Blues Music

Working at the Blues Foundation:

This semester I worked at the Blues Foundation in Memphis, a non-profit dedicated to the history and the promotion of blues music. The Blues is a fascinating genre: it arose from Mississippi Delta through troubadour-esque Blues men who styled the music largely after old field songs. A blues song usually has a few features. One is the shuffle rhythm, another is the 12 bar pattern, and last is a self deprecating or satirical lyric commenting on the conditions of life such as love, hate, drinking, gambling, sitting on a bench, fishing. Lterally anything.

A quote that I often think back too is one I heard here, and it's a story about BB King. One night BB was walking down Beale street and a young black woman asked him, "why have white people taken our Blues music?" BB coolly replies, "White people didn't steal it, we just stopped listening. Being the generic stepping stone it prove to be, blues music was an early battlefield for white appropriation. Once thought of as a strictly lowly and black art, guitarists from Europe in the 1960s started eating up blues records however they could.  The result is people like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, who in their early careers would mimic blues records they were fortunate enough to find and utilize blues guitar licks into "rock" bands like Cream or the Yardbirds.

So it's interesting to think about how Blues has crossed the race line over the years. By the 90s when Stevie Ray Vaughan was reviving a now unprofitable genre, blues seemed to be not black or white but "American." At the Foundation, a sizable portion of the due-paying members and museum visitors are from Western Europe/Scandinavia. At this point it's lost much of its racial association, but blues music lives on as perhaps the most significant building block upon which Western pop music is built.