A bit about the Blues

Chapter One

In 1903 W.C. Handy, a well known band leader and songwriter was waiting for his train in Tutwiler, Mississippi. His train was 9 hours late so he decided to try to sleep on the bench in the station. There was nothing else to do in this small town in the middle of the night.

Tutwiler only had a few hundred inhabitants and at that time of night everything was closed. Handy probably felt the loneliness of the place with only the noise from the wind in the trees and a stray cat or dog for company, curled up and quickly fell asleep Some hours later he was woken when a man sat down on the bench next to him. The man then began to sing and play the guitar in a style that even Handy as an experienced musician, had never heard before.

The guitarist was dressed in old worn out clothes and carried an old battered guitar. Everything about this style was new to Handy. He played notes that were not common in the music Handy knew. He was producing sounds by moving a knife handle along the strings and he was singing about the train he was waiting for. This man was playing the blues, but he was almost certainly not the inventor of the blues, only playing a style of music which was already common in the area.

If this guitar player was not the father of the blues, where did it begin?

Slaves were being imported to the United States for two hundred years until the abolition of slavery in 1865.The languages and cultures of these Africans were forbidden because the slave owners did not understand them and feared that they could be used to organise and inspire rebellion. These slaves began to develop their own form of the English language and their own music, which was a mixture of their African roots and the European music they heard around them. Blues music was part of this musical evolution. When slavery became illegal the conditions of African Americans improved a little, in some cases, but most of them were obliged to continue working under inhuman conditions with no constitutional rights. Under these conditions the music which we now call blues continued to develop.