91-671: Jerome Solon Felder (June 27, 1925 – March 14, 1991), known professionally as Doc Pomus , was an American blues singer and songwriter. He is best known as the co-writer of many rock and roll hits . Pomus was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a non-performer in 1992, the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1992), and the Blues Hall of Fame (2012). Jerome Solon Felder was born on June 27, 1925 in Williamsburg , Brooklyn , New York . He
182-476: A Grammy in 1981. He also played an important role with John Belushi in creating the back-up band for the Blues Brothers in the 1970s. The documentary film A.K.A. Doc Pomus (2012), conceived by Pomus's daughter Sharyn Felder, directed by filmmaker Peter Miller , edited by Amy Linton, and produced by Felder, Hechter, and Miller, presents Pomus's biography. Pomus died on March 14, 1991, of lung cancer at
273-997: A 1956 hit for Ray Charles . In the 1970s and 1980s, in his eleventh-floor, two-room apartment at the Westover Hotel at 253 West 72nd Street, Pomus wrote songs with Dr. John , Ken Hirsch , and Willy DeVille for what he said were "... those people stumbling around in the night out there, uncertain or not always so certain of exactly where they fit in and where they were headed." These later songs ("There Must Be A Better World", "There Is Always One More Time", "That World Outside", "You Just Keep Holding On", and "Something Beautiful Dying")—recorded by Willy DeVille , B.B. King , Irma Thomas , Marianne Faithfull , Charlie Rich , Ruth Brown , Dr. John , James Booker , and Johnny Adams —are considered by some, including writer Peter Guralnick , musician and songwriter Dr. John, and producer Joel Dorn , to be signatures of Pomus's best craft. B. B King's recording of "There Must Be A Better World Somewhere" won
364-484: A banjo or guitar. Regional styles of country blues varied widely in the early 20th century. The (Mississippi) Delta blues was a rootsy sparse style with passionate vocals accompanied by slide guitar. The little-recorded Robert Johnson combined elements of urban and rural blues. In addition to Robert Johnson, influential performers of this style included his predecessors Charley Patton and Son House . Singers such as Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller performed in
455-415: A break; the harmony of this two-bar break, the turnaround, can be extremely complex, sometimes consisting of single notes that defy analysis in terms of chords. Much of the time, some or all of these chords are played in the harmonic seventh (7th) form. The use of the harmonic seventh interval is characteristic of blues and is popularly called the "blues seven". Blues seven chords add to the harmonic chord
546-567: A center for electric blues from 1948 on, when Muddy Waters recorded his first success, "I Can't Be Satisfied". Chicago blues is influenced to a large extent by Delta blues , because many performers had migrated from the Mississippi region. Howlin' Wolf , Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Jimmy Reed were all born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. Their style
637-399: A component of R&B. After World War II, new styles of electric blues became popular in cities such as Chicago , Memphis , Detroit and St. Louis . Electric blues used electric guitars , double bass (gradually replaced by bass guitar ), drums , and harmonica (or "blues harp") played through a microphone and a PA system or an overdriven guitar amplifier . Chicago became
728-676: A ground bass overlaid with complex treble patterns, while vocal supplies a third rhythmic layer. Similar techniques can be found in hundreds of blues records". The lyrics often relate troubles experienced within African American society. For instance Blind Lemon Jefferson 's "Rising High Water Blues" (1927) tells of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 : Backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time I said, backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time And I can't get no hearing from that Memphis girl of mine Although
819-610: A movement known as the Great Migration . The long boom following World War II induced another massive migration of the African-American population, the Second Great Migration , which was accompanied by a significant increase of the real income of the urban blacks. The new migrants constituted a new market for the music industry. The term race record , initially used by the music industry for African-American music,
910-456: A note with a frequency in a 7:4 ratio to the fundamental note. At a 7:4 ratio, it is not close to any interval on the conventional Western diatonic scale . For convenience or by necessity it is often approximated by a minor seventh interval or a dominant seventh chord . In melody , blues is distinguished by the use of the flattened third , fifth and seventh of the associated major scale . Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce
1001-456: A number of songs, such as "Poor Rosy", that were popular among the slaves. Although she admitted being unable to describe the manner of singing she heard, Forten wrote that the songs "can't be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit", conditions that have inspired countless blues songs. Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, when Hart Wand 's " Dallas Blues " became
SECTION 10
#17328689062701092-594: A part in early blues, citing Robert Johnson 's " Cross Road Blues " as a "thinly veiled reference to Eleggua , the orisha in charge of the crossroads". However, the Christian influence was far more obvious. The repertoires of many seminal blues artists, such as Charley Patton and Skip James , included religious songs or spirituals. Reverend Gary Davis and Blind Willie Johnson are examples of artists often categorized as blues musicians for their music, although their lyrics clearly belong to spirituals. The blues form
1183-569: A part of ragtime; Handy's signature work was the " Saint Louis Blues ". In the 1920s, the blues became a major element of African American and American popular music, also reaching white audiences via Handy's arrangements and the classic female blues performers. These female performers became perhaps the first African American "superstars", and their recording sales demonstrated "a huge appetite for records made by and for black people." The blues evolved from informal performances in bars to entertainment in theaters. Blues performances were organized by
1274-419: A recording career that began in 1926 and spanned forty years. These recordings were typically labeled " race records " to distinguish them from records sold to white audiences. Nonetheless, the recordings of some of the classic female blues singers were purchased by white buyers as well. These blueswomen's contributions to the genre included "increased improvisation on melodic lines, unusual phrasing which altered
1365-406: A separate genre arose during the black migration from the countryside to urban areas in the 1920s and the simultaneous development of the recording industry. Blues became a code word for a record designed to sell to black listeners. The origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of Afro-American community, the spirituals . The origins of spirituals go back much further than
1456-450: A subsidiary of Hill & Range. It also employed writers (including Leiber and Stoller ) to provide songs for Presley's films and albums. This arrangement effectively precluded Presley from recording material not licensed to Hill & Range from the mid-1950s through to the early 1970s. Hill & Range gradually expanded to become the largest independent music publishing company, with worldwide interests. The company employed many of
1547-581: A wide variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues , Delta blues and Piedmont blues , as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues . World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues rock developed, which blended blues styles with rock music . The term 'Blues' may have originated from "blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness. An early use of
1638-678: Is New York attorney Raoul Felder . Using the stage name Doc Pomus, teenager Felder began performing as a blues singer. His stage name was not inspired by anyone in particular; he just thought it sounded better for a blues singer than Jerry Felder, though it included a “nod” to blues singer Doctor Clayton . He began going to Jazz clubs before working up the nerve to perform in front of mostly black audiences, doing his version of popular blues songs that were received with great enthusiasm. The 18 year old Pomus debuted at George's Tavern in Greenwich Village . Pomus stated that more often than not, he
1729-449: Is a cyclic musical form in which a repeating progression of chords mirrors the call and response scheme commonly found in African and African-American music. During the first decades of the 20th century blues music was not clearly defined in terms of a particular chord progression. With the popularity of early performers, such as Bessie Smith , use of the twelve-bar blues spread across
1820-575: Is a music genre and musical form that originated amongst African-Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues has incorporated spirituals , work songs , field hollers , shouts , chants , and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture . The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz , rhythm and blues , and rock and roll , and is characterized by
1911-675: Is a music publishing company which was particularly responsible for much of the country music produced in the 1950s and 1960s, and had control over the material recorded by Elvis Presley over that period. It is today part of Warner Chappell Music . Hill and Range Songs, Inc. was incorporated in New York on December 9, 1944, by Austrian -born brothers Julian Aberbach and Jean Aberbach and their business partners Milton Blink and Gerald King, who owned Biltmore Music. It opened an office in Los Angeles in 1945. Aberbach's brother Jean joined in
SECTION 20
#17328689062702002-560: Is a sly wordplay with the double meaning of being " tight " with someone, coupled with a more salacious physical familiarity. Blues songs with sexually explicit lyrics were known as dirty blues . The lyrical content became slightly simpler in postwar blues, which tended to focus on relationship woes or sexual worries. Lyrical themes that frequently appeared in prewar blues, such as economic depression, farming, devils, gambling, magic, floods and drought, were less common in postwar blues. The writer Ed Morales claimed that Yoruba mythology played
2093-450: Is characterized by its lyrics , bass lines , and instrumentation . Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the AAB pattern , consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over
2184-407: Is characterized by the use of electric guitar, sometimes slide guitar, harmonica, and a rhythm section of bass and drums. The saxophonist J. T. Brown played in bands led by Elmore James and by J. B. Lenoir , but the saxophone was used as a backing instrument for rhythmic support more than as a lead instrument. Hill %26 Range Hill & Range (originally "Hill and Range Songs, Inc.")
2275-418: Is little evidence of Sub-Sahelian influence in the blues as "elaborate polyrhythm, percussion on African drums (as opposed to European drums), [and] collective participation" which are characteristic of West-Central African music below the savannah, are conspicuously absent. According to the historian Paul Oliver , "the roots of the blues were not to be found in the coastal and forest regions of Africa. Rather...
2366-709: Is often associated with solo piano, boogie-woogie was also used to accompany singers and, as a solo part, in bands and small combos. Boogie-woogie style was characterized by a regular bass figure, an ostinato or riff and shifts of level in the left hand, elaborating each chord and trills and decorations in the right hand. Boogie-woogie was pioneered by the Chicago-based Jimmy Yancey and the Boogie-Woogie Trio ( Albert Ammons , Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis ). Chicago boogie-woogie performers included Clarence "Pine Top" Smith and Earl Hines , who "linked
2457-491: Is often associated with the California blues style, performed a successful transition from the early urban blues à la Lonnie Johnson and Leroy Carr to the jump blues style and dominated the blues-jazz scene at Los Angeles during the 1940s. The transition from country blues to urban blues that began in the 1920s was driven by the successive waves of economic crisis and booms that led many rural blacks to move to urban areas, in
2548-439: Is reported to have recorded more than record fifty sides of music, though others have reported the number at about forty sides, as a singer in the 1940s and 1950s for Chess , Apollo , Dawn , Gotham , and other recording companies (such as Savoy , Atlantic and Coral ). In 1946, Gatemouth Moore had recorded one of Pomus' own songs for National Records . In 1947, he became one of Atlantic Records original songwriters. In
2639-475: The American South sometimes referred to as a jitterbug or a one-string in the early twentieth century) and the banjo are African-derived instruments that may have helped in the transfer of African performance techniques into the early blues instrumental vocabulary. The banjo seems to be directly imported from West African music. It is similar to the musical instrument that griots and other Africans such as
2730-590: The Count Basie Orchestra were also concentrating on the blues, with 12-bar blues instrumentals such as Basie's " One O'Clock Jump " and " Jumpin' at the Woodside " and boisterous " blues shouting " by Jimmy Rushing on songs such as "Going to Chicago" and " Sent for You Yesterday ". A well-known big band blues tune is Glenn Miller 's " In the Mood ". In the 1940s, the jump blues style developed. Jump blues grew up from
2821-579: The Igbo played (called halam or akonting by African peoples such as the Wolof , Fula and Mandinka ). However, in the 1920s, when country blues began to be recorded, the use of the banjo in blues music was quite marginal and limited to individuals such as Papa Charlie Jackson and later Gus Cannon . Blues music also adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs", minstrel shows and Negro spirituals , including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment. The style also
Doc Pomus - Misplaced Pages Continue
2912-741: The Theater Owners Booking Association in nightclubs such as the Cotton Club and juke joints such as the bars along Beale Street in Memphis. Several record companies, such as the American Record Corporation , Okeh Records , and Paramount Records , began to record African-American music. As the recording industry grew, country blues performers like Bo Carter , Jimmie Rodgers , Blind Lemon Jefferson , Lonnie Johnson , Tampa Red and Blind Blake became more popular in
3003-405: The call-and-response pattern, the blues scale , and specific chord progressions , of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch , are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove . Blues music
3094-409: The degrees of the progression. For instance, for a blues in the key of C, C is the tonic chord (I) and F is the subdominant (IV). The last chord is the dominant (V) turnaround , marking the transition to the beginning of the next progression. The lyrics generally end on the last beat of the tenth bar or the first beat of the 11th bar, and the final two bars are given to the instrumentalist as
3185-451: The spirituals . The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery , with the development of juke joints occurring later. It is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century. The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into
3276-438: The 1920s, among them "the big three"— Gertrude "Ma" Rainey , Bessie Smith , and Lucille Bogan . Mamie Smith , more a vaudeville performer than a blues artist, was the first African American to record a blues song, in 1920; her second record, "Crazy Blues", sold 75,000 copies in its first month. Ma Rainey, the "Mother of Blues", and Bessie Smith each "[sang] around center tones, perhaps in order to project her voice more easily to
3367-428: The 1920s, when the record industry created the marketing categories " race music " and " hillbilly music " to sell music by blacks for blacks and by whites for whites, respectively. At the time, there was no clear musical division between "blues" and "country", except for the ethnicity of the performer, and even that was sometimes documented incorrectly by record companies. Though musicologists can now attempt to define
3458-451: The 9-bar progression in " Sitting on Top of the World ", by Walter Vinson . The basic 12-bar lyric framework of many blues compositions is reflected by a standard harmonic progression of 12 bars in a 4/4 time signature . The blues chords associated to a twelve-bar blues are typically a set of three different chords played over a 12-bar scheme. They are labeled by Roman numbers referring to
3549-542: The African American community. Kentucky-born Sylvester Weaver was in 1923 the first to record the slide guitar style, in which a guitar is fretted with a knife blade or the sawed-off neck of a bottle. The slide guitar became an important part of the Delta blues . The first blues recordings from the 1920s are categorized as a traditional, rural country blues and a more polished city or urban blues. Country blues performers often improvised, either without accompaniment or with only
3640-520: The African call-and-response tradition that transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar, the blues form itself bears no resemblance to the melodic styles of the West African griots . Additionally, there are theories that the four-beats-per-measure structure of the blues might have its origins in the Native American tradition of pow wow drumming. Some scholars identify strong influences on
3731-501: The Broadway play "Fiorello.) They were divorced in 1966. His first songwriting break came when the Coasters recorded a hit with the song " Young Blood ", although the melody had been radically changed by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller . Still, Pomus had co-credit as lyricist, and soon received a royalty check for $ 2,500 (US$ 27,121 in 2023 dollars), an event that convinced him that songwriting
Doc Pomus - Misplaced Pages Continue
3822-728: The Name of) His Latest Flame ". Save the Last Dance for Me has been called his crowning achievement. The lyrics came to him at his wedding, watching his wife dance with others, Pomus being unable to dance because of polio's effects on his body. It is said to be the last song Leonard Cohen ever performed on stage. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pomus wrote several songs with Phil Spector ("Young Boy Blues", "Ecstasy", "First Taste of Love" and "What Am I To Do?"), Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber ("Young Blood" and " She's Not You "), and other Brill Building-era writers. Pomus also wrote " Lonely Avenue ",
3913-558: The age of 65 at NYU Medical Center in Manhattan. Together with Shuman, and individually, Pomus was a key figure in the development of popular music . The duo co-wrote such hits as " A Teenager in Love ", " Save the Last Dance for Me ", " This Magic Moment ", " Sweets for My Sweet ", " Viva Las Vegas ", " Little Sister ", " Surrender ", " Can't Get Used to Losing You ", " Suspicion ", " Turn Me Loose " and " A Mess of Blues ". Blues Blues
4004-420: The back of a room". Smith would "sing a song in an unusual key, and her artistry in bending and stretching notes with her beautiful, powerful contralto to accommodate her own interpretation was unsurpassed". In 1920, the vaudeville singer Lucille Hegamin became the second black woman to record blues when she recorded "The Jazz Me Blues", and Victoria Spivey , sometimes called Queen Victoria or Za Zu Girl, had
4095-544: The beginning of the 20th century. They are now lost. Other recordings that are still available were made in 1924 by Lawrence Gellert . Later, several recordings were made by Robert W. Gordon , who became head of the Archive of American Folk Songs of the Library of Congress . Gordon's successor at the library was John Lomax . In the 1930s, Lomax and his son Alan made a large number of non-commercial blues recordings that testify to
4186-647: The blues from the melodic structures of certain West African musical styles of the savanna and sahel. Lucy Durran finds similarities with the melodies of the Bambara people , and to a lesser degree, the Soninke people and Wolof people , but not as much of the Mandinka people . Gerard Kubik finds similarities to the melodic styles of both the west African savanna and central Africa, both of which were sources of enslaved people. No specific African musical form can be identified as
4277-443: The blues gained an association with misery and oppression, the lyrics could also be humorous and raunchy: Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me, Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me, It may be sending you baby, but it's worrying the hell out of me. Hokum blues celebrated both comedic lyrical content and a boisterous, farcical performance style. Tampa Red and Georgia Tom 's " It's Tight Like That " (1928)
4368-568: The blues in the same year in Missouri ; and W.C. Handy , who first heard the blues in Tutwiler, Mississippi , in 1903. The first extensive research in the field was performed by Howard W. Odum , who published an anthology of folk songs from Lafayette County, Mississippi , and Newton County, Georgia , between 1905 and 1908. The first non-commercial recordings of blues music, termed proto-blues by Paul Oliver , were made by Odum for research purposes at
4459-460: The blues is usually dated after the Emancipation Act of 1863 , between 1860s and 1890s, a period that coincides with post- emancipation and later, the establishment of juke joints as places where African-Americans went to listen to music, dance, or gamble after a hard day's work. This period corresponds to the transition from slavery to sharecropping, small-scale agricultural production, and
4550-516: The blues narrowly in terms of certain chord structures and lyric forms thought to have originated in West Africa, audiences originally heard the music in a far more general way: it was simply the music of the rural south, notably the Mississippi Delta . Black and white musicians shared the same repertoire and thought of themselves as " songsters " rather than blues musicians. The notion of blues as
4641-459: The blues was rooted in ... the savanna hinterland, from Senegambia through Mali, Burkina Faso, Northern Ghana, Niger, and northern Nigeria". Additionally, ethnomusicologist John Storm Roberts has argued that "The parallels between African savanna-belt string-playing and the techniques of many blues guitarists are remarkable. The big kora of Senegal and Guinea are played in a rhythmic-melodic style that uses constantly changing rhythms, often providing
SECTION 50
#17328689062704732-411: The blues, usually dating back to the middle of the 18th century, when the slaves were Christianized and began to sing and play Christian hymns , in particular those of Isaac Watts , which were very popular. Before the blues gained its formal definition in terms of chord progressions, it was defined as the secular counterpart of spirituals. It was the low-down music played by rural blacks. Depending on
4823-479: The boogie-woogie wave and was strongly influenced by big band music. It uses saxophone or other brass instruments and the guitar in the rhythm section to create a jazzy, up-tempo sound with declamatory vocals. Jump blues tunes by Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner , based in Kansas City, Missouri , influenced the development of later styles such as rock and roll and rhythm and blues. Dallas-born T-Bone Walker , who
4914-452: The company in 1972 (and she remained with the company during and after its purchase by Chappell Music, eventually becoming vice president of Chappell before leaving in 1987). In 1973, Julian Aberbach suffered an incapacitating heart attack, and in 1975 his brother Jean sold much of the business to Chappell Music, then a subsidiary of the PolyGram organization, although it retained control of
5005-577: The early 1950s after working for Chappell Music , and thereafter the two shared control of the company, with Jean Aberbach being based in the Brill Building in New York City . After initially finding success representing Spade Cooley and Bob Wills , the company became active in the country music industry, particularly in Nashville , and at one point were reportedly responsible for three-quarters of all
5096-469: The early 1950s, Pomus began writing magazine articles, as well as songwriting for Lavern Baker , Ruth Brown , Ray Charles , and Big Joe Turner (whose music had changed Pomus' life). The Charles 1956 recording of the R&;B top ten song Lonely Avenue marked a national breakthrough for Pomus. In 1957, he married an aspiring Broadway actress from Westville, Illinois, named Willi Burke. (She later performed in
5187-479: The emphasis and impact of the lyrics, and vocal dramatics using shouts, groans, moans, and wails. The blues women thus effected changes in other types of popular singing that had spin-offs in jazz, Broadway musicals , torch songs of the 1930s and 1940s, gospel , rhythm and blues , and eventually rock and roll ." Urban male performers included popular black musicians of the era, such as Tampa Red , Big Bill Broonzy and Leroy Carr . An important label of this era
5278-429: The expansion of railroads in the southern United States. Several scholars characterize the development of blues music in the early 1900s as a move from group performance to individualized performance. They argue that the development of the blues is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the enslaved people. According to Lawrence Levine, "there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon
5369-430: The first copyrighted blues composition. In lyrics, the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood. Early traditional blues verses often consisted of a single line repeated four times. However, the most common structure of blues lyrics today was established in the first few decades of the 20th century, known as the "AAB" pattern. This structure consists of a line sung over the first four bars, its repetition over
5460-535: The form of a loose narrative. African-American singers voiced their "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, [and] hard times". This melancholy has led to the suggestion of an Igbo origin for blues, because of the reputation the Igbo had throughout plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and outlook on life when they were enslaved. Other historians have argued that there
5551-417: The genre took its shape from the idiosyncrasies of individual performers. However, there are some characteristics that were present long before the creation of the modern blues. Call-and-response shouts were an early form of blues-like music; they were a "functional expression ... style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure". A form of this pre-blues
SECTION 60
#17328689062705642-454: The huge variety of proto-blues styles, such as field hollers and ring shouts . A record of blues music as it existed before 1920 can also be found in the recordings of artists such as Lead Belly and Henry Thomas . All these sources show the existence of many different structures distinct from twelve- , eight- , or sixteen-bar . The social and economic reasons for the appearance of the blues are not fully known. The first appearance of
5733-434: The individual, the popularity of Booker T. Washington's teachings, and the rise of the blues." Levine stated that "psychologically, socially, and economically, African-Americans were being acculturated in a way that would have been impossible during slavery, and it is hardly surprising that their secular music reflected this as much as their religious music did." There are few characteristics common to all blues music, because
5824-408: The last bars. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the racial discrimination and other challenges experienced by African-Americans. Many elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa . The origins of the blues are also closely related to the religious music of the African-American community,
5915-586: The low rate of literacy among rural African Americans at the time. Reports of blues music in southern Texas and the Deep South were written at the dawn of the 20th century. Charles Peabody mentioned the appearance of blues music at Clarksdale, Mississippi , and Gate Thomas reported similar songs in southern Texas around 1901–1902. These observations coincide more or less with the recollections of Jelly Roll Morton , who said he first heard blues music in New Orleans in 1902; Ma Rainey , who remembered first hearing
6006-516: The music industry during the 1920s and 1930s. Other chord progressions, such as 8-bar forms, are still considered blues; examples include " How Long Blues ", " Trouble in Mind ", and Big Bill Broonzy 's " Key to the Highway ". There are also 16-bar blues , such as Ray Charles 's instrumental "Sweet 16 Bars" and Herbie Hancock 's " Watermelon Man ". Idiosyncratic numbers of bars are occasionally used, such as
6097-568: The music produced in Nashville. In 1955, the Aberbachs were responsible for setting up an unprecedented arrangement in which the publishing rights to all songs recorded by emerging star performer Elvis Presley were split 50:50 between the Hill & Range company and Presley and his management. The Aberbach brothers established their younger cousin, Freddy Bienstock , as head of Elvis Presley Music - in effect,
6188-452: The next four, and a longer concluding line over the last bars. This pattern can be heard in some of the first published blues songs, such as " Dallas Blues " (1912) and " Saint Louis Blues " (1914). According to W.C. Handy , the "AAB" pattern was adopted to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times. The lyrics are often sung in a rhythmic talk style rather than a melody, resembling a form of talking blues . Early blues frequently took
6279-489: The propulsive left-hand rhythms of the ragtime pianists with melodic figures similar to those of Armstrong's trumpet in the right hand". The smooth Louisiana style of Professor Longhair and, more recently, Dr. John blends classic rhythm and blues with blues styles. Another development in this period was big band blues. The " territory bands " operating out of Kansas City , the Bennie Moten orchestra, Jay McShann , and
6370-458: The religious community a musician belonged to, it was more or less considered a sin to play this low-down music: blues was the devil's music. Musicians were therefore segregated into two categories: gospel singers and blues singers, guitar preachers and songsters. However, when rural black music began to be recorded in the 1920s, both categories of musicians used similar techniques: call-and-response patterns, blue notes, and slide guitars. Gospel music
6461-510: The single direct ancestor of the blues. However the call-and-response format can be traced back to the music of Africa . That blue notes predate their use in blues and have an African origin is attested to by "A Negro Love Song", by the English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor , from his African Suite for Piano , written in 1898, which contains blue third and seventh notes . The Diddley bow (a homemade one-stringed instrument found in parts of
6552-406: The southeastern "delicate and lyrical" Piedmont blues tradition, which used an elaborate ragtime-based fingerpicking guitar technique. Georgia also had an early slide tradition, with Curley Weaver , Tampa Red , "Barbecue Bob" Hicks and James "Kokomo" Arnold as representatives of this style. The lively Memphis blues style, which developed in the 1920s and 1930s near Memphis, Tennessee ,
6643-466: The term "blues" was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase ' blue law ', which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday. In 1827, it was in the sense of a sad state of mind that John James Audubon wrote to his wife that he "had the blues". In Henry David Thoreau 's book Walden , he mentions "the blues" in the chapter reflecting on his time in solitude. He wrote his account of his personal quest in 1845, although it
6734-465: The term in this sense is in George Colman 's one-act farce Blue Devils (1798). The phrase 'blue devils' may also have been derived from a British usage of the 1600s referring to the "intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal". As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils and came to mean a state of agitation or depression. By the 1800s in the United States,
6825-449: The top pop songwriters of the day, including Doc Pomus , Mort Shuman , and Phil Spector , as well as Leiber and Stoller . In 1964, it bought Progressive Music, the publishing company operated by Atlantic Records . In 1966, Pat Rolfe joined the company, and she would eventually work on Elvis Presley's publishing catalog, in addition to publishing for Johnny Cash , Marty Robbins , Eddy Arnold , and Bill Monroe . Rolfe became GM of
6916-399: The trance-like rhythm and call-and-response, and they form a repetitive effect called a groove . Characteristic of the blues since its Afro-American origins, the shuffles played a central role in swing music . The simplest shuffles, which were the clearest signature of the R&B wave that started in the mid-1940s, were a three-note riff on the bass strings of the guitar. When this riff
7007-519: Was a career worth pursuing. By 1957, Pomus had given up performing in favor of songwriting. Pomus collaborated with pianist Mort Shuman , whom he met when Shuman was dating Pomus's younger cousin. Songwriter Otis Blackwell introduced the duo to Hill & Range Music Co./Rumbalero Music at its offices in New York City's Brill Building . Pomus asked Shuman to write with him because Pomus did not know much about contemporary rock and roll, whereas Shuman
7098-532: 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 Cuban habanera rhythm that had long been
7189-515: Was acquainted with popular artists of the day. For the most part, Pomus wrote the lyrics while Shuman composed the melodies , but they often collaborated on both aspects of their songs. Together they wrote " A Teenager in Love ", " Save the Last Dance for Me ", " Hushabye ", " This Magic Moment ", " Turn Me Loose ", " Sweets For My Sweet " (a hit for The Drifters , and later The Searchers ), " Go, Jimmy, Go ", " Little Sister ", " Can't Get Used to Losing You ", " Suspicion ", " Surrender ", and " (Marie's
7280-399: Was closely related to ragtime , which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music". The musical forms and styles that are now considered the blues as well as modern country music arose in the same regions of the southern United States during the 19th century. Recorded blues and country music can be found as far back as
7371-457: Was heard in slave ring shouts and field hollers , expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content". Blues has evolved from the unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves imported from West Africa and rural blacks into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States. Although blues (as it is now known) can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and
7462-567: Was influenced by jug bands such as the Memphis Jug Band or the Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers . Performers such as Frank Stokes , Sleepy John Estes , Robert Wilkins , Kansas Joe McCoy , Casey Bill Weldon and Memphis Minnie used a variety of unusual instruments such as washboard , fiddle , kazoo or mandolin . Memphis Minnie was famous for her virtuoso guitar style. Pianist Memphis Slim began his career in Memphis, but his distinct style
7553-659: Was nevertheless using musical forms that were compatible with Christian hymns and therefore less marked by the blues form than its secular counterpart. The American sheet music publishing industry produced a great deal of ragtime music. By 1912, the sheet music industry had published three popular blues-like compositions, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley adoption of blues elements: "Baby Seals' Blues", by Baby Franklin Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews ); "Dallas Blues", by Hart Wand ; and " The Memphis Blues ", by W.C. Handy . Handy
7644-474: Was not published until 1854. The phrase "the blues" was written by Charlotte Forten , then aged 25, in her diary on December 14, 1862. She was a free-born black woman from Pennsylvania who was working as a schoolteacher in South Carolina, instructing both slaves and freedmen, and wrote that she "came home with the blues" because she felt lonesome and pitied herself. She overcame her depression and later noted
7735-420: Was played over the bass and the drums, the groove "feel" was created. Shuffle rhythm is often vocalized as " dow , da dow , da dow , da" or " dump , da dump , da dump , da": it consists of uneven, or "swung", eighth notes. On a guitar this may be played as a simple steady bass or it may add to that stepwise quarter note motion from the fifth to the sixth of the chord and back. Hart Wand 's " Dallas Blues "
7826-430: Was published in 1912; W.C. Handy 's " The Memphis Blues " followed in the same year. The first recording by an African American singer was Mamie Smith 's 1920 rendition of Perry Bradford 's " Crazy Blues ". But the origins of the blues were some decades earlier, probably around 1890. This music is poorly documented, partly because of racial discrimination in U.S. society, including academic circles, and partly because of
7917-507: Was replaced by the term rhythm and blues . This rapidly evolving market was mirrored by Billboard magazine's Rhythm & Blues chart . This marketing strategy reinforced trends in urban blues music such as the use of electric instruments and amplification and the generalization of the blues beat, the blues shuffle , which became ubiquitous in rhythm and blues (R&B). This commercial stream had important consequences for blues music, which, together with jazz and gospel music , became
8008-444: Was smoother and had some swing elements. Many blues musicians based in Memphis moved to Chicago in the late 1930s or early 1940s and became part of the urban blues movement. City or urban blues styles were more codified and elaborate, as a performer was no longer within their local, immediate community, and had to adapt to a larger, more varied audience's aesthetic. Classic female urban and vaudeville blues singers were popular in
8099-536: Was the Chicago-based Bluebird Records . Before World War II, Tampa Red was sometimes referred to as "the Guitar Wizard". Carr accompanied himself on the piano with Scrapper Blackwell on guitar, a format that continued well into the 1950s with artists such as Charles Brown and even Nat "King" Cole . Boogie-woogie was another important style of 1930s and early 1940s urban blues. While the style
8190-470: Was the only Caucasian in the clubs, but that as a Jew with polio, he felt a special underdog kinship with African Americans, while in turn the audiences respected his courage and were impressed by his talent. Pomus performed as a singer for 10 years around metropolitan New York (1944-1954), heading a band that included Mickey Baker and King Curtis . Gigging at clubs in and around New York City, Pomus often performed with Milt Jackson , Baker, and Curtis. Pomus
8281-506: Was the son of British born Jewish immigrants. Having contracted polio as a boy, he was in an iron lung for a year, and walked with the aid of crutches. Later, due to post-polio syndrome exacerbated by an accident, Felder relied on a wheelchair. Felder became a fan of the blues after hearing a Big Joe Turner record, "Piney Brown Blues". He attended Bushwick High School and then Brooklyn College , where he studied music and learned to play piano and saxophone, from 1943 to 1945. His brother
#269730