Information About Jazz and Blues

Jazz and blues have influenced music worldwide.

Jazz and blues are two important and related musical genres created by the African American community in the United States. Some jazz and blues performers became worldwide stars. The blues influenced the development of rock 'n' roll and pop music. Jazz evolved into a serious, often experimental, musical form which is played throughout the world.

Birth of the Blues

Blues came from the work songs of the cotton fields.

The blues began as the music of the black working poor in the southern United States around the end of the 19th century. It emerged from the "hollers" sung in the fields by cotton pickers, songs that some have claimed can be traced back to African roots. Little of this music was recorded, although researchers such as Alan Lomax, working in the 1930s, were able to record singers who remembered the blues in its earliest days. Among the early bluesmen who went on to make commercial recordings were Charlie Patton, Skip James and Lead Belly.

Birth of Jazz

New Orleans was the birthplace of jazz.

The development of jazz occurred slightly later and reflects the influence of the blues as well as the dance music called "ragtime." In New Orleans, especially, bands in the clubs of Bourbon Street played versions of blues songs with instrumentation that reflected the importance of marching bands in New Orleans' black culture: trumpets, trombones and saxophones were played as well as guitars. The first stars of jazz, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, learned their trade in the city's dance halls.

The Blues Goes to the City

The promise of better jobs caused African Americans to migrate from rural to urban areas--to Memphis in the South, and later, in the 1950s, to Chicago, Detroit and other northern cities. The blues developed from a folk genre into the powerful, sophisticated soundtrack of urban black life. Stars of the new blues included Muddy Waters and B.B. King.

Jazz Grows Up

Jazz became serious concert hall music.

Jazz had become so popular by the 1920s that the era was christened the "Jazz Age" and Louis Armstrong was on his way to becoming the music's greatest star. The boundaries of the traditional form were pushed and finally broken in the 1940s and '50s by virtuoso musicians based primarily in New York--the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, saxophonists Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and pianist Thelonious Monk. The intellectually ambitious style of jazz they perfected became known as bebop. Ever after, jazz was not merely popular dance music but also considered by many to be a serious art form.

Beyond the Boundaries

Rock 'n' roll developed from the blues.

One of the first true rock 'n' roll records, cut by a young Elvis Presley in July 1954, included on one side an old blues song by Arthur Crudup, "That's All Right." Elvis' wild performance helped launch rock 'n' roll as an international phenomenon. The pop explosion of the 1960s was headed by British groups such as the Rolling Stones who had grown up listening to imported blues records. Jazz, meanwhile, through the work of pioneers such as Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, found its way to concert halls and became a subject of scholarship. It has not ceased, however, to influence musicians around the world, especially in Latin America and Africa.

References

• "The Land where Blues Began"; Alan Lomax; 1993
• "Jazz: A History of America' Music"; Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns; 2002
• "The Legacy of the Blues"; Samuel Charters; 1977
• "The Rise and Fall of Popular Music"; Donald Clarke; 1995

Resources

• The Blues Foundation
• Online encyclopedia of jazz musicians