JAM equals Jazz Appreciation Month

April is Jazz Appreciation Month in the United States where Jazz music was born and still continues to influence the music of this great country. One element of Jazz, and there are many, is the “blues”. The blues began to emerge in the United States as the slaves sang songs filled with words telling of their extreme suffering and privation. The station of a slave meant that one was not considered a human with human feelings. It meant one was owned like a dog, treated in many instances as a dog, and regarded as a possession that “certainly had no feelings nor rights to feelings”. The blues began with the field holler who would chant to the slaves to keep them in a rhythm of work, allowing the slaves to chant back, imitating the tones of the chanter. The field holler songs were a means of communication between plantation workers and the overseers and used by slaves to keep time with a task. The songs of the field holler and slaves had elements of personalization but they were not solo songs. As the musical form of the blues developed it remained a form of call and response, but the blues singer responded to himself or herself, thereby not creating a new type of music, but creating one that showed a new perception about oneself.

It was Booker T. Washington in 1807 that put the term “blues” to the music that reflected the new status of blacks as they acquired freedom. It was the teachings that an individual molds his own destiny. After the Civil War the Negroes were being acculturated in a way that would have been impossible during slavery and their music reflected this in both their secular music as well as in their religious music. Blues lyrics contain some of the most fantastically penetrating autobiographical and revealing statements in the Western musical tradition. A blues song, according to Paul Tanner in A study of Jazz, “often is intensely personal, frequently contains sexual references and often deals with the pain of betrayal, desertion, unrequited love and unhappy situations such as being jobless, hungry, broke, away from home and lonely”.

By the 1890’s the blues were being sung in many of the rural areas of the South. At this time the banjo was the primary blues instrument but early in the 1900’s the guitar gained popularity when a singer would engage in a call-and-response with his guitar. He would sing a line and the guitar would answer it. American troops brought the blues home with them following the First World War. They did not learn them from Europeans, but from Southern whites that had been exposed to the blues. Michael Kamien in Music: An Appreciation, states “At this time the U.S. Army was still segregated, but during the twenties, the blues became a national craze. Records by leading blues singers like Bessie Smith and later in the thirties, Billie Holiday, sold in the millions. The twenties also saw the blues become a musical form more widely used by jazz instrumentalists as well as blues singers”.

Billie Holiday was one such blues singer. In 1935 she was popular and had suffered a very painful childhood. Her parents never married and by the age of 12 she was a prostitute. She called herself Billie Holiday after her often absent father and she had a streak of independence that could not be held down. Billie had a limited voice range but could sing almost a total song on one note. She had the perfect rhythm for singing a song that would tear out one’s heart. Billie sang with various bands but in 1938, while the country was still in the grip of the depression, she joined the Artie Shaw Band. One night at a gig she was handed a song by an unknown composer called Sweet Fruit. This blues song was about lynchings which were still taking place in the U. S. and Billie had the courage to sing the song. At the conclusion of the song the audience was completely silent and then one small pair of hands began to clap until the whole room was standing and clapping with a roar that could no longer be silenced. Billie had opened the flood gates on the humiliating practice of lynching fellow humans, both male and female.

In defining what the blues are there is the problem of a variety of authoritative opinions. Paul Tanner says “the blues are neither an era in the chronological development of jazz, nor are they actually a particular style of playing or singing jazz”. Some say that the blues are defined by the use of blue notes – simply flatted thirds, fifths, and sevenths applied to a major scale while some say they are microtones. Others feel that the song form (twelve bars, one-four-five) is the defining feature of the blues. Some feel that the blues is a way to approach music, a philosophy, in a manner of speaking, while still others hold a view that the blues are an entire musical tradition rooted in the black experience of the post-war South. Whatever one may think author Harry Shapiro tells it was the blues “strong autobiographical nature, their intense personal passion, chaos and loneliness, executed to vibrantly that it captured the imagination of modern musicians” and the general public as well. Musicians of today continue to be influenced on other genres of music, such as rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and rap.