The Great Migration Chicago Style Blues Intro: Instrumental       In 1850, some 300 Black people lived in Chicago. However, during each of the following decades, that number tripled. By 1930, more than half of the African American population in the United States lived in northern cities and towns. Between 1910 and 1920, over 60,000 black people migrated to Chicago. Out of the 109,000 blacks living in Chicago, 90,000 were migrants, and 20,000 of them were born in Mississippi. Many companies in the North required labor, regardless of color, and offered reasonable compensation for it.        African Americans saw the North as a land of opportunities unavailable to them in the South. They believed racial prejudice was less common in the North, and they had access to better jobs and more opportunities in the music industry. This newfound optimism led many African Americans to write home to their families in the South about the excitement and glamor of city life. Little Brother Montgomery's 1946 song, "Lake Front Blues," captures this hopeful spirit. EX- Lakefront Blues-  Note : The Green Diamond was a first-class streamlined   passenger train  operated by the Illinois Central Railroad  between Chicago, Illinois , and St. Louis, Missouri .      From the 1920s to the 1940s, several record labels specializing in blues emerged in Chicago. These labels produced some of the country's best "race" records. The recording industry used "race records" to categorize black music until Billboard introduced the term Rhythm and Blues in 1946. Some Early Urban Chicago Blues artists that gained recognition during this time were Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson, Roosevelt Sykes, Little Brother Montgomery, and Big Bill Broonzey.     In 1920, a fair-skinned black vaudeville singer, Mamie Smith, became the first black female artist to record a blues song. The title of the song was "Crazy Blues". 1920 was also the beginning of the Classic Female Blues Singers era, which included Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters (also known as Sweet Mama String Bean), and Alberta Hunter. Because of discrimination, some black female artists, including Ada "Bricktop" Smith and Josephine Baker, performed for European audiences. The contributions of women in the Blues genre are immense.       In the 1950s, Chicago had a population of well over 500,000 blacks. During this decade, two brothers, Phil and Leonard Chess, recorded blues musicians while operating several Southside clubs. They founded the Chess Recording Company, which dominated the field of Chicago blues recordings. Notable artists who recorded for Chess Records include Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Walter, Muddy Waters, Etta James, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy, and other      Blues music traveled across the U.S. to new cities and towns, creating new styles, such as EX Jazz Blues and Jump Blues. -Fruteland Jackson

The Land Where The Blues Began The Mississippi Delta stretches from Memphis in the North to 200 miles south of Vicksburg, Mississippi, from Central Mississippi eastward to the Arkansas Ozarks. Delta style is one of the earliest-known styles of blues music. Delta-style guitar emphasizes single-string progression. The delta region was so isolated from American popular music that the music heard was a relatively pure product of early African American slave culture. The concentration of rural, uneducated blacks, segregated from the white citizenry, provided the mesh for the Delta blues to take root, grow, and flourish in its pure form. Three significant players helped to shape Delta Style Blues: ⦁ (The first Is) Charley Patton, the Father of Delta Blues, was born in 1891 near Edwards, Mississippi. Charley Patton was your stereotypical hard driving, drinking fight, and womanizing bluesman. He was the hub where all his days of bluesmen would revolve.Charley Patton left an enduring body of work that continues to inspire musicians worldwide. His approach to playing the blues eventually led to the Chicago Blues tradition. EX; Eddie "Son" House, born in Lyon, Mississippi, in 1902, was an essential artist in country folk blues. "Son" is often referred to as the father of this genre. His unique style of music was a blend of preaching and blues. House was the one who popularized bottleneck slide guitar playing and recorded for the Columbia Records label. "Son" House is noted for his highly emotional style of music. Eddie "Son" House passed away in Detroit, Michigan in 1988. ⦁ Born in 1911, Robert Johnson was a young bluesman who became known as the King of Delta Blues. He completed a group of men who contributed to Mississippi's lasting tradition of delta-style blues. Johnson's music was crucial in bridging the gap between rural blues and its early modern urban manifestations. EX. There is a long list of Delta Bluesmen: Bukka White, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williams, B.B. King, Little Milton, John Lee Hooker, Howling Wolf, Elmore James, and many others who would reshape the Delta style to form the distinctive Chicago style blues. -Fruteland Jackson

The Alternating Bassline played by the thumb Intro: Old Papa The Piedmont region was settled early in American history. The Piedmont region extends from the Appalachian Mountains in the Upper West to the Atlantic Coastal Lowlands in the Lower East. The Piedmont region includes eastern Kentucky, Northern Georgia and Alabama, North and South Carolina, and Virginia. This Piedmont region has always had a robust Anglo-American folk tradition, particularly among poor whites living in the Appalachian Mountains. This dominant folk tradition significantly influenced the development of blues music. Historians suggest that Blues music emerged in the Piedmont region 10 to 15 years after it did in the Mississippi Delta and East Texas regions. The Piedmont folk traditions have their roots in West Africa, among the Wolof and Mandingo tribes who introduced the banjo (or the Halam) and *Kora style playing to the music. The Kora playing style involves using the thumb to play the alternating bass lines while the other fingers play the melody. Piedmont blues was the most advanced and schooled, involving more harmonic inventiveness. Many Piedmont musicians understood the circle of fifths i music theory unlike musicians who lived in the Mississippi Delta. The Piedmont region was less isolated than the Mississippi Delta and Piedmont regions. The Piedmont region had more exposure to outside influences than the Mississippi Delta and East Texas areas. As a result, the music in Piedmont developed a unique flavor. The region was a melting pot of American folk music styles such as Scottish/Irish, Old Timey, Hill Billy, Bluegrass, African American, Native American, and Country music. The music was popularized by traveling minstrels and medicine shows that helped spread the music across the country. Musicians played various acoustic instruments, including the fiddle, banjo, guitar, mandolin, and bass. EXAMPLE Influential Piedmont greats include the Blind Rev Gary Davis, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller Elizabeth Cotton, Sonny Terry and Brownie Magee, Cephas and Wiggins, and John Jackson. -Fruteland Jackson

The Father of the Blues W. C. Handy, also known as the "Father of the Blues," was crucial in bringing structure, form, and legitimacy to the blues music genre. Besides being a cornetist and bandleader, Handy was also a composer and publisher. He made history by publishing one of the first blues compositions in 1912, a song called the Memphis Blues. Handy was born on November 16, 1873, in a log cabin his grandfather had built in Florence, Alabama. His grandparents were among the first blacks to own property in the city. He grew up in a middle-class religious family that emphasized the importance of education. Both his father and grandfather were Methodist ministers. Despite their disapproval, Handy pursued his passion for music and published over 70 songs, including "The St. Louis Blues," which became the most recorded song of the first half of the twentieth century. The Stlouis Blues was published in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1914 The song created stars Gilda Gray, Sophie Tucker, and Marion Harris. They were all trailblazers and were the first famous white singers to record a song written by a black composer beginning in the 1920s. The St. Louis Blues made the orchestras of Rudy Vallee, Earl Fuller, and Paul Whiteman. The song was played before the palace of Haile Selassie. The St. Louis Blues became the Ethiopian war anthem when Italy invaded Ethiopia during World War II. It was performed on bagpipes at Balmoral Castle before King Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson. Queen Elizabeth called the St. Louis Blues her favorite dance music. The St. Louis Blues played at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1924, Carnegie Hal in 1939, and two World Fairs. Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1993 for their 1925 version of the St. Louis Blues. Handy fused a tangled beat with blues progressions using the one-two count of the marching band tempo. William Christopher Handy was a prolific author who wrote five books on the blues, black folk music, and early African American composers. By the 1940s, he had achieved great wealth and lived on Striver's Row in Harlem. However, in 1943, Handy suffered a fall from a subway platform that caused him to become blind, which effectively ended his music and book-writing career. Handy passed away because of pneumonia in March 1958 at 84. -Fruteland Jackson

East Texas, Piedmont, and the Mississippi Delta Regions EAST TEXAS Slavery's Last Refuge Intro: "Another Man Don' Gone" East Texas holds a rich tradition in blues music with blues musicians like Huddie Ledbetter, aka *"Leadbelly, "*Blind Lemon Jefferson (Father of Texas Blues), Influential Texas blues guitarist, *Ragtime "Henry Thomas, and Alger "Texas" Alexander, who helped popularize blues music born in the cotton fields, to name a few artists who left their distinctive style upon the music. Today, however, we focus not on the Texas Blues musicians but on the Texas work song tradition. Prison farms were established along the Brazos River in East Texas, where Texas used convict labor for public works projects and farming thousands of acres of farmland. The convicts were leased to private operators. This practice was adopted by other southern penal institutions, including Cummings Prison Farm in Grady, Arkansas (which covered some 16,500 acres since 1902), Missouri State Prison in Jefferson City, MO (which operated from 1836 to 2004), Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, LA, and Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman,Mississippi. In David M. Oshinsky's book, "Worse than Slavery,"- Mississippi State Penitentiary, aka Parchman Farm, was described as the closest thing to slavery that survived The Civil War. Quickly, the formerly enslaved people learned they could no longer count on the protection that went along with being the master's valuable property. In prison, an inmate could be overworked, underfed, beaten senseless, and left to die. There was no one to protect the inmates from savage beatings, endless workdays, and criminal neglect. Many wardens were not penologists, but experienced plantation managers hired by the state to oversee government-run cotton and sugar cane plantations. Convicts often dealt with the pain of severe punishment at the hands of untrained racists and sadistic guards who were still angry over the South's humiliating defeat during the Civil War. The infamous Texas prison farm system was indirectly responsible for the survival of the work song tradition. Work songs had three primary functions: 1) They helped supply a rhythm of work or synchronized rhythm of movement. 2) They helped to pass the time while performing tedious tasks. 3) They offered an outlet for frustration and anger Although work songs were prevalent across all southern states, the tradition of work songs in Texas was particularly noteworthy. These songs were composed to the rhythm of sledgehammers, picks, and axes. They narrated tales of women left behind, the prison guards, the sound of bloodhounds on the trail of escapees, the captains, the memory of freedom they once had, and the gnawing unrelenting loneliness of the convicted murderers and vagrants who were punished for being homeless. The incarcerated individuals expressed their emotions of love, separation, and oppression, all while performing their back-breaking labor. EXAMPLE: (Big Leg Rosy and Women in Prison) Today, work songs have dwindled to a halt, and work conditions have changed.The modern-day inmates have traded their sledgehammers, pics, and axes for law libraries, cooking classes, SIMPLE BROOMS, and email.

BLUES 101 I N T R O D U C T I O N What is the Blues      The English word "Blues" was first recorded during the 1500s. The word was used to describe an anxious or troubled state of mind. By the 1600s," the Blue Devils" became a common term for evil spirits that brought depression and despair. In the 1800s, in the U.S., people would claim to have a case of "the Blue Devils" to describe a mood of low spirits or being under emotional stress. During the Reconstruction Era* (1865-1877), blacks began to apply the term to folk music that spoke to the social realities in their lives. Blues music emerged as folk music on the cotton plantations in the South. By the end of the Civil War, and after many decades of evolution in the bosom of urban ghettos in the North, the blues was a purely American art form. Blues music sprang from an environment of grueling hard work and poverty. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, the cotton belt was densely populated with former slaves, and Blues music emerged as a popular form of folk singing.   The Mississippi Delta, East Texas, and the Piedmont region in the U.S. were the key regions where the blues was born. Blues music evolved from the fusion of field hollers, work songs, and religious music, each contributing to the makeup of the blues . The field songs of the enslaved represented the sorrow in their lives. They were not happy-go-lucky. Prison farm officials, railroad supervisors, and road gang leaders encouraged singing work songs to keep the men and women focused on their tasks. These bosses discovered  that more work is completed when set to rhythmic timing.  The religious songs include hymns, slave songs/church songs, and the Negro spirituals. While serving the same purpose today as during slavery, Sacred songs give hope for a better tomorrow- and a belief in a higher power. We are going on a short journey back in time before singing work songs  and field hollers . We are traveling back in time across the middle passages to Africa. We will travel to the northern part of the West African coastal region where stringed instruments were found, and we will discuss the African connection or the West African roots of American blues m usic. -Fruteland Jackson   .

"NOMMO"-The Power of the Spoken Word What elements of West African Music are found in American Blues Music? African American history begins with the slave trade. Many of the enslaved Africans were from the West African Coastal region. Tribes in that coastal region included the Ashanti, Bini, Yoruba, Dahomey, and Ibo, to name a few. I can only hint at the essence of the power of blues music. The DNA, if you will, of a force that we apply to blues music. The raw elements of blues music are the power of the spoken word using the vehicle of a song and the fusion of field hollers, work songs, religious music, and the black human soul. *The secret of the blues lies centuries deep in the soul of the black and the blue races. Handy Quote. Language is one of the most stable elements in African societies. The Bantu word "NOMMO" refers to the life force or the vital energy that carries words as water vapor from the mouth. What you hear is both water and words. NOMMO represents the power of the spoken word. Therefore, all human activities and natural movements rely on the word and its productive capacity, using water and word. Thus, NOMMO is the life force itself. Nommo is a critical component of the foundation of the African ethos. Nommo serves as a building block of strategic importance. Nommo encourages the speaker of the word and the listener to unite and affirm each other's reality. The Nommo holds a significant place in the heart of blues music. In West African music, the song is called the "Nommo." It does not reflect, but creates a mood instead. African singers do not describe feelings or moods to their audience. Instead, they create a mood that puts their listeners in that frame of mind. This musical mood creates a climate where mystical powers to heal and transform exist.  Something magical may happen when someone taps into the blues genre of music. Blues music provides a sense of empowerment that is truly overwhelming. It makes you feel like you are not alone - that someone else has been where you are and that everything will be all right. Listening to the blues can positively impact your psychological and emotional well-being. Blues music allows you to express your feelings and thoughts and connect with peers and oppressors. European music is blueprinted, scored, and known for its precision. Musical notation governs how short or long musical notes are played using timing, structure, and metering. In contrast, the African musicians talked through their instruments, and the individual players' personalities were infused with the music. African musicians used their instruments to communicate. The Africans incorporated vocal inflections into their music by playing around, above, and below musical notes. They would manipulate notes by bending or sliding and use their voices to add guttural sounds and slurs to color melodic lines. These elements or techniques have survived by finding their way into American Blues Music and have become integral to the genre. -Fruteland Jackson

The Emergence of Rural Blues in America The Africans that survived the middle passages experienced culture shock. Most African tribes had strict customs, rituals, ceremonies, and taboos that dominated their lives. Being left alone, unclothed, and friendless was a shock more traumatic than the sting of the whip or physical punishment. The frightened, miserable creatures that the slave ships landed in southern waterfront cities tried to bring their music with them. However, the practice of separating enslaved Africans so that no single tribal group could be allowed on any plantation weakened the musical traditions. The enslaved Africans could not build drums for fear of communication. After several generations, most of the enslaved African's way of life was bred out of his seed. Their whole life was read within the confines of slavery. The fundamental differences between the African and African American traditions were based on each group's social conditions. Therefore, with no instruments, the unadulterated pain of everyday life as an enslaved person gave birth to the field holler, which was used to articulate personal and social concerns that arose in daily life. -EXAMPLE- O'l Hannah: In Texas, there was a nickname for the sun called Old Hannah; when it was 90 degrees in the shade, the enslaved and formerly enslaved would plea in a field holler that the sun would quickly set. The field holler had no form or structure. No one knows when field hollers began. However, their popularity lasted until the early twentieth century. -Fruteland Jackson