The Origin of the Blues: From the Work Song Before
the War to the Classic Blues in the 1920’s
The blues developed out of West
African music and dance.
A
characteristic of West African music is the “call and response” style where the
leader of the song sing a passage first and others follow.
This
feature can be seen in today’s African-American music such as jazz, hip-hop,
and gospel.
The call and response style had existed among West-African slaves
for a long period and eventually led to the “Work Song” on the plantation under
slavery.
African-American
slave groups had sang the work song to reduce the pain of hard labor.
At
first, planters prohibited slaves from singing, because it could lead to
uprisings against them.
However,
once they realized that the work song could increase the rate of productivity,
some planters allowed slaves to sing the song.
After
1865 when the Civil War ended and plantations became disorganized, the work
song was sung in labor environments where black Americans needed to stand in
groups such as the African-American prison and railway construction works.
Even now, the work song recorded by Alan Lomax in
the late 1940’s can still be heard.
The
following lines are the lyric of a work song named Black Woman.
In
the song, the leader named B.B. and other six singers are engaged in chopping
firewood on the Parchman Farm:
I don’t want no jet
black woman,
O she’s too mean, Lawd,
Lawd she’s too mean.
I don’t want no jet
black woman,
O she’s too mean, Lawd,
Lawd she’s too mean.
I don’t want no sugar
in my coffee,
It makes me mean, Lawd,
Lawd, it makes me mean (repeat)
In
the song, “sugar” and “my coffee” are used as metaphors for “a Caucasian” and
“an African”.
As the collateral evidence, Alan Lomax noted on the leaflet of the CD as
follows: “The first verse betrays one of the ways in which working-class
African Americans accepted and internalized the very color prejudice which
confined them to their caste.”
