[Harp-L] Is the blues a microscopic part of global culture?

["Winslow Yerxa" <winslowyerxa@xxxxxxxxx>]

Is the blues a microscopic part of global culture?

U.S. Census bureau figures:

World population: 6,529,840,541 (low by about 100 million according to
some estimates)

U.S. Population: 299,280,029

U.S. Percentage of world population: 4.6 percent

Number of different musical cultures among those 6-plus billion people
spread around the globe: Heaven knows.

Percentage of U.S. population that are blues musicians or fans? Let's
be really generous and say 20 percent. And just to justify that
generosity let's say it includes non-American blues fans worldwide.

So a little less than 1 percent of the world population may not be
microscopic, but you have to agree that it's a tiny fraction.

"The early roots music of european decent morphed into Country and
Bluegrass and has nearly been lost."

Where do you get this sweeping statement? I personally know it to be
untrue. Country and bluegrass certainly aren't dying off, and neither
is the older music they are based on. There are many thousands of
people (I'm one of 'em) actively playing Irish, Scottish, and other
related styles right here in America. All over the continent. In
multiple regional styles that developed on this side of the water.
Young kids are learning this stuff eagerly. When they go off to
college, I fear the youth band part of the fiddle club is gonna die
off, but instead it gets bigger. Meanwhile the ones who went off to
college have professional careers as the new generation of 
Celtic/traditional fiddlers in the U.S. and Canada.

There seems to be an automatic assumption that what you don't see
doesn't exist. It may not be ignorance in the technical sense, but it
is certainly a form of cultural arrogance.

But wait, you do see it - Riverdance and similar celtic-based showbiz
is raking it in, in Vegas, road tours, and TV specials and getting a
good deal more attention than blues. Yet somehow it doesn't fit the
preconception, so it gets ignored. Hmm, maybe ignorance is the right word.

This sort of ignorance has distorted American musical history for
several generations. Ther used to be a thriving culture of black
string bands. Now there's something that did die off and was very
poorly documented in recordings, largely because both white
musicologists and white record executives didn't like the idea - it
didn't fit their preconceptions.

As to the recitation straight out of the textbook about blues having
generated jazz and rock'n'roll, I suspect that a huge part of this
standard story is guesswork abetted by a willingness to accept
uncritically what is convenient and easy to believe without ever doing
the work to actually figure out what happened, to the degree that it's
possible to know.

Where is the evidence that blues had any role in shaping ragtime? In
what way do they sound even remotely alike? That they both come from
African Americans does not cut it.

Jazz *as *we *know *it has a strong blues component. But here are two
problesm with the blues-is-the-mother-of jazz assumption:

1. Yet old recordings reveal people both black and white syncopating,
improvising, and phrasing in a way that sounds an awful lot like jazz,
without ever using a blues scale or a blues inflection or a blues
form, and doing it to the popular music of the day. It is entirely
possible that something very much like jazz could have arisen in
America without the blues ever having existed. It wouldn't sound like
the jazz we know, but that's beside the point. The point being, blues
is not the mother of everything.

2. Jazz musicians can play blues but blues musicians are seldom able
to play jazz. That tells me that there are profound differences. Blues
is one thread in the fabric of jazz, but not the defining one.

Much of this blues-generated-everything belief seems to be based on
the faulty assumption that it is the common cultural heritage of all
African Americans. If that were true, then there would be a blues
tradition in Africa just like there are people playing jigs and reels
in Ireland and Scotland. And the blues musicians in Afrcia would be
playing the same tunes as American blues musicians, but in older
versions. 

Yet, when African American jazz composer Oliver Nelson went to Africa
he found, to his surprise, that Africans had no clue of how to play
the blues. He concluded that the blues, while it has an African
component, is uniquely American. The textbook will drone about how
some combinaton of African and European music traditions produced the
blues. What none of these all-knowing Gods of music history seem to
have noticed is the striking resemblance between the form of the blues
and the form of pow-wow songs.

While there are musicians in parts of Africa playing music that is
being touted as the ancestor of blues, I'm skeptical about any direct
correspondence.

Fact is, Africans brought here as slaves were whoever the slave
traders could kidnap or buy from other slave traders, and they came
from many different ethnic groups in Africa. If you forcibly shipped a
mixed bag of Europeans - say, Swedes, Greeks, Italians, Czechs, and
Irish  off to some other continent, how much cultural cohesion - and
shared musical tradition - do you think they'd be likely to have?

Winslow


--- In harp-l-archives@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Paul LaBrier" <paul@...> wrote:

I agree with a lot of what you said but think you might be taking it a
bit too far.  Saying that the Blues is only a "microscopic" piece of
the big picture is a bit extreme.

 Look at it historically.  Go back to the origins of it.  You had
primative roots music being played both by those of african and
european decent.  It was primarily from the rural south in america.
The early roots music of european decent morphed into Country and
Bluegrass and has nearly been lost.  The early roots music of african
decent mutated into many other things too.  The acoustic music
commonly reffered to as Delta and Piedmont Blues migrated from the
rural south to urban areas like Memphis, St. Louis and Chicago and
took on a whole new dimension. It was also the genesis for Jazz,
ragtime, R&B.  It merged with music of european origin when folks like
Elvis and Johnny Cash took pieces of it in new directions.  This was
still in the deep south.  But that was about to change.  As they say,
" The blues had a baby and they named it rock-n-roll."    The
popularity of Rock-n-Roll spread around the globe taking with it an
interest in it parent.  That has impacted music on almost every
continent, not sure about antartica ;)

Oddly, the early roots music of african decent has survived and is
still popular today.  Blues in the Delta and Piedmont tradition is
still around.

Is this saying that the Blues is the best or most important form of
music, by no means.  But I think that saying it is only a microscopic
part of music history is understating its importance.

Paul



On 7/21/06, Winslow Yerxa <winslowyerxa@...> wrote:

> The world is a huge place.
>
> It's full of amazing things.
>
> it's full of deep feelings.
>
> Blues is only one teensy, tiny piece of that. Deep as the blues is,
> it's only a microscopic piece.
>
> Think about how huge the world must really be if the blues can be that
> deep and still only a tiny piece of what's out there.
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