Dave’s Music Database: Louis Jordan, the Father of R&B, Is Born: July eight, 1908
Shuffle blues
Thus, the Who, though a quintessential mod rock band, marketed their early performances as “Maximum R&B” to attract an viewers. Although bands that followed this technology—John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Fleetwood Mac, for instance—referred to as themselves blues bands, rhythm and blues remained the rubric for the Animals, Them, the Pretty Things, and others. Today a band that advertises itself as rhythm and blues is sort of certainly following on this tradition somewhat than that of the early pioneers.
It is in this sense of a sad frame of mind that one of many earliest recorded references to “the blues” was written by Charlotte Forten, then aged 25, in her diary on December 14, 1862. She was a free-born black from Pennsylvania who was working as a schoolteacher in South Carolina, instructing both slaves and freedmen, and wrote that she “got here home with the blues” as a result of she felt lonesome and pitied herself. She overcame her melancholy and later famous a variety of songs, similar to Poor Rosy, that had been popular among the many slaves.
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 kinds and subgenres, with regional variations throughout the United States. Additionally, there are theories that the four-beats-per-measure construction of the blues might have its origins in the Native American custom of pow wow drumming. The blues form is a cyclic musical form during which a … Read More