Fascinating. Thanks! Makes me wonder how far back we could locate the emergence of the blues (or jazz) if it weren't for the racial barriers and scarcity or lack of recording tech back then. Crazy Blues has always sounded like a New Orleans-style blues to me, but I now realize that assumes that such a thing existed in 1920. I'm always inclined to assume that the earliest recorded examples of jazz and blues were preceded by at least a decade or two of similar work by influential but unknown or unrecorded musicians. For example, I know some guitarists who became well known later for playing blues, like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly, were performing in the mid 1910s, and I figure they had teachers/influences who may have brought much of the later "blues" form (flatted 5th, AAB structure, secular/risque lyrics, etc.) from the 1890s or earlier. Sure wish we could hear them now, or hear New Orleans music (Conga Square, funereal march/parades, Mardi Gras) from the decades before the first "jass" bands began to emerge there. Guess I'll just have to add some histories of turn of the century African-American music to my already too-long reading list instead!
BTW, I think your English is great. I'm just hypersensitive to the possibility that I've offended or angered someone without meaning to. Always have been, especially online, without the benefit of vocal inflections, eye contact, and body language. It's something I need to work on.
Great point about the protest/work song roots of what came to be called blues. I hadn't thought of that as an influence that was made more explicit in later years. I associate songs like "Strange Fruit" with the influence of the Harlem Renaissance on later songwriters and poets, but of course those kinds of sentiments are much older than that.
It wasn't bad at all! But if it took some special skill to read it, it was a skill you probably have earned too, by reading lots of first-year student essays. Your comment was far easier to make sense of than some of those! As I recently wrote in the margins of a particularly garbled student paper: "I have no idea what this sentence means, but I know what you're trying to say."
Fascinating. Thanks! Makes me wonder how far back we could locate the emergence of the blues (or jazz) if it weren't for the racial barriers and scarcity or lack of recording tech back then. Crazy Blues has always sounded like a New Orleans-style blues to me, but I now realize that assumes that such a thing existed in 1920. I'm always inclined to assume that the earliest recorded examples of jazz and blues were preceded by at least a decade or two of similar work by influential but unknown or unrecorded musicians. For example, I know some guitarists who became well known later for playing blues, like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly, were performing in the mid 1910s, and I figure they had teachers/influences who may have brought much of the later "blues" form (flatted 5th, AAB structure, secular/risque lyrics, etc.) from the 1890s or earlier. Sure wish we could hear them now, or hear New Orleans music (Conga Square, funereal march/parades, Mardi Gras) from the decades before the first "jass" bands began to emerge there. Guess I'll just have to add some histories of turn of the century African-American music to my already too-long reading list instead!
BTW, I think your English is great. I'm just hypersensitive to the possibility that I've offended or angered someone without meaning to. Always have been, especially online, without the benefit of vocal inflections, eye contact, and body language. It's something I need to work on.
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Great point about the protest/work song roots of what came to be called blues. I hadn't thought of that as an influence that was made more explicit in later years. I associate songs like "Strange Fruit" with the influence of the Harlem Renaissance on later songwriters and poets, but of course those kinds of sentiments are much older than that.
[This comment was removed]
It wasn't bad at all! But if it took some special skill to read it, it was a skill you probably have earned too, by reading lots of first-year student essays. Your comment was far easier to make sense of than some of those! As I recently wrote in the margins of a particularly garbled student paper: "I have no idea what this sentence means, but I know what you're trying to say."