America celebrates 100 years of the blues

Jet, Dec 15, 2003

As the nation celebrates the 100th anniversary of the blues, a number of the music's performers share the secret to its longevity.

At the same time, these blues greats lament the fact that this music has not gotten the widespread recognition that it deserves.

The Blues is an original art form created by Black Americans that evolved out of Black American work songs, field hollers, spirituals and early string band sounds more than a century ago during slavery.

It has stood the test of time and has influenced every other American music form born in the 20th century, including gospel, jazz, R&B, rock 'n' roll, country, classical and even today's popular hip-hop music.

Blues legend B.B. King loves to sing and talk about the blues.

He says the music is everlasting because it tells the truth. "Most of the blues can almost be summed up with things we like, things we dislike, things we wish were and things we wish weren't. Every true male is going to be happy sometimes and not going to be happy sometimes--so you wish things were better--and when things are bad, you wish they weren't ... Blues to me is life. Life the way we live it, life the way we lived in the past and the way, I believe, we will live it in the future. It has to do with people, places and things and that's why it is here to stay."

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Black composer and musician W.C. Handy's first encounter with blues music. Handy, known as "the Father of the blues," heard the blues for the first time in a train station in Mississippi, which led him to compose the first blues music to be distributed across the nation. He always said he did not invent the blues, but wrote the music down and presented it to the world through his publishing company. His compositions include St. Louis Blues and Memphis Blues.

In addition to Handy, some of the original blues performers included Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson and Ma Rainey.

In the '50s, the blues was the rage with such stars as Dinah Washington, John Lee Hooker, Big Maybelle, Big Joe Turner, Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton and others.

The U.S Senate has declared this year "the Year of the Blues" and there has been a yearlong celebration of events to help raise awareness of the blues, which is an original Black American art form.

Senators Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Bill Frist (R-TN), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), and Fred Thompson (R-TN) led a congressional effort, initiated by the Seattle-based Experience Music Project and the Memphis-based Blues Foundation, to bring long overdue recognition to one of America's most important music forms.

This year the blues has been celebrated with a number of events, including lectures and exhibits at libraries and museums across the nation, including an upcoming PBS-TV salute to B.B. King and his trademark blues sponsored by the HistoryMakers in Chicago. The blues will also be remembered in a special at the upcoming "Sweet Chicago Blues" exhibit set to open Black History Month at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

A key salute to the blues and the men and women who perform it was a seven-part PBS-TV series, "The Blues," executive-produced by famed filmmaker Martin Scorsese.

"The blues is at once American and worldly," Scorsese says. "It's a form of storytelling that is so universal that it has inspired people beyond our borders and continues to influence music here and abroad."

Blues veteran singer Koko Taylor shared her definition of the blues on the PBS series. "A lot of people think blues music is something to make you sad, to look down on yourself. But I tell everybody, not my blues. My music is like therapy. It's designed to make people look up, get up, smile, feel better about themselves."

She is pleased that the blues is being recognized this year, but notes as a rule the music is often overlooked. "It does net get the recognition that it should. The blues is not talked about. It's not heard on the radio. You hear all kinds of music 24/7, but you are lucky to hear one station play the blues. You can hear somebody whistling more than you hear the blues. The blues has always been at the tail end of the totem pole."

Blues great Bobby "'Blue" Bland shares why the music is here to stay: "'The blues is real music and it reaches down in your soul and touches something that moves people. It makes them think of things that have happened to them or someone they love, someone they know. The blues is about how a person feels about himself; hew he feels about others."

Bland adds, "As long as there's a man loving a woman or a woman loving a man ... somebody's gonna have the blues," he says.

Tony and Grammy Award-winner Ruth Brown believes that the blues will last for centuries to come. "As long as people have problems, the blues is not going anywhere. The blues will be here because it is a feeling in your heart."

Brown and the other veteran performers are concerned, though, about who will carry the music on. "There are not many places to perform the blues. There are not many of us left around here. B.B. and I talk about this all the time. The innovators, they are slipping away."