Who started the Delta blues myth?

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Etymologophile
Date: 31 May 15 - 01:05 AM

It sounds like the words "blues" and "jazz" were first used by people who didn't initially create the music they referred to by those terms, and the meanings were not initially clear and unanimous among the people who used the terms.

That reminds me of when I first heard and heard of grunge music. When I moved to Seattle in 1989, a musician there said to me, "All this music that's around now that everyone's calling grunge, that's not grunge. Real grunge is all gone now."

I think the idea that blues is a musical form used to air grievances about a history of poverty and repression, and that it's called "blues" because it expresses the depressed feelings people have about that history, was probably something that was tacked on a little later. And it was probably tacked on because most people didn't understand why it was called "blues," and so they guessed that it had some connection to feeling blue, and that guess became attached to the music. Similarly, after the introduction of nylon fabric rendered obsolete the duck that was such a big part of WWII soldiers' lives, most people didn't understand the term and concluded that the tape made for those soldiers by coating duck with rubber and adhesive must have been created for sealing ductwork.

Even after the blue=sad meaning was attached to blues music, some people ignored that meaning and continued creating joyful dance music and calling it blues, in accordance with Gordon Seagrove's guess about the implication of the word "blue," i.e. that blue music takes away your blues. That's certainly what the blues musicians and fans in Kansas City were using it for when I lived there.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Phil
Date: 30 May 15 - 10:37 PM

Joe: The text was addressed (and now confirmed) to "Mr. Offer." (To which she adds, if it's Joesphine or Joeslyn, no offense) Hope this helps.
FYI: Joseph (OP) you're "Dread" ;D

Blues is Jazz, etc:
I was tempted to follow Seagrove with that Bechet ragtime quote.
Bechet: "Jazz, that's a name the white people have given to the music."
Rosen, Critical Entertainment, Cambridge, Harvard U. Press, 2000. p.217
Note: Seagrove and everybody referenced in the Trib article were white.

And at the risk of blues drift I will add Armstrong on the same subject:
"At one time they was calling it levee camp music, then in my day it was ragtime. When I got up north I commenced to hear about jazz, Chicago style, Dixieland, swing. All refinements of what we played in New Orleans. But every time they change the name they got a bigger check. All these different kinds of fantastic music you hear today – course it's all guitars now – used to hear that way back in the old sanctified churches where the sisters used to shout until their petticoats fell down. There ain't nothing new. Old soup used over."
"Music" Putnam's Monthly, 1:1, January 1953, p.119-120

Lomax, a few decades on:
"I discovered to my consternation that the rich traditions which my father and I had documented had virtually disappeared. Most young people are caught up in TV and the Hit Parade... simply don't know anything about the black folklore that their forebears had produced and which had sustained and entertained generations of Americans. We resolved to try and do something about this situation."
(My tattered notes of) VHS "Land Where the Blues Began", Beverly Hills, Pacific Arts Video; PBS Home Video, 1990. No time stamp, sorry.

And Wald (back to ragtime)
"The pop music world that began with ragtime is fiercely democratic. Whatever its underlying commercial foundations, it claims to be the music of all America, rich and poor, country and city, black and white (and yellow, red, and brown, when it bothers to acknowledge such subtleties). The only gap it does not strive to bridge is age: Each shift of genre blazons the arrival of a new generation and threatens all doubters with the ignominy of hunching over their canes and mumbling impotent imprecations as youth dances by." (Brutal... but fair.)
Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll, NY, Oxford, 2009, p.27

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Stim
Date: 30 May 15 - 09:48 PM

Lucy McKim Garrison, who was the first to collect, transcribe, notate and publish the music of African Americans said the following:

"it is difficult to express the entire character of these negro ballads by mere musical notes and signs. The odd turns made in the throat; and the curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices chiming in at different irregular intervals, seem almost as impossible to place on score, as the singing of birds, or the tones of an Aeolian harp. Their airs however can reached. They are too decided not to be easily understood, and their striking originality
would catch the ear of any musician. Besides this, they are valuable as an expression of the character and life of the race which is playing such a conspicuous part in our history. The wild sad strains tell, as their sufferers themselves never could, of crushed
hopes, keen sorrow, and a dull daily misery which covers them as hopelessly as got from the rice swamps...."

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Lighter
Date: 30 May 15 - 07:44 PM

Fred, I think you misunderstood my point.

In the late '60s and early '70s it was frequently asserted that the blues scale "undoubtedly" came from Africa because it pretty clearly originated among black Americans.

Sounds plausible, but as you say there's never been any evidence of an African origin. Plus the scale would have had to have gone quite unnoticed since at least the early 19th century, when the U.S. got out of the international slave trade - or, in theory, since the beginning of the 17th, when slaves began to be imported.

Beyond that, I'm skeptical of any theory that a musical form or style can be generated simply by widespread social conditions. (Subject matter, sure; but form, no.) I see no connection between the two concepts. Did rock 'n' roll become popular in the early '50s because teenagers had to hide their fears of nuclear holocaust in a more frenetic, more sexually charged kind of music? I don't know, but I doubt it. Did swing become popular in the '30s because people needed something new to make them forget the Depression? I doubt that too. Parlor songs became incredibly saccharine in the 1840s or '50s for no obvious reason. Social causality isn't usually that simple.

More to the point, were day-to-day conditions for Southern blacks really more depressing after Reconstruction than they'd been under slavery? Would the very individual, supposedly depressive singers of the first blues have been any less depressed if Reconstruction had succeeded? Lynchings hit their peak in the early '90s, but as Stim observes, early blues seem to say nothing about them. Even if the singers were afraid to speak out, nothing would stop them from singing about something metaphorical like "devils" or something like that. But most early blues are about personal and domestic matters.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Lighter
Date: 30 May 15 - 07:19 PM

High point of Odum's 1911 description:

"The 'musicianer' places his knife by the side of his instrument while he picks the strings and sings. He can easily pick it up and use it at the proper time without interrupting the harmony. In this way the instrument can be made to 'sing,''talk,'[or] 'cuss'.... It defies musical notation to give it full expression."

"Defies musical notation" is significant, but Odum never says anything specific about what was later called the blues scale.

On the other hand, every other feature of the blues that I can think of appears somewhere in the articles, which never mentions musical "blues" by name.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 30 May 15 - 06:29 PM

Please remember that Joseph Scott started this thread. I'm Joe, and I'm getting confused...

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Lighter
Date: 30 May 15 - 03:21 PM

> "Earlier than that it simply meant 'an incorrect or off-pitch note.'" What's your source for that?

See mine of May 29, 10:15 PM.

I.

Good find of "'Blue' note melody." I suspect it meant "melody based on supposedly incorrect notes that are actually correct here."

That would exemplify the way new word meanings can arise shift from possible ambiguity. Anyone who'd never heard of the earlier kind of "blue note" might easily think that use of the word was narrowly descriptive rather than broadly pejorative.

I've searched a number of vast newspaper databases without finding any earlier references to musical "blues" or blues-type "blue notes." There are a few more places I can look.

OED def.4b of "blue," adj., beginning in the 17th century, seems relevant: "Of a period, event, circumstance, etc.: sad, dismal, unpromising, depressing." It would not take too much of a shift to apply it to a sour note - though that it looks like that shift took a long, long time to appear and catch on, mostly among musicians American popular musicians. (The evidence is spotty.)


II.
Acc. to the Encyclopaedia Britannica: "The rural blues developed in three principal regions, Georgia and the Carolinas, Texas, and Mississippi. The blues of Georgia and the Carolinas is noted for its clarity of enunciation and regularity of rhythm. Influenced by ragtime and white folk music, it is more melodic than the Texas and Mississippi styles."

And those are just the "principal" regions. Nothing there about the Delta as the ultimate source.

Mr Red's fungi analogy is worth keeping in mind, but it seems unlikely to relate the blues. If blues originated at point A, there seems to be no reason why they should disappear from A after spreading to points B-Z. Not that it *couldn't* happen; but there would have to be some special circumstance.

Let's say guitarist Joe Blue invents the blues as we known them in Blue City in 1880. Blue becomes an itinerant musician and travels all over the South. If his music had caught on at home, why would it die out there?

And if it hadn't caught on, saying it "began" in Blue City would pedantically miss the point. The effective point of origin would be the first place where it did catch on on and from which it began to spread, regardless of where it was, strictly speaking, first played.

As for "Blues is jazz." Jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet (1897-1959, from N.O.) frequently insisted that "Jazz is ragtime."

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Phil
Date: 30 May 15 - 03:18 PM

Forwarded to Joe from a cousin still back in the islands:
"I know the South very well, I spent 20 years there one night"
Dick Gregory. Grouchy ol' St. Louis finally got his Hollywood Walk of Fame star last February ('bout damn time peoples!)

Fred: "If there was something else going on then, besides the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings etc., then I appear to have missed it. Perhaps you could enlighten me."

Stim beat me to Patton & Fahey so I'll take a schwang at Waters:

"Muddy Waters is remembered soley as a blues musician, but when he was discovered by the folklorist Alan Lomax on a plantation outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, he said his most popular numbers at local dances included "Chatanooga Choo-Choo" and "Darktown Strutters Ball," and in a later interview he recalled, "We had pretty dances then. We was black bottoming, Charleston, two-step, waltz and one-step."
McKee & Chisenhall, Beale Black and Blue, Baton Rouge, LSU Press, 1981, p.231.

We managed to shoehorn in a few semi-nonviolent activities and church on Sunday (or Saturday) so enough with hoary pigeonholes and sterotypes already. Somehow, someway, learn to process women wanting to dance and men wanting to be around women y'all.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Stim
Date: 30 May 15 - 12:24 PM

Fred and Lighter--One of the things that Fahey did in his book on Patton was to do a content analysis of the lyrics for for any sort of references social justice or oppression. He didn't find it--he says, "Patton was an entertainer, not a social prophet in any sense. He had no profound message and probably was not very observant of the troubles of his own people."

He goes on to say, "His lyrics are totally devoid of any protesting sentiments attacking the social or racial status quo."

Earlier on the same page, he says "if we search for verses of great cultural significance, depicting any historical trend or movement, of aspirations to 'improve the lot of the people', we search in vain. Such a search would not be fruitful with any blues singer."

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 30 May 15 - 12:18 PM

"What we really need is a description of the blues written before 1912."

http://ourblues.net/2012/09/27/folk-song-and-folk-poetry-as-found-in-the-secular-songs-of-the-southern-negroes/

Especially pp. 270-273, 361-364.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 30 May 15 - 12:08 PM

"> I think what people like Newman White, Howard Odum, Thomas Talley, E.C. Perrow, Abbe Niles, Dorothy Scarborough, Charles Peabody, and Gates Thomas did before 1930 is generally overlooked and underrated these days by blues fans.

All very true, but they couldn't be everywhere. But I acknowledge that I haven't studied these sources, and their import may be stronger than I think."

White, for instance, collected Alabama and North Carolina songs and carefully compared them to songs others had collected in Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee, etc.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 30 May 15 - 11:55 AM

"It would be interesting to know who first commented on 'blue notes,' however they might have been described, and when. The Oxford English dictionary's earliest example of the sense we mean is from so late as 1915" "'Blue' Note melody" appears on p. 2 of the 1913 edition of "Memphis Blues" (whose copy Handy had nothing to do with).

"Earlier than that it simply meant 'an incorrect or off-pitch note.'" What's your source for that?

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: pattyClink
Date: 30 May 15 - 11:46 AM

Guest who wonders why it's called the delta when it's not one:   

It's my understanding that in the 19th century, the low alluvial plain country that surrounds the Lower Mississippi had a topography which looked remarkably similar to the Nile Delta. This inspired the naming of Cairo, Illinois and Memphis, Tennessee, etc. Ignorant? I guess it seems so, to those of us with instant access to Google Earth, and after the work done by Fisk etc. in the 1940s to unravel the story of the shifting river and its floodplains and deltas, which by the way it's hard to see as you travel where the plains stop and the deltas begin.

By the time there was greater scientific understanding the place had a name which was well ingrained in common use.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Fred McCormick
Date: 30 May 15 - 10:48 AM

Lighter. What makes you say that? As I mentioned, the blues first emerged around the turn of the 20th century (see for example Paul Oliver , Songsters and Saints). If we're looking for social causes, such a late date would rule out the direct effects of slavery, and BTW it would also rule out the notion of the Blues as an African survival.

Therefore, the social conditions which produced the Blues must have arisen sometime during the last two decades or so of the nineteenth century. IE., precisely when the earliest Blues singers were growing up and suffering the effects, not of slavery, but of the White backlash.

If there was something else going on then, besides the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings etc., then I appear to have missed it. Perhaps you could enlighten me.

Just on the score of the Blues scale, I am not a musicologist and I don't know my way around the various mucial scales to be heard in Africa. However, it's worth pointing out that the Blues scale is in fact the Dorian mode with a extra flattened note. Please don't quote me, but wouldn't it be surprising if the roots of the Blues lay not in Africa, but in the sounds which Black singers heard their White neigbours making? The high lonesome sound and all that?

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Lighter
Date: 30 May 15 - 10:07 AM

Am in general agreement, Fred. It's been a long time since I even heard it claimed that the blues scale "must have" originated in Africa.

But I doubt that the blues as a genre can be ascribed simply to "social alienation which had been brought on by the failure of reconstruction and by the withdrawal of the northern army in 1876."

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Fred McCormick
Date: 30 May 15 - 09:35 AM

I tried to post a message about this several days ago. Unfortunately, my computer crashed immediately afterwards and, on getting going again, I find the message hasn't landed.

The conversation has moved on quite a bit since then but, FWIW, here's a re-post. It might actualy land this time.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Despite having been an avid Blues fan for over fifty years, I have never come across the slightest scrap of evidence to even suggest that the blues was born in the Delta. Moreover, my feeling is that the Blues did not arrise directly as a result of slavery, or as a survival of African musical heritage.

Rather, the idiom emerged sometime around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, as a result of social alienation which had been brought on by the failure of reconstruction and by the withdrawal of the northern army in 1876.

IE., with no army to stop them, white southerners were free to terrorise the black population with an avalanche of fiery crosses, lynchings, burnings, beatings and what have you. The effect of that campaign was to mentally unsettle black people and the musical consequence of that unsettlement was the Blues.

Such alienation was by no means confined to Mississippi, but in fact was replicated to a greater or lesser extent all over the South. Hence , rather than seeing the Blues as a product particularly of Mississippi, we find the idiom emerging, more or less around the same time, pretty well everywhere below the Mason-Dixon line.

Against that, it's worth pointing out that the Blues often seems to be at its most emotionally intense in the Delta. However, one might speculate that social conditions in the Delta were probably worse than anywhere else. If so, we can also speculate that the musical consequences of those conditions would be somewhere around the extremes of emotional expression.

But emotional intesity and appalling treatment do not autmatically equate with origins.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Lighter
Date: 30 May 15 - 08:32 AM

Possibly the question was laid to rest long ago, at least in the minds of specialists.

In a lengthy article in "American Folklore: An Encyclopedia" (J.Brunvand, ed., 1996), blues scholar David Evans writes:

"Blues first came to public notice around the beginning of the 20th century. The precise time and place cannot be identified. ...Blues was especially popular in ...the Mississippi Delta, Louisiana's Caddo Lake, and south Florida. ..."

While citing Lomax in his bibliography, nowhere does Evans assert that the Delta exclusively was the "land where the blues began."

It seems to me that roughly simultaneous popularity in New Orleans, southern Indiana, Memphis, and South Florida around 1910 would suggest many years of unnoticed development.

Presumably the intentional use of "blue notes" began ad lib, possibly to suggest a vocal moan. It would have taken a long time for that practice to become standardized into a new musical genre over a wide area.

It's been a long time since I listened to this album, recorded as late as 1974 to 1997, but I don't recall hearing anything bluesy - possibly because the banjo repertoire didn't lend itself well to blue notes:

http://www.folkways.si.edu/black-banjo-songsters-of-north-carolina-and-virginia/african-american-music-old-time/album/smithsonia

At any rate, while there's no suggestion that I'm aware of that the "blues" existed or spread during, say, the Civil War. But there's no way to know about the use of occasional "blue notes" during the 19t century. They would have gone unmentioned in print and would have originally been thought of as simply off-key.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Mr Red
Date: 30 May 15 - 04:13 AM

just thought but if you take the analogy of fungi, they start from a centre and as they spread they can leave a centre bereft of fungi. Or take the phenomenon of rich and poor in cities. Rich folks living in the centre and as the city expands the rich want to be in "better" places so they migrate to the periphery, the centre is filled with the poor in the crumbling old buildings. But note, in a hundred years or so the centre becomes obscenely expensive again.

Now if "blues" had started in an urban environment like, say, New Orleans and spread from there, and fashion being what it is, "Jazz" came in to fill the foided centre...........................

we have that "delta" !

speculation can open eyes, but maybe not minds.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Stim
Date: 30 May 15 - 12:49 AM

For what it's worth, I'm with you on this one Joseph--I've been reading John Fahey's "Charlie Patton". He does a very thorough analysis of music and lyrics, and points out that there is nothing musically, or lyrically that ties it exclusively to "The Delta", meaning that floating verses, rhythmic cadences and music figures are just like what was in music from everywhere else.

He also points out that Patton, who he says started performing prior to 1915, had a repertoire that included a lot of stuff that wasn't blues, where younger musicians, such as Son House and the Chatmons (who were his younger brothers) played mostly blues. This leads one to think that the blues might have become popular in Delta about the same time it became popular everywhere else--

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Etymologophile
Date: 30 May 15 - 12:29 AM

And thank you doubly, Lighter, for the two quotes using the term "blue note" in 1895 and 1908! Neither of them appears to have anything to do with blues music. You and Phil have shown that Mudcat is a haven for true scholars, and not just a place for people to trade insults over their views on gay marriage. And thank you, Joseph Scott, for starting these fascinating threads and for keeping them high-brow with your very rigorous research on the subjects.

Lighter's 1908 quote is posted at:
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10508/pg10508.txt
And this is the full paragraph that it's in:
"I did all a human being could do to bring her to--rubbed her hands and slapped her face; but even then she was in no fit condition to appear. Go on she would, in spite of my prayers, and what does she do when she comes tripping on, blithe and gay as a school girl, but stumble and do a slide on her profile half way across the O.P. side, just as the tenor was starting the chorus to his song, 'Bevey in Little Children.' He being a nervous party springs a blue note that got the musical director hysterical and he forgot to give the bass drum man his cue and the whole thing went to blazes.
(It's interesting that the author passed up the chance to say it went to blue blazes. I wonder if blazes were already thought of as blue back then.)

I couldn't find the 1895 Kansas City Times article. Lighter, do you live in Kansas City? It's a great place to hear both blues and jazz, or at least it was when I was there in the 1970's and 80's. There were terrific local amateur blues bands playing at many little corner bars, and there was Milton's on Main, and the Grand Emporium, and an incredible blues club on the east side whose name I can't recall right now, and they were starting to re-develop 12th/18th and Vine. It was also a great place to dance to reggae and soca music, thanks chiefly to the Blue Riddim Band and SDI, and to hear and play folk music, thanks chiefly to The Foolkiller.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Gordon Seagrove
Date: 29 May 15 - 11:33 PM

Seagrove, Gordon, Chicago Sunday Tribune, July 11, 1915.

Blues is Jazz and Jazz Is Blues

    She leaned across the table while the waiter slunk away and in a pleading voice said something to the Worm. The Worm was her husband. You may have guessed this before.
Anyway what she said was this:
   "Ortus," she murmured, looking into his tired eyes, "if you don't fox trot with me shortly, I shall bring suit for divorce. Our life cannot go on this way."
   "Don't I give you clothes – all you want?" the Worm returneed [sic]. "Huh? Don't I now? Don't I love –you —"
    "Stop!" she cried, deathly white. "You don't understand me.   Clothes – bah –! Coverings for the skin! –Love – a mockery! You do not realize that I have a shoul – that I have two feet – that I want fox trotting."
   "You know I can't dance. Why last wee –"
    "Enough!" she cried imperiously drawing a veil over her snow white shoulders which always appear in scenes like this. "You may consult my attorney tomorrow. You have failed me in the fox trot – I cannot go on –"
   She stopped. Te music had started. Suddenly from above the thread of the melody itself came, a harmonious, yet discordant wailing, an eerie mezzo that moaned and groaned and sighed and electrified, a haunting counter strain that oozed from the saxaphone.
   The Worm stopped. His eyes shone with a wonderful light – the light that lies in the eyes of a man who has had two around the corner. His mouth moved convulsively. The years fell away from his shoulders leaving only his frock coat.
    The Worm had turned – turned to fox trotting. And the "blues" had done it. The "jazz" had put pep into the legs that had scrambled too long for the 5:15.
   What mattered to him now the sly smiles of contempt that his friends had uncorked when he essayed the foxy trot a month before: what mattered it whose shins he kicked?
   That was what "blue" music had done for him.
    That is what "blue" music is doing for everybody – taking away what its name implies, the blues. In a few months it has become the predominant motif in cabaret offerings; its wailing syncopation i heard in every gin mill where dancing holds sway.
   Its effect is galvanic. Cripples take up their beds and one-step; taxi drivers willing suffer sore feet because of it; string halt become St. Vitus' dance in its grip.
   Maybe you, poor sol, in your metropolitan ignorance,, do not gather just what the "blues" are. Worry not; neither does the average person that plays them, and it was only after weks [sic] of toiling that the true definition was obtained.
    The first sortie after the definition was made in a song publisher's arena, where beautiful actresses try their voices and the manager's nerves.
   "Halt," cried the seeker after the definition, "fixing a dark haired piano player with a relentless eye. "What are the blues?"
    The young man recoiled and shuddered. "I don't know," he said. "All I can do is play 'em. A kind of a wail you might call it. Still I couldn't tell you positively. But, say! I can take any piece in the world and put the blues into it. But as for a definition – don't ask me."
   At the next place a young woman was keeping "Der Wacht Am Rhein" and "Tipperary Mary" apart when the interrogator entered.
   "What are the blues?" he asked gently. "Jazz!" The young woman's voice rose high to drown the piano.
   A tall young man with nimble fingers rose from the piano and came over. "That's me," he said. And then he unraveled the mystery of "the blues."
   "A blue note is a sour note," he explained. "It's a discord – a harmonic discord. The blues are never written into music, but are interpolated by the piano player or other players. They aren't new. They are just reborn into popularity. They started in the south half a century ago and are the interpolations of darkies originally. The trade name for them is "jazz."
    "There's a craze for them now.   People find them excellent for dancing. Piano players are taking lessons to learn how to play them."
   Thereupon "Jazz" Marion sat down and shoed the bluest streak of blues ever heard beneath the blue. Or, if you like this better: "Blue" Marion sat down and jazzed the jazziest streak of jazz ever.
   Saxophone players since the advent of the "jazz blues" have taken to wearing "jazz collars," neat decollete things that give the throat and windpipe full play, so that the notes that issue from the tubas may not suffer for want of blues – those wonderful blues.
   Try it some time – for that tired feeling – the blues.

There are two drawings, the first of an African-American saxophonist with "Wooo- ooo-ooo! emanating from the bell, captioned "A BLUE NOTE IS A SOUR NOTE." The second shows "The Worm" and his wife at the table. He cups his ear. "THE YEARS FELL AWAY FROM HIS SHOULDERS."

The article is in the first column of the last page of the eight-page entertainment section (Section VIII) of the Chicago Sunday Tribune for July 11, 1915.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Etymologophile
Date: 29 May 15 - 11:32 PM

Thank you, Phil, for that quote from the Chicago Tribune! The article was cited by a guest in Joseph Scott's previous thread, but I didn't pay attention to it because the part that was quoted there didn't sound interesting. In fact, you have to read the whole article to understand it, and even then it takes some time because of the writer's jazzed-up writing style. It's a string of quotes the author heard in a night club.

It's also the first known (i.e. first published example that anyone has been able to find recently) use of the word "jazz" to refer to music. So it may not use that word in the same way we do. And it was written at a time when what was called "blues" was a new and very popular instrumental music sounding similar to ragtime but with some variations, including the use of blue notes. Much of it may not qualify as blues by today's definition, but clearly the instrumental pieces that included the word "blues" in the title then were using a very different definition. The word "jazz" at that early stage was also closely associated with the use of blue notes, as the article points out, so the people quoted in the article can be forgiven for confusing the two forms, if indeed they were then two different forms in the same way that they are today.

My favorite part is when the pianist who had been playing what the people in the club called both "blues" and "jazz" said the line that Phil quoted -- that a "blue note" is a sour note, a harmonic discord. And then in the next quoted sentence he went on to use the term "the blues" to mean "the blue notes."

The article is posted as a PDF file at:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ve
I'm going to try to post the entire two-page text here, which I think is permissible given the 1915 publication date. You really have to read the whole thing to understand it, and it's a document that should be preserved in any way possible.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Lighter
Date: 29 May 15 - 10:15 PM

OED online:

1895   Kansas City Times 10 Dec. 4/4   At the beginning of their career..they found difficulty in keeping their instruments out of ear-splitting mischief. In the language of the 'profesor' they struck many a 'blue' note.

1908   K. McGaffey Sorrows of Show Girl xiii. 157   He being a nervous party springs a blue note that got the musical director hysterical.

You're quite right about "playing the blues."

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Phil
Date: 29 May 15 - 09:55 PM

I think the current myth is this thread has an identifiable and/or measurable subject. Myth-delta-blues or what?

Myth?
The thread title says we were done before we started.

Delta?
Why bother with any other definition than Lomax's? And then ignore it. Three great circus/minstrelsy producing dynasties of the 19th century, Rice, Robinson and Stickney all kept one foot in Cincinnati and the other in New Orleans. Why (other than Alan Lomax's personal outlook on life) would any one section of the river between be culturally isolated from any other during those decades of touring?

Blues?
It's not a static definition and revisions are both retrospective and obsolescent even as they are made.
"A blue note is a sour note....It's a discord-a harmonic discord. The blues are never written into music, but are interpolated by the piano player or other players. They aren't new. They are just reborn into popularity. They started in the south half a century ago and are the interpolations of darkies originally. The trade name for them is "jazz."
Gordon Seagrove, Chicago Tribune, 11 July 1915.

Joe: "Have you ever been there?"
Hoot: "...I doubt if he has ever left the reading room of his public library.... Perhaps he will clarify things by informing us what his qualifications and experience are. I don't ever recall coming across his name anywhere in my years of collecting, listening and reading."
Joe: "Joseph, don't take offense."
Me: [face palm]

It ain't the blues but I lived in the islands longer than the Lomax and Charters Bahamian summer vacations combined (200x.) As far as my family history goes it's not even close. Lomax produced a complete fabrication of static cultural isolation where none existed in the least. (My father honeymooned his 1st wife on Cat Cay the year before Lomax's so-called discoveries.)

The recently departed 'expert' Charters spent pretty much the entire summer of '58 behaving like a Mudcat troll. A real cool jerk and proud of it too. Zero respect for local customs and manners on both islands, NP & Andros.

I can think of no reason why the same 'methodology' applied to the elsewhere would produce better results. Keep the 'blues' recordings, as curios only. Bin the liner notes, books and 'facts' for the great steaming pile-o-drek they are.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Hootenanny
Date: 29 May 15 - 06:40 PM

Joseph,
Please read the first nine words of my post above.

If you are unable to understand the meaning of those I wonder how you can understand the reading material that you endlessly quote.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Etymologophile
Date: 29 May 15 - 05:25 PM

Lighter: Same here. Just thinking out loud. No way to ever prove anything, but it's fun to speculate. Folk etymology. (I hope that won't incite tirades about the 1954 definition of folk etymology)

I'm really interested in one thing you said:
But if "blue note" in the relevant sense is first *known* to appear in 1915, and in an earlier sense 20 years before...
Where did that latter information come from? And what was the earlier meaning of "blue note"?

With regard to "singing the blues": As a folk etymologist, I'm concerned with plausibility. It seems plausible to me that "singing the blues" and "crying the blues" could have been popular expressions before there was any music called blues, even if there's no written record of it. But that can't be said of "playing the blues." And a lot of the first compositions calling themselves blues were instrumental pieces that sounded more like ragtime than the moaning and complaining music we now think of as blues. It doesn't seem likely that those would have been called blues because of the connection blue=sad. Sad lyrics were in some cases added much later, but that could have been after a blue=sad connection had been tacked on. Perhaps there was earlier folk music that was sad and was called blues for that reason, and Handy and other early composers took something from that style but not the sadness, and also took the name that those folk musicians applied to their own music; but I haven't seen any evidence of that.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Lighter
Date: 29 May 15 - 04:41 PM

> I think what people like Newman White, Howard Odum, Thomas Talley, E.C. Perrow, Abbe Niles, Dorothy Scarborough, Charles Peabody, and Gates Thomas did before 1930 is generally overlooked and underrated these days by blues fans.

All very true, but they couldn't be everywhere. But I acknowledge that I haven't studied these sources, and their import may be stronger than I think.

As for "blues" and "blue note," there really is no way of knowing for sure which came first. But if "blue note" in the relevant sense is first *known* to appear in 1915, and in an earlier sense 20 years before, all we can say is that, on the basis (again) of limited evidence, the "wrong note" sense appears to be prior to the "note typical of African-American blues" sense.

But perhaps "the blues" have nothing to do with blue notes. Since people have *had* "the blues" since the mid-18th century (see OED), some might have been "singing" "their blues" a century later, even if that simply meant singing sad, first-person songs (say, "Old Smoky") with or without "blue notes," AAB form, etc.

Of course, there's no evidence for an 18th or 19th century of "sing the blues." But since people who might have been saying it didn't leave written records, there's simply no telling.

Of course, such a usage would have nothing to do with the evolution of the blues or with the use of "blue notes." It's simply that the terminology can add to the uncertainty.

What we really need is a description of the blues written before 1912. But even that would be unlikely to tell us where the blues actually originated.

Clearly Lomax had reason to believe it really was the "Mississippi Delta." But he didn't arrive on the scene till the 1930s. Do we know exactly why he was so confident? Mississippi River traffic is certainly a plausible method of the music's transmission, but it could have spread either up from Louisiana, down from the Ohio River, or both ways from Memphis.

Just thinking out loud.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 29 May 15 - 03:33 PM

Joseph, don't take offense. You worked hard on your piece, and you brought up some interesting points for discussion. That's what it's all about. We're all here in this world to learn and to share ideas.
-Joe-

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 29 May 15 - 03:32 PM

"It seems rather obvious that given the early obscurity of the blues among writers, and the inability of anyone in the 1920s to carry out extensive ethnomusicological studies across the South - or anywhere" Well, I think what people like Newman White, Howard Odum, Thomas Talley, E.C. Perrow, Abbe Niles, Dorothy Scarborough, Charles Peabody, and Gates Thomas did before 1930 is generally overlooked and underrated these days by blues fans.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST
Date: 29 May 15 - 03:28 PM

pattyClink: Any idea why it's called the Delta when it begins 600 miles upstream of the mouth? Even if it extends all the way to the Gulf, as Joe suggested, it's still a far cry from what is normally called a delta. Were the people there so isolated and ill-informed that they thought they were living on a river delta?

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 29 May 15 - 03:26 PM

Hootenanny, if you think my posts about blues music contain errors of fact, your time would be better spent pointing them out than speculating about where I spend my time.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 29 May 15 - 03:19 PM

"The posting from Patty Clink above is surely irrelevant here for the reasons you have stated." No, it's exactly relevant to Alan Lomax's choice to starting throwing the words "Delta blues" around in the 1940s as if they meant something special, when black and white musicians and listeners had not seen reason to do so in earlier decades.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 29 May 15 - 03:16 PM

"Seems to me, that music genres are more likely to come from socio-economic-cultural regions, rather than specified geographic or geological areas." Of course, but Alan Lomax didn't bother himself with such logic.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST
Date: 29 May 15 - 03:14 PM

"So, Joseph, if the Blues did not begin in the Delta, where did it begin" Quoting Lighter, "there seems to be little enough evidence (as distinct from assertion) to locate the birthplace of the blues in any region narrower than the American South and the Ohio Valley."

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: pattyClink
Date: 29 May 15 - 01:45 PM

I was just trying to clarify what people mean when they say "The Delta" because an earlier description wasn't on point.

No, of course the music doesn't stop at the bluffline. But the alluvial plain is a special place because of its geography and fertility, and that influenced its demographics, and that influenced the music.   It is 5 million acres of rich flat land that required massive amounts of human labor to farm. Most of that labor was African American. If you look at old aerials of it, you can see that about every 10 acres was a house where a tenant farmer lived, because it took a family for about every 10 acres. Never mind men to work the mills, clear the timber, and build the levees.

There are lots of small towns, and a few cities including Greenville and Memphis and Greenwood, and back in the day there were lots of juke joints and houses that sponsored music on weekend nights, and there developed a culture of musicians gathering locally, and as they got more professional, traveling around to other towns. This is the scene described by David Honeyboy Edwards in his book.

Certainly similar things were going on on the Arkansas and Louisiana side and in spots up in hill towns, but I think there was a dense concentration of people and talent here that of course Lomax thought was the central cradle of the music.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Etymologophile
Date: 29 May 15 - 01:20 PM

To be fair I should point out that the O.E.D. agrees with Scott:
Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of the playing or singing of the BLUES. So blue note: a minor interval occurring where a major would be expected; an off-pitch note.

Of course they too would be basing it solely on published works.

I think the O.E.D. mentioned that "blue" has also been used in place of "black" to describe people whose skin is brown, though I think the only instances they cited were in the mid 20th century. If it occurred much earlier it might be grounds for calling a note from an African scale a blue note.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Etymologophile
Date: 29 May 15 - 01:04 PM

quote: Earlier than that it simply meant "an incorrect or off-pitch note." So it's easy to see how the secondary sense of the word developed - from a theoretically "wrong" note to a perfectly acceptable one.

Lighter: In another thread (Earliest jazzers how blues-interested?), Joseph Scott argued against that, because the earliest evidence of the use of the expression "blue note" is from several years after the earliest evidence of the idea of "blues" music.

I'm not convinced. I think a slang term can exist for a long time before it appears in print, especially if it describes part of a musical form practiced by a rural culture of a poor and oppressed minority, a form that hadn't yet come to the attention of the mainstream. And I think it's more plausible that the term "blue note" came first. It sounds like you agree. If so, do you have any evidence?

The Yates article also seems to agree with that order, suggesting that the blue note was something from an African scale that didn't appear to fit into the European scale, i.e. not a blue note simply because it was used in the blues style.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Hootenanny
Date: 29 May 15 - 12:52 PM

I am not saying that the guy is wrong and am not looking for an argument. I don't quite own all the sources which he quotes and don't have the time or interest in pinpointing when and where a particular chord sequence was used or who first used the term blues. We will never know for sure it's all so long ago.
As I stated above the region generally referred to among non-laymen blues followers as the Delta in Mississippi is that north west corner, some people would also include that part of Arkansas just across the bridge.

As a non-American I am surprised to hear that the geological Mississippi Delta starts in Ohio. But I am more interested in music than geology.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Lighter
Date: 29 May 15 - 11:56 AM

Two more points.

As I understand Scott's argument, it's not that the blues *did not* or *could not have* originated in "the Delta," only that the evidence for the claim is not very strong, even if it has been repeated so often as to be taken as fact.

Also, it seems likely that in the days before radio and blues recordings," an innovation in musical style like the blues must have taken some time to circulate over a wide area.

Here's a contrary suggestion: Did the success of "Memphis Blues" trigger a blues-making craze?

It certainly mainstreamed the style in an unprecedented way.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Lighter
Date: 29 May 15 - 11:43 AM

The relevant question isn't geological terminology, it's what non-geologist commentators on the blues mean when they say "Mississippi Delta."

As a layman, my perception (and that's all it is) is that what Alan Lomax and others called "the Delta" was restricted to southeast Louisiana and southwest Mississippi, much as Guest suggests. In that case, if the blues began in Memphis, for example, Lomax would be in error.

Did Lomax ever define the area he called "the Delta"? (I suspect that if he'd meant the geological "Mississippi Delta," he'd have said something plainer, like "the banks of the Mississippi from the Ohio down." Did he? A "delta" is usually taken to mean the area where a river obviously diverges in a delta-like pattern close to its mouth.

There seems to be inevitable confusion between the technical "Mississippi Delta" and the easily understood "Mississippi River Delta."

I don't know Joseph Scott, but I do know an ad hominem argument when I see one. The issue is the comparative reliability of the cited sources. If you have reason to doubt his conclusions, go back to the sources and show why he's wrong.

It seems rather obvious that given the early obscurity of the blues among writers, and the inability of anyone in the 1920s to carry out extensive ethnomusicological studies across the South - or anywhere - any claims about where the blues began must have been based on limited evidence and mere impressions.

Even W. C. Handy's testimony, while extremely valuable, is inconclusive. When he heard the blues in Indiana for the first time, they might already have been common in Florida, or Oklahoma, St. Louis, or (even) Louisiana. Who knows? Nobody was looking for them.

Questions about place of origin of folk-music characteristic are generally unanswerable in any detail. The historical information is rarely sufficient.

The farther back you go before the first known mention, however, the less likely the phenomenon is to have existed. I think that saying the blues seem to have existed in parts of the South some years before the First World War, almost solely among African Americans, is about as far as one can go.

It would be interesting to know who first commented on "blue notes," however they might have been described, and when. The Oxford English dictionary's earliest example of the sense we mean is from so late as 1915, suggesting the influence of Handy's compositions. Earlier than that it simply meant "an incorrect or off-pitch note."

So it's easy to see how the secondary sense of the word developed - from a theoretically "wrong" note to a perfectly acceptable one.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Hootenanny
Date: 29 May 15 - 05:55 AM

Re Joe Offer above;

Joe the last time I was in Yazoo City compared to when I was there in 1976 it was looking great down town, nice old shop fronts and advertising signs all looking very spruced up and interesting. Then I noticed a number of builders and decorators everywhere painting and then giving an "antiqueing process" to it all plus the shop fronts were facades placed temporarily over the existing ones. Result the backdrop for some scenes in "Oh Brother Where Art Thou".

The posting from Patty Clink above is surely irrelevant here for the reasons you have stated.

I tend to agree with you re the socio-economic-cultural area. But among those of us "blues collectors" for want of a better description The Missisippi Delta is understood to be that area up in the north west corner.

You ask the original poster if he has ever been to the Delta. I get the feeling that he hasn't met many blues musicians either. Taking a guess from his postings I doubt if he has ever left the reading room of his public library but I could be wrong. He seems to enjoy making lists of names. Perhaps he will clarify things by informing us what his qualifications and experience are. I don't ever recall coming across his name anywhere in my years of collecting, listening and reading.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 29 May 15 - 12:43 AM

...and I thought it was both of 'em together, starting at Cairo and going all the way south. Driving the area, that seems to be the case. It's all low-lying wetlands.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST
Date: 29 May 15 - 12:19 AM

Very interesting! But why is that area called the Delta? It's not shaped like the Greek letter delta, and it's not a river delta.

I always assumed that when people spoke of the Delta or the Mississippi Delta they were speaking of the Mississippi River delta.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 28 May 15 - 10:29 PM

So, Patty, the blues stops right there at the bluffs?

Seems to me, that music genres are more likely to come from socio-economic-cultural regions, rather than specified geographic or geological areas. Oceans form rather distinct borders of cultural areas, but not river bluffs.

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: pattyClink
Date: 28 May 15 - 09:41 PM

Let's clarify the area that we call The Delta. I'm a geologist who has spent years mapping and dealing with water and topographic issues in that area so I'm claiming authority on this point.   On the map Offer linked, the boundary of the Delta is in fact the green line. On the right the line exactly follows the low 'bluffline' which is the edge of the flat alluvial plain. And of course on the left, the boundary is the Mississippi River.   

The citation text on that map has used unfortunate and incorrect wording 'the land between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers', this is not correct. Other smaller subbasins are included and the boundary of the Delta is not the Yazoo but the bluffline.

So Memphis is right at the north tip of the Delta plain, though most of town sits up above the bluffline. Same deal with Vicksburg, it is a bluff town which overlooks the point where the Mississippi, the Yazoo, and the bluffline converge to form the southern 'point' of the Delta.   As the author said, the Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Stanron
Date: 28 May 15 - 08:35 PM

Here's an article about African music. The author discusses how African scales differ from European and American conventions.

EXPLORING AFRICAN TONE SCALES

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST
Date: 28 May 15 - 08:05 PM

That Yates article (http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/blues.htm) makes what seems to me an extraordinary statement about blues origins and the concept of the blue note, but without footnoting it or even mentioning where he got the idea. He makes it sound as if it's common knowledge. Am I just not in the loop on this? Here's the statement:

African slaves, it seemed, had taken their own musical scales to the Americas. These were different from Western scales, and when the two scales met there were sound clashes, which produced so-called 'blue' notes.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 28 May 15 - 07:30 PM

So, Joseph, if the Blues did not begin in the Delta, where did it begin - Arizona? Las Vegas? Boston?

And what do you define as the Delta? Certainly, one legitimate geographical definition is the northwest corner of Mississippi, between the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers, with Greenwood and Yazoo City at the approximate center. That seems to be what you consider to be the Delta. Yazoo City, by the way, is one of the most miserable towns I have ever seen. I hope it has cleaned up since I last saw it in 1985.

But as a socio-economic-cultural area, the Delta is much, much larger. I'd venture to say that from that point of view, the Delta extends from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans and even farther south - and perhaps up to 200 miles wide in places. The terrain, vegetation, industry, people, language, customs, and culture are interrelated throughout that entire area. It's a wonderful area to explore - stay off the Interstate and drive the two-lane roads and get out and walk when you get to towns. Go to cheap restaurants and taverns, and seek out people to talk to.

Have you ever been there?

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST
Date: 28 May 15 - 02:55 PM

"At the time, I mean." Although it would be interesting to try to find examples of blues musicians about Mance Lipscomb's age bringing up the concept of the "blue note" in interviews even in about the 1960s.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 28 May 15 - 02:52 PM

"there is no evidence that any black musician used the expression 'blue note' about the earliest blues music" At the time, I mean.