Can You Hear The Blues?
In Peter van der Merwe's book Origins of the Popular Style, he argues that an understanding of the blues is imperative to understand all Western popular music that came after it. I thought that if this is really the case, then it was worth including something in my website about learning to hear and understand the blues streams that flow through the popular music that has come after it.
I had a number of issues with this. Firstly, I really didn't want to get into a mess trying to describe exactly what part of certain musics were the blues, what parts came from elsewhere, and how they all mixed. I had already avoided being too prescriptive about exactly what features making something "the blues" or influenced by the blues, so it wasn't really going to work to say, "Hear that lick at 2:13? It uses the 'blue' third so clearly that's blues-influenced."
Secondly, the links between the blues and the kind of popular music that kids listen to today is harder to draw (although ultimately still present in subtle ways). So doing a comparison between blues recordings from the 1930s and Nicki Minaj was probably (though not definitely) going to yield a distinct lack of interesting results.
As something of a middle road, I decided to look at a few points where the blues intersected closely with popular music. This way, it would take some of the cross-pollinational obscurity out of things, because in each case, there would be clearly identifiable links between common blues features and the music in question. Well I'm hoping the links will be clearly identifiable anyway.
So I thought I'd do a bit of a summary tour of linking the blues and popular music
W.C. Handy - "Father Of the Blues"
No history of the blues is complete without mentioning W.C. Handy, the man who allegedly spent two years in the South of the US documenting the songs of poor working blacks in order to put them together in his compositions. Handy became very rich and successful from the blues, but strangely enough it wasn't from record sales but sheet music! It was the 1910s. In the section on W.C. Handy in my website, the resource has one of his compositions that students can listen to and then answer a question.
Blue Like Jazz
The links between blues and jazz are more than extensive; Elijah Wald (in his book The Blues: A Very Short Introduction) argues that many musicians in the 1920s and 30s wouldn't have known whether to call themselves blues or jazz musicians, while some became known as one or the other through luck or coincidence.
For this reason, I again avoided trying to draw clear boundaries between the two art forms, and instead just picked one example of a jazz hit (i.e. a popular song in the 1940s) that used the blues form.
Note how at the end of this section as well as the last, I have included questions to focus listening. I guess these are questions that teachers could use as a starting point for class discussions, or teachers could write their own questions based on the material. But hopefully regardless, teachers are able to make use of the resources provided on the page.
Rockin' and a Rollin'
I imagine that sometimes for students, drawing links between W.C. Handy and the blues could be difficult, even though Handy was the start of so much. But the links between the blues and rock'n'roll are much clearer. I decided for this section that I'd include a wide selection of rock'n'roll songs that students could research and analyse. I might add some more later as well.
