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Some 'bluesologists' claim (rather dubiously), that the first blues song that was ever written down was 'Dallas Blues,' published in 1912 by Hart Wand, a white violinist from Oklahoma City. (Tanner 40) The blues form was first popularized about 1911-14 by the black composer W.C. Handy (1873-1958). However, the poetic and musical form of the blues first crystallized around 1910 and gained popularity through the publication of Handy's Memphis Blues (1912) and St. Louis Blues (1914). (Kamien 518) Instrumental blues had been recorded as early as 1913. Mamie Smith recorded the first vocal blues song, 'Crazy Blues' in 1920. (Priestly 9) Priestly claims that while the widespread popularity of the blues had a vital influence on subsequent jazz, it was the initial popularity of jazz which had made possible the recording of blues in the first place, and thus made possible the absorption of blues into both jazz as well as the mainstream of pop music. (Priestly 10)
American troops brought the blues home with them following the First World War. They did not, of course, learn them from Europeans, but from Southern whites who had been exposed to the blues. At this time, the U.S. Army was still segregated. During the twenties, the blues became a national craze. Records by leading blues singers like Bessie Smith and later, in the thirties, Billie Holiday, sold in the millions. The twenties also saw the blues become a musical form more widely used by jazz instrumentalists as well as blues singers. (Kamien 518)
During the decades of the thirties and forties, the blues spread northward with the migration of many blacks from the South and entered into the repertoire of big-band jazz. The blues also became electrified with the introduction of the amplified guitar. In some Northern cities like Chicago and Detroit, during the later forties and early fifties, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, and Elmore James among others, played what was basically Mississippi Delta blues, backed by bass, drums, piano and occasionally harmonica, and began scoring national hits with blues songs. At about the same time, T-Bone Walker in Houston and B.B. King in Memphis were pioneering a style of guitar playing that combined jazz technique with the blues tonality and repertoire. (RSR&RE 53)
In the early nineteen-sixties, the urban bluesmen were discovered by young white American and European musicians. Many of these blues-based bands like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Cream, Canned Heat, and Fleetwood Mac, brought the blues to young white audiences, something the black blues artists had been unable to do in America except through the purloined white cross-over covers of black rhythm and blues songs. Since the sixties, rock has undergone several blues revivals. Some rock guitarists, such as Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, and Eddie Van Halen have used the blues as a foundation for offshoot styles. While the originators like John Lee Hooker, Albert Collins and B.B. King--and their heirs Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, and later Eric Clapton and the late Roy Buchanan, among many others, continued to make fantastic music in the blues tradition. (RSR&RE 53) The latest generation of blues players like Robert Cray and the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, among others, as well as gracing the blues tradition with their incredible technicality, have drawn a new generation listeners to the blues.
There are a number of different ideas as to what the blues really are: a scale structure, a note out of tune or out of key, a chord structure; a philosophy? The blues is a form of Afro-American origin in which a modal melody has been harmonized with Western tonal chords. (Salzman 18) In other words, we had to fit it into our musical
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