The Blues

The Blues

Picture being in a jazz club, sitting in the soft cushion booths, waiting for the band to come to the stage. Finally the spotlight shines on the artist on stage. It is a living legend, Robert Johnson. He starts playing and singing the blues and you picture and feel everything he is saying, feeling his pain and experiences. The Blues is emotional, rhythmic, storytelling music that shows the artists feelings and personal experiences, which is shown in the novel Reservation Blues, which includes characters such as blues great Robert Johnson.

It becomes increasingly difficult through time to link blues music and Native Americans. This is because the musical genre of blues has been stereotyped to Afro-Americans. It emerged in African-American communities of the United States from spirituals, praise songs, field hollers, rhymed Scots-Irish narrative ballads, shouts, and chants. The blues influenced later American and Western popular music, as it became part of the genres of ragtime, jazz, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and pop songs. The phrase the blues derived from the devil blues, meaning �down’ spirits, or depression and sadness. The blues great Robert Johnson, who was a character in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues was a Delta Blues singer, one of the earliest forms on the blues. It is referred to as Delta Blues because it originated in the Mississippi Delta region.

(Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org)

Robert Johnson is one of the most famous Delta Blues musicians. Also known as the “Grandfather of Rock-and-Roll”, his music styles influenced a large amount of musicians, ranging throughout time. Such artists include Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, and Eric Clapton. Clapton once said that Robert Johnson was “the most important blues musician who ever lived.” Johnson traveled up and down the Mississippi Delta, traveling by bus, hopping trains, and sometimes hitchhiking. According to Blues folklore, while traveling on a cross-road in the Delta, Robert sold his immortal soul to the Devil in exchange for mastery of the guitar. Sherman Alexie makes connections to this legend within the novel Reservation Blues. Johnson’s guitar is passed down to the band, and soon takes the same effects on them as it did on Johnson. There is much controversy over Robert Johnson’s death. He died at the age of 27 in Greenwood, Mississippi. Some believe that Johnson was poisoned by the jealous husband of a woman he was flirting with in a bar. Others believe that Robert Johnson died of Marfan’s syndrome. This was speculated in a 2006 article from the British Medical Journal, written by David Connell. In the novel Reservation Blues, Robert Johnson lived for many years after his estranged death, searching to break his deal with the devil. This allows Alexie to distort history, connecting Robert Johnson to Native American life, allowing for an exhilaration story.

(Delta Haze, http://www.dealtahaze.com/) (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org)

Blues musical styles, forms, melodies, and the blues scale have influenced many other genres of music, such as rock and roll, jazz, and popular music. Prominent jazz, folk or rock performers, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and the White Stripes have performed significant blues recordings. Like jazz, rock and roll, heavy metal, hip hop music, and pop music, blues has been