The Roots of Blues Music Essay Example

Despite being around since the 1910s, blues as a musical genre is difficult to describe. So much so that most people go off of the feeling they have connected to listening to the blues. However, everyone has their own perspective so one person’s interpretation of what makes the blues can vary. Of course, there is also a musicality aspect of the blues but the average music listener is not well-versed in musical theory thus defers to how blues makes them feel. Much like a sonnet or a haiku, the composition of a blues song is deliberate and intentional. There is the presence of “blue notes'' that make the songs sound more melancholy than most musical pieces as well as many other things that can be indicative of blues music but, again, listeners defer to the feeling spurred from the music and the personal meaning behind the song which categorizing the genre of music.

Even the most articulate and prolific of voices of days past could not come to a definite consensus of what is so radical about the blues and why it means so much to so many people, yet this fact only added to the magic that we know today as the blues. Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Franklin Rosemount each described the blues as a foundation for many souls to find their voice. Ralph Ellison went so far as to say “The Blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” Everyone endures a certain weight of living, sometimes it feels unbearable, other times it is a welcome heaviness but the blues serves as a reminder that in times of triumph and despair there is someone just like us. Others describe the musical force of the blues as a sort of phantom of lost history and the desperation to find a tone to soothe one’s soul. Houston Baker expresses it best by saying “[The blues are] a phylogenetic recapitulation... of species experience." Much like Peter “Memphis Slim” Chapman and George “Wild Child” Butler, Baker believed the roots of blues were directly linked to what created the blues mystic. African Americans had been freed from the chains of slavery but had lost a substantial part of history, instead of mourning the loss of this information they began to lay the groundwork for what would become their new history and legacy in music, in art, and in culture. As opposed to relating the content of the blues to one’s current struggles Baker said the blues is a reminder of struggles past. 

However an individual chooses to define the blues - as an artform its influence is undeniable. In each song under the melancholy of the notes, there is a personal attachment to be had and emotion that continues to draw us to the genre.