Origins of The Blues - Birth of The Blues (1910s)

Birth of The Blues (1910s)

In 1912 the sheet music industry published the first known blues composition—"Dallas Blues" by Hart A. Wand of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Two other blues-like compositions, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley adoption of blues elements, were also published in 1912: "Baby Seals' Blues" by Baby F. Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews) and "Memphis Blues", another ragtime arrangement with a single 12-bar section, by W. C. Handy. Also in 1912 (on November 9), another song, "The Blues", was copyrighted by LeRoy "Lasses" White, but not actually published until 1913.

Handy was a formally trained musician, composer and arranger who helped to popularize the blues by transcribing and orchestrating blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers. He became a popular and prolific composer, and billed himself as the "Father of the Blues"; however, his compositions can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Afro-Cuban habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime; Handy's signature work was the St. Louis Blues.

Songs from this period had many different structures. A testimony of those times can be found for instance in Henry Thomas's recordings. However, the twelve-, eight-bar, or sixteen-bar structure based on tonic, subdominant and dominant chords became the most common. Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the lowered third and dominant seventh (so-called blue notes) of the associated major scale. The standard 12-bar blues form is noted in uncorroborated oral histories as appearing communities throughout the region along the lower Mississippi River during the decade of the 1900s (and performed in New Orleans at least since 1908). One of these early sites of blues evolution was along Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. However, author Eileen Southern has pointed out several contrasting statements by old-time musicians. She cites Eubie Blake as saying "Blues in Baltimore? Why, Baltimore is the blues!" and Bunk Johnson as claiming that the blues was around in his childhood, in the 1880s.