Geographic and Historical Landscape in the Development of the Blues
According to ethnomusicologist and blues authority David Evans, the term "blues" began to emerge during the first decade of the twentieth century. This new singing style was associated with the Black communities in the southern parts of the United States. He further elaborates that:
…these songs were new and different both in their formal and musical characteristics and in the topics and attitudes they expressed in their lyrics…. The fact that the blues songs seem to turn up everywhere in the Deep South and Midwest more or less simultaneously-in rural areas, small towns, and cities such as New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis-suggest that the form had been developing for a few years and probably allows us to place its origins in the 1890s.
(Evans 2015, 119)
Although the Mississippi Delta Region is traditionally accepted as the area where the blues originated, scholars such as Dr. Tina Naremore Jones from The University of West Alabama argue that Alabama's role in the blues development was just as significant and even more so. She states that "Alabama's blues tradition, centered in its fertile Black Belt, is more rural than the well-known Mississippi Delta blues and in some sense closer to the original source" (Jones 2020, n.p.).
Together with ragtime, jazz, and gospel music, blues is part of the rich heritage of African American musical expression rooted in the experience of the post-Reconstruction years of the latter part of the nineteenth century. The blues has arguably been among the most persistent and the most influential idioms among the many that have influenced or shaped trends in twentieth-century popular music. The blues played a significant part in the numerous forms of jazz, from New Orleans to big band, swing, and eventually the various modern jazz styles. In the post-World War II era, the emergence of rhythm and blues (R&B), rock and roll, and the subsequent forms of rock music reflected blues structure, instrumental music, and modes of vocal expression. Despite the undeniable importance of blues in the evolution of all these musical styles, the blues' origins and development raise many unanswered questions (Oliver 2012, n.p.).
