Blues notes

Catharsis

  • Release of emotions

  • The basis for both genres was that they dealt with loss and displacement

  • Music is cathartic in that it lets you release and cope with strong emotions



Zumba's Lament

  • First known complete musical composition

  • About grief, loss, memory, and regret



Mirologi

  • Songs sung to the dead at funerals



Sekilios Epitaph

  • First miroglogia written in ancient Greece

  • From husband to dead wife



Ksenitia

  • Loss of home



Alexis Zoubus and Blind Johnson

  • Loss and weeping in their music

  • Sense of displacement and unbelonging, Ksenitia



Syncretism

  • Different elements come together to create something new

  • Basis for both genres 



The Great/Big/Megali Idea

  • A 19th- and early 20th-century Greek political concept that aimed to unite all ethnic Greek populations and historically Hellenic lands into a single, expanded Greek state

  • Greece expansion: 1821-1922

  • After being freed from the Ottoman Empire



Smyrna Catastrophe

  • Destruction of the town and mass killing of Greek and Armenian residents by Turkish nationalist forces between September 13 and 22, 1922

  • The Great Fire

  • Ending the Greek occupation during the Greco-Turkish War



The Asia Minor Catastrophe

  • The Asia Minor Catastrophe was the 1922 collapse of the Greek military campaign in Anatolia, marking the violent end of a three-millennia-long Greek presence in Asia Minor

  • The population exchange

  • End of the Megali Idea era

End of Megali Idea and displacement of Greeks

  • Formation of Rebetiko

  • Catharsis

  • Similar to Blues




Historial Processes

  • What you should focus on as a historian

  • Not key dates but overarching themes and such



Nation

  • Syncretic concept

  • Different cultures come together



Teleology

  • Thinking that when you know the outcome, you can relate it now to everything in the end

  • Don’t let it bias how you think about history



Fredrick Douglas

  • 4th of July Speech

  • Famous scholar, told to speak for that day but spoke about how Black Americans can’t celebrate independence when they are still enslaved 



Slavery

  • Core of the blues

  • Built a community in response 



Reconstruction

  • 1865-1877

  • Plan for the transition after slavery

  • Thought as a failure now, but at first it was (Black Americans in Congress)

  • Structure was there, but attitudes didn’t completely change

  • Death of Abraham; new leader who reversed and cracked down



Sharecropping

  • New form of slavery

  • Given land and provided lodging and things, but had to work it

  • Hard and impossible to get out of; had to give earnings to owners



Censorship

  • Censorship from Greek fascist leader Mextast; didn’t like Rebetiko, too dirty

  • Go to America, now able to record 

  • America becomes major hub for the genre



Greek Jews

  • Tensions surrounding WWII, leave to America

  • Rebetiko 



Xenia

  • Feel like an alien and an outsider

  • Many Greeks immigrated to America, rise of Rebetiko 



Blues Emotion is not Blues Music

  • Framing it as just sad limits the genre

  • Blues started out as a word related to alcohol (Greece), not depression (UK)

  • Also about love affairs, loss, anger, happiness 



The Work Song

  • Songs sung by slaves while they worked in the field

  • Helped cope and with work rhythm 

  • Call and response, how they communicated 



Spirituales 

  • African American religious songs

  • Culture surrounded by religion and family 



Minstrel Shows

  • White people blackface performances

  • Mockery of Black culture

  • How the white population was exposed to the Blues because they would have never gone to a black performance



Delta Blues

  • Cradle of the blues



W.C Handy

  • Father of the blues

  • Print, scoring, and documentation 

  • Wrote Memphis Blues

  • Wrote Memphis Blues

  • Documented Blues History in Blues: An Anthology (1926)



Mamie Smith

  • 1920. First Black Blues Singer recorded star

  • Sang Crazy Blues



Race Market

  • How they marketed the Blues in the beginning

Classic Blues era

  • 1920s, New Orleans

  • First style to be recorded



Country Blues

  • Rougher sound, spontaneous, self-taught

  • Acoustic, more guitar (easier to make this instrument than brass instruments)

  • First star: Blind Lemon Jefferson



Slider/ Bottle Neck Sound

  • Sounded like talking

  • Memphis



Depression Blues

  • 1930s

  • Street and live performances

  • Robert Johnson (deal with the devil)



Urban Blues

  • Migration means that blues expands into the cities

  • St. Louis, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, New York.



Bluebird Beat

  • Blues from Chicago

  • More electronic than acoustic



Impact of WWII on Blues

  • Fewer resources to make recordings

  • Rise of DJs, Radios, and jukeboxes

    • Audience now expands to white listeners 



Optimism after War

  • A part of the war effort and victory leads to new confidence and nationalism

  • More experience from the war, new job opportunities

  • Wanted a better world after the war

  • Pay and living conditions improve, still not great

  • Newfound optimism led to cleaner and more sophisticated music

    • Moves away from the rough and moaning sounds that blues started as



1940s Blues

  • Technology improves, and there are now amps and microphones

  • Guitar can be used more

  • Voices heard more clearly 




T-Bone Walker

  • Electric sound and stage presence

  • Influence BB King



West Coast Blues

  • 1940-1945

  • Wave of migration to California; LA was the center



Louis Jordan

  • Final coexistence of blues and jazz: Jump Blues (more swing, dancing)

  • Part of West Coast Blues

  • Nightclub blues