percussion based cultures in southern coastal west Africa (like southern Nigeria), central Africa and Bantu speaking parts of Africa lacking in many elements that created the blues, Many of The slaves brought to North America were from the Sahel region and much more Familiar with stringed instruments basing the Banjo on string instruments from the Sahel like Akonting, Charters found that many Sahelian slaves were from Muslim cultures and favored stringed, melodic, and solo singing, which differed from the drum-based music of other African regions. These traditions, which were sometimes permitted by plantation owners who feared drums as tool of rebellion and thus evolved into the blues.
Blue note a hallmark of blues music and Rhythm and blues characterised by flattened thirds, fifths, or sevenths—has deep roots in the musical traditions of The Sahel region, making African American popular music like the blues having a Sahelian based origin in contrast to the more percussion based Afro-Brazilian music and Afro-Cuban music which have more of a southern coastal west African, Central African and Bantu influence where the blue note is absent. The Griot tradition of the Sahel also may have influenced Talking blues and by extension Hip hop,.
There are few characteristics common to all blues, as the genre takes its shape from the distinctive attributes of each individual performance. Some characteristics, however, were present prior to the creation of the modern blues, and are common to most styles of African American music. The earliest blues-like music was a "functional expression, rendered in a call-and-response style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure".Garofalo, p. 44 This pre-blues music was adapted from the field shouts and hollers performed during slave times, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content".Ferris, p. 229
Many of these blues elements, such as the call-and-response format, can be traced back to the music of Africa. The use of melisma and a wavy, nasal intonation also suggests a connection between the music of Sahelian West Africa and the blues. The belief that blues is historically derived from the West African music including from Mali is reflected in Martin Scorsese’s often quoted characterization of Ali Farka Touré’s tradition as constituting "the DNA of the blues".
Perhaps the most compelling African instrument that is a predecessor to an African-American instrument is the "Akonting", a folk lute of the Jola tribe of Senegambia. It is a clear predecessor to the American banjo in its playing style, the construction of the instrument itself and in its social role as a folk instrument. The Kora is played by a professional caste of praise singers for the rich and aristocracy (called griots or jalis) and is not considered folk music. Jola music may not have been influenced much by North African/Middle Eastern music, which may point to African American music not being, according to Sam Charters, related to kora music. The music of the Akonting and that played by on the banjo by elder African-American banjo players, even into the mid 20th century is easily identified as being very similar. The akonting is perhaps the most important and concrete link that exists between African and African-American music.
While the findings of Kubik and others clearly attest to the essential Africanness of many essential aspects of blues expression, studies by Willie Ruff and others have situated the origin of "black" spiritual music inside enslaved peoples' exposure to their masters' Hebridean-originated gospels.Paul Kelbie, "Gospel Truth - Hebrides Invented Church Spirituals", The Independent - UK, 9-19-3 Additionally, there are theories that the four-beats-per-measure structure of the blues might share its origins with the Native American tradition of pow wow drumming.
Other African influence The historian Sylviane Diouf and ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik identify Islamic music as an influence on blues music. Diouf notes a striking resemblance between the Islamic call to prayer (originating from Bilal ibn Rabah, a famous Abyssinian African Muslim in the early 7th century) and 19th-century field holler music, noting that both have similar lyrics praising God, melody, note changes, "words that seem to quiver and shake" in the vocal chords, dramatic changes in musical scales, and nasal intonation. She attributes the origins of field holler music to African Muslim slaves who accounted for an estimated 30% of African slaves in America. According to Kubik, "the vocal style of many blues singers using melisma, wavy intonation, and so forth is a heritage of that large region of West Africa that had been in contact with the Islamic world via the Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries." There was particularly a significant trans-Saharan cross-fertilization between the musical traditions of the Maghreb and the Sahel. Many of the elements that characterise early blues such as the blues Pentatonic scale, "Blue Notes" and Pitch Instability Declamatory and Melismatic Vocals can be found not just in the West African Sahel but all the way in the eastern Sahel in Sudan suggesting cross fertilisation along the Sahel. The blues with its origin in the American South has likely evolved as a fusion of an African just intonation scale with European 12-tone musical instruments and harmony.
There was a difference in the music performed by the predominantly Muslim Sahelian slaves and the predominantly non-Muslim slaves from coastal West Africa and Central Africa. The Sahelian Muslim slaves generally favoured wind and string instruments and melismatic solo singing, whereas the non-Muslim slaves generally favored drums and group chants. Plantation owners who feared revolt outlawed drums and group chants, but allowed the Sahelian slaves to continue singing and playing their wind and string instruments, which the plantation owners found less threatening. Among the instruments introduced by Muslim African slaves were ancestors of the banjo. While many were pressured to convert to Christianity, the Sahelian slaves were allowed to maintain their musical traditions, adapting their skills to instruments such as the fiddle and guitar. Some were also allowed to perform at balls for slave-holders, allowing the migration of their music across the Deep South.
Influence of field hollers Field holler music, also known as Levee Camp Holler music, was an early form of African American music, described in the 19th century. Field hollers laid the foundations for the blues, spirituals, and eventually rhythm and blues. Field hollers, cries and hollers of the slaves and later sharecroppers working in cotton fields, prison chain gangs, railway gangs (Gandy dancers) or turpentine camps were the precursor to the call and response of African American spirituals and gospel music, to jug bands, minstrel shows, stride piano, and ultimately to the blues, rhythm and blues, jazz and African American music in general. Sylviane Diouf and Gerhard Kubik have traced the origins of field hollers to African Muslim slaves, who were influenced by the Islamic musical tradition of West Africa (see African roots above).
Influence of spirituals
The most important American antecedent of the blues was the spiritual, a form of religious song with its roots in the camp meetings of the Great Awakening of the early 19th century. Spirituals were a passionate song form, that "convey(ed) to listeners the same feeling of rootlessness and misery" as the blues. Spirituals, however, were less specifically concerning the performer, instead about the general loneliness of mankind, and were more figurative than direct in their lyrics.Southern, p. 333 Despite these differences, the two forms are similar enough that they can not be easily separated — many spirituals would probably have been called blues had that word been in wide use at the time.Southern, p. 333-334
Influence of Hawaiian guitar In the early 20th century, Hawaiian music was the most popular music in America, and many Hawaiian musicians toured the deep south, where they popularized the lap steel guitar. Early blues musicians such as Son House referred to the slide style of playing as the Hawaiian way of playing. Blues slide guitarist Tampa Red described using a bottleneck as a slide as a "Hawaiian effect".
Social and economic aspects
The social and economic reasons for the appearance of the blues are not fully known.Philip V. Bohlman, "Immigrant, folk, and regional music in the twentieth century", in 'The Cambridge History of American Music', ed. David Nicholls, 1999, Cambridge University Press, , p. 285 Blues has evolved from an unaccompanied vocal music of poor black laborers into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States. African American work songs were an important precursor to the modern blues; these included the songs sung by laborers like stevedores and roustabouts, and the field hollers and "shouts" of slaves. The first appearance of the blues is not well defined and is often dated between 1870 and 1900, a period that coincides with the emancipation of the slaves and the transition from slavery to sharecropping and small-scale agricultural production in the southern United States.
Several scholars characterize the early 1900s development of blues music as a move from group performances to a more individualized style. They argue that the development of the blues is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the slaves. According to Lawrence Levine,Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, Oxford University Press, 1977, , p. 223 "there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the popularity of Booker T. Washington's teachings, and the rise of the blues." Levine states that "psychologically, socially, and economically, Negroes were being acculturated in a way that would have been impossible during slavery, and it is hardly surprising that their secular music reflected this as much as their religious music did."