By Bernie Brink

We look forward to February each year to commemorate Black History Month.  In recognizing the innumerable contributions of black Americans to American and global culture, it’s a formal opportunity to celebrate the “Great American Art Form” of jazz.  But jazz itself – and virtually all forms of contemporary, popular music – would not exist without the blues.

Blues music enshrines many musical and cultural values endemic to Africa.  Pitch-bending and its free vocal style encourages improvisation in interpretation, highlighting individual expression; at the same time, lyrical content and formal structure invite all observers to participate, leaning on the call-and-response format to create an inclusive expression for the broader community.  Being an oral tradition, blues music not only aided black communities in recording and recalling their history and experiences, but in its very practice it mirrored traditional West African lifeways of transcribing and translating history through the griot.

Jazz music only came about as black artists continued to expand on blues principles, combining them with elements of hymns, marches, and ragtime in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to develop the earliest forms of jazz.  Any jazz musician today will tell you those blues sensibilities are essential to producing legitimate and convincing jazz music of any ilk.  As delta blues artists became more widely recorded in the 1930s and ‘40s, many urban artists iterated on those ideas to create jump blues, and a clear line can be drawn from Louis Jordan to “Big Mama” Thornton and Elvis Presley.  In the 1960s and ‘70s, The Beatles, Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zepplin were all drawing directly from the work of great blues artists like Robert Johnson and Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter.  The call-and-response nature of blues forms is clearly reflected in the structure of all popular song of the last century – name any favorite pop song, they are invariably organized in a “verse – chorus – verse – chorus” structure.  The vocal style has also remained influential in all music from country to hip-hop.  Any singing techniques thought of as “bluesy” or “soulful” are rooted in African musical expression, and are heard today in the work of Samara Joy, Beyoncé, Luke Combs, and Nicki Minaj.

Blues music is a fundamental form of black musical and cultural expression, and lies at the foundation of virtually all popular music today.  As we observe Black History Month this year, we rejoice in the blues and its grand influence on jazz, popular music, and our everyday lives.  You can hear all about “the meaning of the blues” every weekday at 12:00 noon on Community Blues Hour with BJ Estares on Jazz 93.5.