vigorous growths, all indigenously and characteristically American and all popular in the widest sense. It was specifically European art music that was and is rejected by the vast majority.
The triumph of the European tonal-harmonic tradition in the nineteenth century among Americans who considered themselves to be cultured went parallel to that of the post-Renaissance scientific world view, and its cognates the Protestant ethic, capitalism and industrialism. Only for those who lived outside the mainstream of American life did the older traditions survive. We have seen how the tradition of communal hymn singing in the old style persisted in rural areas into the late years of the nineteenth century; even today in the backwoods areas of Kentucky and the Carolinas one comes across thriving groups who sing the old hymns in the old way, using shape-note notation and “fasola” syllables which date back to the days of the eighteenth-century song schools. The survival of modal Anglo-Celtic folksong among the remote rural populations of the Appalachian mountain region is well known; indeed, British folk-song collectors such as Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles found in the nineteen-twenties that these areas were an altogether richer source of British folk song than anywhere in England.
By far the largest group, which until recently has been excluded from the mainstream of American economic, political, and cultural life, is the Negro population. We have already observed that the collision between the African and the European, notably Anglo-Celtic, traditions, has proved one of the most fruitful in the entire history of music, and although this is not the place for an examination of that collision and its fruits, we may perhaps make some observations on the music and its relation to Negro society.
First, the blues. In its classic form this consists, verbally, of stanzas of two lines of rhyming verse, with the first line repeated, so that the second when it comes forms a kind of punchline. The words are characterized by an unsentimental melancholy tinged with an ironic humor, frequently connected with deprivation of love, such as:
I’m gonna buy me a bulldog, watch you while I sleep
(I said) I’m gonna buy me a bulldog, watch you while I sleep,
Just to keep those men from making their early mornin’ creep’
Often the imagery is explicitly sexual:
My baby got a little engine, call it my Ford machine,
(I say) My baby got a little engine, call it my Ford machine,
If your generator ain’t bad, baby, you must be buying bad gasoline.
and is surprisingly little concerned with topics concerning racial discrimination or economic deprivation.
Musically the classic blues consists of twelve bars of music on a very simple and conventional sequence of I-IV-I-V-(IV)-I chords, alternating two sung bars with two bars of instrumental improvisation. Although it would thus seem to be based firmly on European harmonic progressions, the music preserves, as do black singers towards white American society, a very ambiguous relationship towards tonal harmony. Leaving aside the fact that the progression is an unvarying one which can therefore play no part in the actual expressive means, since what is expected, harmonically speaking, always arrives, we find that the favored accompanying instrument, at least in country blues, is the guitar, an instrument that lends itself, especially when played with a sawn-off bottleneck, to bold pitch distortions, and is commonly used that way. We find, too, that the seventh degree of the major scale is frequently flattened, undermining the V-I progression, and that the third degree of the scale is commonly placed somewhere between the major and the minor third thus weakening if not destroying the distinction between major and minor scale so basic to the emotional expressiveness of tonal-harmonic music. The more sophisticated urban blues tends to use the piano, whose pitches are fixed on the tempered scale; the “neutral” third is simulated by playing major and minor third simultaneously (a feature that it shares with jazz) giving the characteristic sound to piano blues and its offshoots, barrelhouse and boogie-woogie, both of which use the blues harmonic framework. In any case, the tremendous proliferation of styles, of melodies and types of texture, which can be heard over that simple, conventional bass, shows that the interest of the music lies elsewhere than in harmony.
Many of the features are undoubtedly related to survivals of African music (the tenaciousness and persistence of African cultural elements in black people through generations of degradation and deliberate disruption is one of the cultural miracles of modern times) but that is not the present point; in the blues we see once again how the attitude to tonal harmony is a clear indicator of the ambiguity of its singers’ position within and their attitude towards white society.
Blues was, and remains, an essentially oral tradition, with strong and close links with the society from which it arose. The blues singer, like his society, was, with a very few exceptions, and those only recently, poor. He was often itinerant, travelling large distances throughout the South, not infrequently blind, led, Tiresias-like, by a boy, and, like Tiresias, often treated by his people as a seer who “saw” more than the sighted. As in many oral traditions, the material comes largely from a common stock, not only of musical phrases but also of verbal expressions and images such as “I woke up this mornin’ …,” or “Just a poor boy, long ways from home,” or “Laughin’ just to keep from cryin’.” This common stock of phrases, which was often shared by poor white, no less than black, musicians, is a universal characteristic of oral poetry (one thinks of Homer’s stock of phrases such as “the wine-dark sea” or “bright-eyed Athene”) and is a great aid to communality of expression. Everyone can play; the modestly talented singer can fall back on the common stock and by selection and permutation can make something that expresses how he feels, while the greatly gifted artist can take the common stock, building on it and creating something new and uniquely expressive, giving voice to feelings that all his hearers can recognize in themselves, thus remaining always in touch with the community as a whole and comprehensible to them.
These blues singers were—and still largely are—the seers and prophets of the black community. There is much cross-fertilization between blues and gospel music; Charles Keil points out that many black blues singers go on to become preachers in later life: “The word ‘ritual’ seems more appropriate than ‘performance’ when the audience is committed rather than appreciative. And from this it follows that perhaps blues singing is more a belief role than a creative role—more priestly than artistic … Bluesmen and preachers both provide models and orientations; both give public expression to privately held emotions; both promote catharsis; both increase feelings of solidarity, boost morale and strengthen the consensus.”12
Blues began, and has remained, very much a people’s art. It preserves in its techniques similarly ambiguous attitudes to the European tonal-harmonic tradition to those of the community that gave it birth towards white American society. Jazz, on the other hand, is in its origins and its history much closer to white music and to white society. As Gunther Schuller points out,13 the legend of the illiterate jazz musician in New Orleans in the early years of the century is not in general substantiated by the statements of musicians who were around at the time; many were highly trained in the western concert tradition with a wide knowledge of the various kinds of western concert music that New Orleans presented so richly. Many influences went into the shaping of jazz; Wilfrid Mellers, writing about Jelly Roll Morton’s Didn’t He Ramble sums them up thus:
The military march becomes a rag, the hymn becomes a blues and a Latin-American dance-song brings in hints of French or Italian opera and maybe a whiff of Europeanized plantation music in the manner of Stephen Foster also. This melting-pot of a piece gives us an idea of the variety of music that shook New Orleans in the first decades of this century. Parade bands in the streets were so numerous that they were apt to bump into one another. Party bands in the streets and squares might be playing Negro rags or Latin-American tangos or French quadrilles or German waltzes.14
