America has produced a few kinds of music original to our Country, well, as original as any music can be. Of course, all music has a link or two back to earlier times and the obvious root of the blues is Africa. However, African music became American blues after its creators were exposed to the folk music of Europeans. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
For example; there is a great blues song called I Know You Rider. I have heard this song done in several styles: blues, country, folk, and even rock. The Grateful Dead used it as a takeoff piece occasionally for their long extended improvisations, taking it into outer space before bringing it back to Earth. Early blues was deeply influenced by the other music of its time. Robert Johnson was known to play many pop tunes of his day and his favorite song was, by all accounts, a country tune, Tumblin' Tumbleweeds. Those guys made a living playing for live crowds, for tips, and had to be ready to play whatever was popular. The Mississippi Sheiks were often booked to play at square dances for white audiences simply because they were so good. Shamefully, at those gatherings they were forced to play from behind a curtain because of their color. So, as I said, while Blues has its roots in Africa, it did not develop in isolation from other cultural influences.
Why has the blues always been so popular with musicians? Beside its deep emotional appeal, it is a simple loose structure. The basic form is a-a-b; state a line, repeat it, then answer it. That expanded to a-a-b-a; state a line, repeat it, answer it, then restate the original. Later of course, more complexity was added, but the basic form is so simple that it allows the player freedom. Between the basic lines of the form, you can do most anything, as long as you come back to the form. When those players played weekends at bars, folks wanted to dance a but and they tipped according to how much they liked the song. If you did a 2 minute song, no matter how good. they were apt to not tip because that is not enough time to really get into dancing. However, if you stretch that out by improvising, both words and music, to 6 or 7 minutes, giving them a chance to move around with their partner, they were likely to be generous.
And thus, you see the roots of America's one truly native musical form, Jazz. No Blues, no Jazz, it's that simple.
I love all of the many forms the Blues has taken from Charley Patton and Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf on through Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughn. It is possible, many have done it, to spend a lifetime devoted to tracking down old Blues recordings, and through the efforts of those who did so, those of my era rediscovered the older masters of the form. Players as great as Son House and Skip James had all but disappeared until collectors stumbled across old, forgotten recordings, then tracked down those guys and brought them back to public attention in the folk revival of the 1960s. I'm glad they did.
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