The Birth of The Blues

The Blues laid down the template for pop and rock as we know it today, with its early years gifting the world with musical geniuses whose legacy is felt in nearly every song released over the past century.
Blues Musician, B.B King.

With its roots in African-American culture in America’s Deep South, the name is a reference to the melancholy and sadness (a characteristic of early songs like 1912’s Dallas Blues by Hart Wand) that related to the lives of black people at the time. After early folk compositions, the first ever recording by an African American singer emerged from Mamie Smith’s rendition of ‘Crazy Blues’ in 1920, and the success of Ma Rainey more commercially—today remembered as the Mother of the Blues. It survived in the South through segregation and the second world war, leading to spin-off genres like gospel and eventually rock and roll. But the most defining period, which would make it a global music genre, happened during the early to middle part of the twentieth-century.

 

Published

October 2022

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