麻豆约拍 - Radio 2 Sold On Song

Blues has been called the first truly American music. The colour blue has described melancholy and depression since Elizabethan times, but as a musical form its style was born from the experiences of slaves brought from Africa, reflecting their poverty and oppression in the cotton fields of America. Wandering musicians such as Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson recounted their day-to-day misery through song.

In the early 20th Century female performers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith took the music to a wider audience and sold millions of "race records" in the process. The blues evolved further in the 30s and 40s with migration to cities such as Chicago and Memphis where it become electrified and beat-driven. Performers such as BB King and Howlin' Wolf played with a full band and the music became known as rhythm and blues. When elements of R&B became integrated with white country music it became rock 'n' roll.

If you were to meet a typical character from a blues song he would most likely be down on his luck, having trouble with his unfaithful woman and no doubt drowning his sorrows with whisky. So, in a way, what makes a blues song blue is its lyrics. Billie Holiday's "Gloomy Sunday", a song so unhappy it apparently drove some of its listeners to suicide, would be a jazz ballad if it weren鈥檛 for this overwhelming lyrical despondency.

When these phrases are set to song we get our blues form 鈥� the听twelve-bar blues. Originally blues was sung to an aaa form, i.e. a single four-bar phrase is sung three times. But later an aab form evolved which was closer to the call and response tradition in black vocal music including gospel. For example, you might have a four-bar phrase about your dog dying (a), which is then repeated (over different ) giving you aa. This is concluded with a new line inferring that if that wasn鈥檛 bad enough the vet鈥檚 stinging you for 拢300 to have him put down . . . or something of similar sentiment (b). An example of this is from "Out Of Reach" sung by Peter Green in John Mayall鈥檚 Bluesbreakers:

"I'm so lonesome, I don't even have a friend
I'm so lonesome, I don't even have a friend
I've done so much crying, will I never laugh again?"

Three lots of four-bar phrases give you twelve bars. Generally the first four bars stay on one chord, the second phrase uses two chords, and the third is the most complex, using three or four.

Over time a "blues scale" was shaped, based on the vocal box of tricks which blues singers developed. The blues scale took the standard () scale and bent some of the notes down in pitch. But the phrasing of a blues melody is something that is felt, and is not easily written. The blues uses an 'ear' scale, based on the wailing songs of the slave plantations. Only later was that vocal style consciously emulated on musical instruments by sliding, distorting or bending notes.

Which instruments are best suited to the blues? Brass instruments, the blues harp (harmonica), organ and even the fiddle can reach the parts that a piano can't because of their ability to slide or distort a note. Sustain is important too and while the guitar initially would have missed out on this, it was achieved later by T-Bone Walker by electronic means in the form of overdrive or distortion. Hence the latter day blues guitar greats such as Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Jimi Hendrix. The piano however was not to be left out, and great boogie-woogie players from Albert Ammons to Dr. John compensated for this by trilling and gracing notes.

Experience is everything in the Blues. BB King once said you had to be over forty to play the Blues properly. Paradoxically, blues music, far from being depressing, can often make you feel uplifted and happy. Why? Maybe because, as unpleasant as things get in your own life, it's always comforting to know there's someone out there who's got the blues bad, real bad.


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