A History of the Blues: Chapter 1
1/
General Notes;
The Mississippi Delta Starts at Vicksburg, Mississippi, 300 miles from the mouth, & extends 250 miles northwards to Memphis. People started to settle the area in about 1835 and cleared much of the woodland to grow cotton. As well as cotton; rice, sugar cane and tobacco were grown. After the civil war the whole area was gradually cleared.
Pre civil war; Spirituals were popular with slaves. They used the lyrical concept of gospel hymns and adapted them to suit their own needs. This was in part due to the majority having a limited (English) vocabulary and not being able to relate to the intended concepts. Drums & Horns were banned for slaves in case they used them for signalling to each other between plantations. Post war, they adapted the spirituals and made their secular songs. (worldly as opposed to sacred). These were banned by the church and were considered to be ‘devils music’. One of these 19th century spirituals is ‘Swing low sweet chariot’.
Post war, many blacks worked the railroads, steamboats, mining, lumber, levee gangs.
The most famous railroad song was ‘John Henry’, the story of a 220 lb. black man who worked himself to death in an attempt to beat a mechanical steam drill.
Blues probably started to take a shape we would find recognisable in the late 19th century following the civil war. The only way of listening to music was live; this was well before recording became possible. Their styles developed slowly; someone would hear a song, perhaps from a travelling musician or even in church, and would change it to suit their needs. Their influences came from the oral tradition, which would have been passed down from the African slaves through the generations, but also incorporated white influences. Many of the whites would be newer to the U.S than the blacks and so their Celtic or French (Cajun) music would still be fresh to them and would influence the blacks. It all went into the huge melting pot.
Minstrel companies started after the civil war.
Post war – Southern prisons worked in a similar way to slavery. They toiled all day in the fields and road gangs, all the while singing to create a working rhythm.
Sharecropping and farm workers were now much smaller groups than pre-war and could be several fields apart so ‘hollerin’ developed.
The blues was born in the area between Georgia and Texas and included the Mississippi delta. The area was made up mainly of forests, farms and plantations.
Many of the songs were very sexual lyrically.
17th Century.
Through the century there were three real areas of music. Hymns or psalms in the churches or meeting houses, mainly vocals. Dances; violin or fiddle, by black or white players. Military; trumpet, fife and drum.
1619.
The first shipload of African slaves sold to the colonies docks in Virginia. Field-holler singing subsequently develops. Through the ensuing centuries African work songs, call and response patterns, oral tradition, religious beliefs and practices, and rhythms intermingle with European melodies and eventually white American folk forms. The seeds of the blues are planted.
1652.
Rhode Island was the first state to pass any anti-slavery laws, limiting it to 10 years.
ca.1700.
Approx. 28,000 slaves in the colonies.
1707.
A book, ‘Hymns and spiritual songs’ was published and was credited with being a huge influence on black musicians.
1750.
230,000 slaves in the colonies. 206,000 south of pennsylvania.
1774.
A journal written by a Maryland man, describes slaves dancing to a ‘guitar like instrument based on a gourd. They called it a 'banjer'.
1782.
First all black church, in Georgia.
1793.
Cotton Gin invented. This was used to separate the cotton seed from the fibre.
Late 18th Century & early 19th.
New Orleans was becoming the music capital mainly because of its diverse mixture of races although negros, most of them slaves, accounted for about one third of the population. All types of music, such as Brass band, creole, string bands, were poular. These various types gradually spread up to the Mississippi delta by way of the river boats.
19th Century.
Black musicians were used more in orchestras and theatres in the north and the major southern cities. The value of a slave was enhanced if they could play or sing, so some owners actually had slaves educated musically.
Philadelphia had an all black marching band.
ca.1800.
Approx. 1,000,000 blacks in America. Were mainly in the southern states on plantations growing cotton, rice and tobacco. Most of them were slaves.
1807.
Britain abolishes slavery.
1808.
Importation of slaves into the U.S. is banned.
300,000 free blacks in the northern U.S.
1810.
1.38 million blacks in the U.S.
1816.
First black Bishop
1817.
Frank Johnson becomes the first black person to publish sheet music.
1819.
Memphis founded with a population of 364. Known as the ‘Home of the Blues’ and the ‘Birthplace of Rock ‘n’ Roll. 1857; railroad linking the Mississippi to the Atlantic was completed. Received city status in 1861, when pop. was 22,000. 1870 pop. was 40,000. 1880 pop. was 33,000, due to a yellow fever epidemic. 1900, pop was 120,000. Beale street is the best known road in Memphis; one mile long, and is known as the birthplace of the blues.
ca.1830.
T.D.Rice introduces blackface and ‘Jump Jim Crow’.
2.3 million blacks in the U.S.
1833.
Christian Frederich Martin builds his first American made acoustic guitar.
1838.
Frank Johnson’s band toured Europe and played before Queen Victoria. He was so popular because of his ability to ‘Jazz up’ his music.
1840.
2.9 million blacks in the U.S.
1843.
First public minstrel show is performed by the all-white Virginia minstrels in blackface, sparking a desire for ‘black’ entertainment.
1848.
Stephen Foster publishes ‘Oh Susanna’
California gold rush.
1850.
3.6 million blacks in the U.S.
1852.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’.
1855.
Leon Scott invents the ‘pnonoautograph’, a primitive ‘record player’.
1860.
4.4 million blacks in the U.S.
1862-64.
A series of congressional acts facilitates the building of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad, the Union pacific.
1863.
The Emancipation proclamation frees slaves in the Confederate states. In the 1870’s, following reconstruction, southern states will enforce segregation.
1865.
End of the civil war. It accounted for the lives of 615,000 men, of which about 225,000 were killed in action and 390,000 died of disease. There were 1.1 million total casualties.
The thirteenth ammendment abolishes slavery.
In granting basic rights to ex-slaves (including the right to marry and to own land) the ‘Black codes’ passed by most southern state legislatures in the aftermath of the Civil war also ensures segregation of public facilities.
Ex-slaves became tenant farmers or ‘Sharecroppers’. They rented a small parcel of land and shared the profits with the landowner. This was little more than slavery because everything they needed was supplied by the landowner for a price. Many large estates printed their own money that could only be used in their own stores.
1866.
Formation of Fisk Jubilee singers.
The Ku Klux clan formed in Pulaski, Tennessee.
1867.
First collection of spirituals published; William Allen, Charles Ware & Lucy McKim Garrison’s ‘Slave songs of the United States’.
1870.
Section one of the Fifteenth ammendment supposedly guarantees that ‘the right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged….. by any State on account of race, colour or previous condition of servitude’.
Ca.1870,s.
Often assumed that the blues started to gain shape at about this time in the southern states.
1875.
A Civil Rights bill was passed saying that public racial discrimination was illegal.
1876.
Custers last stand at the Little Big Horn.
1877.
Reconstruction ends as Federal troops are withdrawn from the south.
Thomas Edison files patent on a phonograph consisting of a metal cylinder with a fine spiral groove, two diaghram and needle units (one for recording, the other for playback) and a small speaker horn – a vast improvement over Leon Scott’s ‘phonoautograph’ of 1855.
Emile Berliner invents the first microphone and sells the rights to Bell telephone. Thomas Edison invents a better microphone, which in 1878 becomes the one used by Bell.
1878.
The world’s first phonograph company, The Edison speaking phonograph company, is established in New York. The first phonograph for home use is sold by Edison for $10; It is called the parlour speaking phonograph.
Emile Berliner patents the ‘gramophone’ a talking machine that employs laterally cut discs.
Ca.1880’s – 1890’s.
Jazz probably developed into a style around this time in the Storyville district of New Orleans. This area was full of bars, brothels, etc. and was open 24 hours a day, so musicians had to improvise to keep the crowds happy.
1881.
Gunfight at the O.K. corral.
1883.
The Supreme Court declared that the 1875 Civil Rights bill was unconstitutional.
1884.
The likely year in which the first ‘Rag’ was published. It was ‘New coon in town’. Part of what made a rag was the piano trying to imitate the banjo.
1887.
Emile Berliner files for a patent for the gramophone, which plays discs rather than Edisons’s cylinders. (Berliner, a few years later invents a matrix system whereby an unlimited number of copies can be mass produced from an original master).
The first demonstration of disc recording and reproduction by Berliner takes place in Philadelphia. A 12 year old pianist makes a 2 minute cylinder recording in Edison’s laboratory.
1888.
The kodak box camera is introduced.
1889.
The Oklahoma land rush.
A toymaker (Kammerer & Reinhardt) starts making Berliners hand wound gramophones that play 5 inch discs. Frank Goedde, a piccolo player, makes the first commercial cylinders, for the north American Phonograph Company, who had purchased the rights from Edison in 1888.
1890.
Mississippi’s redrawn constitution includes a clause under which a prospective voter could be required to read and interpret any part of the constitution in order to be eligible to vote. This ‘literacy clause’ becomes the model by which many other southern states disenfranchise blacks.
Columbia enters the record business with recordings by John Philip Sousa.
Berliner makes recordings which include ‘The lords prayer’.
1891.
George Washington Johnson’s ‘The laughing song’ & ‘The whistling coon’.
Miss Stewart becomes the first vocalist to record a cylinder, ‘My love & I’, Pattison’s waltz song.
Columbia opens up a ‘Negro music’ section.
1892.
The Boll weevil crosses the mexican border into Texas and eventually spreads to most cotton growing regions, including the Mississippi delta.
The first known recording by a black artist is ‘Mama’s black baby boy’ by the ‘Unique Vocal Quartet’. Music’s first million seller is ‘After the ball’, by J.Aldrich Libbey.
1893.
First public showing of an Edison Kinescope.
1894.
Berliner launches the United States Gramophone Company, from Washington D.C.
1896.
Plessy v. Ferguson. In upholding an 1890 Louisiana statute mandating separate but ‘equal’ railroad cars for blacks, the U.S. supreme court rules that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth ammendment (ratified in 1866) had guaranteed blacks political, but not social, equality. Ironically, the railroad lines were among those calling for repeal of the Louisiana state law. The court’s decision made white compliance with subsequent ‘Jim Crow’ laws mandatory, not discretionary.
1897.
The first recording studio opens over a shoe shop in Philadelphia, where Berliner also opens the first record shop. The Sousa band releases several dance records.
1898.
Bob Cole’s, ‘A trip to coontown’. (Book).
Annexation of the Hawaiian islands.
Eldridge Johnson perfects the first system of mass duplication of pre recorded discs. Johnson improves on Berliners methods by mastering on wax instead of the acid etching method and by using several metal positives which each make multiple stampers.
1899.
Johnson presses the first commercial 2 sided discs, which are children’s records.
Scott Joplin’s, ‘The maple leaf rag’.
Late 1890’s.
An archaeologist, Charles Peabody, was carrying out some excavating near Stovall, Mississippi, when he noticed that his black workers were singing improvised songs that were blues in nature.
ca.1900's.
Jazz started to emerge.
The end of the 19th century up to the start of W.W.1. was the ‘heyday for Delta blacks’. 15% owned land.
By the end of the 20’s there were as many Delta blacks in the northern cities such as Chicago as there were in the delta. There were even rumours that record companies would pay them well to record!
Large families were encouraged in the sharecroppers because of the workload. Charley Patton was one of 12 children. Rube Lacy & Tommy Johnson both had 12 brothers & sisters.
1900.
Columbia starts producing and selling disc records.
By 1900, 14 states had segregation laws.
1901.
Booker T Washinton’s ‘Up from slavery’. (Story).
Oil is discovered at Spindletop, Nr.Beaumont, Texas.
1902.
The Dinwiddle Colored quartet records for Victor.
1903.
The auto industry begins.
The Wright brothers first flight.
W.E.B.DuBois, ‘The souls of black folks’. (Book).
Victor introduces 12 inch and 14 inch disc records under the Deluxe name. Columbia boasts that it is now producing 2 million records a month, a claim which is refuted by Edison.
W.C.Handy, (A black bandleader and ‘Father of the Blues’) – He was sitting on the station late one night in Tutweiler, dozing, and waiting for a train that was 9 hours late. He was woken when another negro with a guitar started playing. He sang the line ‘Goin’ where the southern crosses the dog’ (repeated 3 times)(a reference to the junction of 2 railway lines) and playing the guitar with a knife pressed on the strings. He was used to hearing the jazz band versions of the blues and was hugely affected by this sound, ‘the Delta blues’.
1905.
The first U.S. movie theatre opens in Pittsburgh.
1905-08.
Folklorist, Howard Odum, travelled Georgia and the delta collecting folk songs. Over half of them were blues and many were adapted and recorded in later years. He said they were sung after church and at social gatherings, front porches, dances etc.
1910.
National Association for the Advancement of Coloured people (NAACP) is founded by W.E.B.DuBois and seven whites in response to the lynching of two black men in Springfield, Illinois.
1912.
Leroy ‘Lasses’ White’s ‘Nigger Blues’, Hart Wand and Lloyd Garrett’s ‘Dallas Blues’, W.C.Handy’s ‘Memphis Blues’ and Baby Seals ‘Baby Seals blues’ are all published within a few months of each other; but in a sense, the first published ‘blues’ was Nat D.Ayer & Seymour Brown’s ‘Oh, you beautiful doll’, a pop hit of 1911, whose opening verse had made knowing use of the 12 bar form.
The Titanic sinks.
The Chicago Defender (newspaper) urged black people in the south to flee to the north, thus began the migration to an easier life! Between 1915 & 1925, 1.5 million blacks left the south for a new life. Between 1916-18, 110,000 went to Chicago.
1914.
Handy’s ‘St.Louis Blues’ published, which throws the genre into the mainstream of American popular music.He is later acknowledged as the ‘Father of the blues’.
Borrowing an idea from the meat packing industry, Henry Ford introduces the assembly line to speed production & lowers the selling price of the Model-T. (introduced 6 years earlier).
1915.
Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha is staged in new York.
D.W.Griffith’s The Birth of a nation, based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Klansman (also the source for a long running play), revolutionizes motion pictures and triggers both NAACP boycotts and the revitalization of the Ku Klux Klan (this time a national, rather than an exclusively southern, organisation, as antagonistic towards Jewish & Catholic immigrants as to blacks).
1917.
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band becomes the first Jazz group to record.
The Bolshevik revolution.
The U.S. enters W.W.1.
Birdseye begins to experiment with frozen food, a process not perfected until 1949.
1918-19.
Influenza epidemic kills 500,000 in the U.S. and over 21,000,000 worldwide.
1919.
The underside of the migration: Bloody race riots in a number of northern cities, including Chicago.
Ratification of the Eighteenth ammendment enacts prohibition. Music filled illegal speak-easies, house parties and juke joints attract drinkers. (Juke; West African word; one meaning is wicked or disorderley). Most Juke joints had a bar, dance floor and a back room for gambling. Some were also brothels. Most travelling musicians played the juke joints. It was in one of these that Robert Johnson is known to have studied Son House and Tommy Johnson first studied Charley Patton. The early versions of these joints could be in a persons house and would sell bootleg liquor. Muddy Waters described Juke joint Saturdays as ‘Saturday night fish fries’ or ‘Juke houses’ or even ‘suppers’. A Honky Tonk is the ‘redneck’ equivalent of a juke joint. The difference between the two is the music you’ll find on the jukebox and the colour of the women in the beer adverts. Barrelhouses are much the same and take their name from the fact that beer was kept in barrels. More commonly associated with piano blues, barrelhouses were usually to be found in towns.
1920.
Commercial air travel begins.
Gennett records changed from vertical cut records to lateral and were sued by patent holders Victor. Three years later Gennet won and opened up the market to small independants.
Ca.1920’s.
There were 2 basic styles of blues starting to evolve. The blues played in cities such as Memphis and Chicago were more sophisticated and became known as Urban blues. Rural blues was the type played in the deep southern areas, such as the Mississippi delta; also known as Country blues.
Recording companies concentrated on the Urban style but from 1927 onwards they sent talent scouts to cities such as Dallas, Atlanta, Memphis etc. to try and find rural blues players.
The first blues Superstar was Blind lemon Jefferson.
Memphis’ Beale Street became known as ‘where the blues began’. Charley Patton & Son House recorded some of the greatest blues ever there.
The Mississippi Delta Starts at Vicksburg, Mississippi, 300 miles from the mouth, & extends 250 miles northwards to Memphis. People started to settle the area in about 1835 and cleared much of the woodland to grow cotton. As well as cotton; rice, sugar cane and tobacco were grown. After the civil war the whole area was gradually cleared.
Pre civil war; Spirituals were popular with slaves. They used the lyrical concept of gospel hymns and adapted them to suit their own needs. This was in part due to the majority having a limited (English) vocabulary and not being able to relate to the intended concepts. Drums & Horns were banned for slaves in case they used them for signalling to each other between plantations. Post war, they adapted the spirituals and made their secular songs. (worldly as opposed to sacred). These were banned by the church and were considered to be ‘devils music’. One of these 19th century spirituals is ‘Swing low sweet chariot’.
Post war, many blacks worked the railroads, steamboats, mining, lumber, levee gangs.
The most famous railroad song was ‘John Henry’, the story of a 220 lb. black man who worked himself to death in an attempt to beat a mechanical steam drill.
Blues probably started to take a shape we would find recognisable in the late 19th century following the civil war. The only way of listening to music was live; this was well before recording became possible. Their styles developed slowly; someone would hear a song, perhaps from a travelling musician or even in church, and would change it to suit their needs. Their influences came from the oral tradition, which would have been passed down from the African slaves through the generations, but also incorporated white influences. Many of the whites would be newer to the U.S than the blacks and so their Celtic or French (Cajun) music would still be fresh to them and would influence the blacks. It all went into the huge melting pot.
Minstrel companies started after the civil war.
Post war – Southern prisons worked in a similar way to slavery. They toiled all day in the fields and road gangs, all the while singing to create a working rhythm.
Sharecropping and farm workers were now much smaller groups than pre-war and could be several fields apart so ‘hollerin’ developed.
The blues was born in the area between Georgia and Texas and included the Mississippi delta. The area was made up mainly of forests, farms and plantations.
Many of the songs were very sexual lyrically.
17th Century.
Through the century there were three real areas of music. Hymns or psalms in the churches or meeting houses, mainly vocals. Dances; violin or fiddle, by black or white players. Military; trumpet, fife and drum.
1619.
The first shipload of African slaves sold to the colonies docks in Virginia. Field-holler singing subsequently develops. Through the ensuing centuries African work songs, call and response patterns, oral tradition, religious beliefs and practices, and rhythms intermingle with European melodies and eventually white American folk forms. The seeds of the blues are planted.
1652.
Rhode Island was the first state to pass any anti-slavery laws, limiting it to 10 years.
ca.1700.
Approx. 28,000 slaves in the colonies.
1707.
A book, ‘Hymns and spiritual songs’ was published and was credited with being a huge influence on black musicians.
1750.
230,000 slaves in the colonies. 206,000 south of pennsylvania.
1774.
A journal written by a Maryland man, describes slaves dancing to a ‘guitar like instrument based on a gourd. They called it a 'banjer'.
1782.
First all black church, in Georgia.
1793.
Cotton Gin invented. This was used to separate the cotton seed from the fibre.
Late 18th Century & early 19th.
New Orleans was becoming the music capital mainly because of its diverse mixture of races although negros, most of them slaves, accounted for about one third of the population. All types of music, such as Brass band, creole, string bands, were poular. These various types gradually spread up to the Mississippi delta by way of the river boats.
19th Century.
Black musicians were used more in orchestras and theatres in the north and the major southern cities. The value of a slave was enhanced if they could play or sing, so some owners actually had slaves educated musically.
Philadelphia had an all black marching band.
ca.1800.
Approx. 1,000,000 blacks in America. Were mainly in the southern states on plantations growing cotton, rice and tobacco. Most of them were slaves.
1807.
Britain abolishes slavery.
1808.
Importation of slaves into the U.S. is banned.
300,000 free blacks in the northern U.S.
1810.
1.38 million blacks in the U.S.
1816.
First black Bishop
1817.
Frank Johnson becomes the first black person to publish sheet music.
1819.
Memphis founded with a population of 364. Known as the ‘Home of the Blues’ and the ‘Birthplace of Rock ‘n’ Roll. 1857; railroad linking the Mississippi to the Atlantic was completed. Received city status in 1861, when pop. was 22,000. 1870 pop. was 40,000. 1880 pop. was 33,000, due to a yellow fever epidemic. 1900, pop was 120,000. Beale street is the best known road in Memphis; one mile long, and is known as the birthplace of the blues.
ca.1830.
T.D.Rice introduces blackface and ‘Jump Jim Crow’.
2.3 million blacks in the U.S.
1833.
Christian Frederich Martin builds his first American made acoustic guitar.
1838.
Frank Johnson’s band toured Europe and played before Queen Victoria. He was so popular because of his ability to ‘Jazz up’ his music.
1840.
2.9 million blacks in the U.S.
1843.
First public minstrel show is performed by the all-white Virginia minstrels in blackface, sparking a desire for ‘black’ entertainment.
1848.
Stephen Foster publishes ‘Oh Susanna’
California gold rush.
1850.
3.6 million blacks in the U.S.
1852.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’.
1855.
Leon Scott invents the ‘pnonoautograph’, a primitive ‘record player’.
1860.
4.4 million blacks in the U.S.
1862-64.
A series of congressional acts facilitates the building of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad, the Union pacific.
1863.
The Emancipation proclamation frees slaves in the Confederate states. In the 1870’s, following reconstruction, southern states will enforce segregation.
1865.
End of the civil war. It accounted for the lives of 615,000 men, of which about 225,000 were killed in action and 390,000 died of disease. There were 1.1 million total casualties.
The thirteenth ammendment abolishes slavery.
In granting basic rights to ex-slaves (including the right to marry and to own land) the ‘Black codes’ passed by most southern state legislatures in the aftermath of the Civil war also ensures segregation of public facilities.
Ex-slaves became tenant farmers or ‘Sharecroppers’. They rented a small parcel of land and shared the profits with the landowner. This was little more than slavery because everything they needed was supplied by the landowner for a price. Many large estates printed their own money that could only be used in their own stores.
1866.
Formation of Fisk Jubilee singers.
The Ku Klux clan formed in Pulaski, Tennessee.
1867.
First collection of spirituals published; William Allen, Charles Ware & Lucy McKim Garrison’s ‘Slave songs of the United States’.
1870.
Section one of the Fifteenth ammendment supposedly guarantees that ‘the right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged….. by any State on account of race, colour or previous condition of servitude’.
Ca.1870,s.
Often assumed that the blues started to gain shape at about this time in the southern states.
1875.
A Civil Rights bill was passed saying that public racial discrimination was illegal.
1876.
Custers last stand at the Little Big Horn.
1877.
Reconstruction ends as Federal troops are withdrawn from the south.
Thomas Edison files patent on a phonograph consisting of a metal cylinder with a fine spiral groove, two diaghram and needle units (one for recording, the other for playback) and a small speaker horn – a vast improvement over Leon Scott’s ‘phonoautograph’ of 1855.
Emile Berliner invents the first microphone and sells the rights to Bell telephone. Thomas Edison invents a better microphone, which in 1878 becomes the one used by Bell.
1878.
The world’s first phonograph company, The Edison speaking phonograph company, is established in New York. The first phonograph for home use is sold by Edison for $10; It is called the parlour speaking phonograph.
Emile Berliner patents the ‘gramophone’ a talking machine that employs laterally cut discs.
Ca.1880’s – 1890’s.
Jazz probably developed into a style around this time in the Storyville district of New Orleans. This area was full of bars, brothels, etc. and was open 24 hours a day, so musicians had to improvise to keep the crowds happy.
1881.
Gunfight at the O.K. corral.
1883.
The Supreme Court declared that the 1875 Civil Rights bill was unconstitutional.
1884.
The likely year in which the first ‘Rag’ was published. It was ‘New coon in town’. Part of what made a rag was the piano trying to imitate the banjo.
1887.
Emile Berliner files for a patent for the gramophone, which plays discs rather than Edisons’s cylinders. (Berliner, a few years later invents a matrix system whereby an unlimited number of copies can be mass produced from an original master).
The first demonstration of disc recording and reproduction by Berliner takes place in Philadelphia. A 12 year old pianist makes a 2 minute cylinder recording in Edison’s laboratory.
1888.
The kodak box camera is introduced.
1889.
The Oklahoma land rush.
A toymaker (Kammerer & Reinhardt) starts making Berliners hand wound gramophones that play 5 inch discs. Frank Goedde, a piccolo player, makes the first commercial cylinders, for the north American Phonograph Company, who had purchased the rights from Edison in 1888.
1890.
Mississippi’s redrawn constitution includes a clause under which a prospective voter could be required to read and interpret any part of the constitution in order to be eligible to vote. This ‘literacy clause’ becomes the model by which many other southern states disenfranchise blacks.
Columbia enters the record business with recordings by John Philip Sousa.
Berliner makes recordings which include ‘The lords prayer’.
1891.
George Washington Johnson’s ‘The laughing song’ & ‘The whistling coon’.
Miss Stewart becomes the first vocalist to record a cylinder, ‘My love & I’, Pattison’s waltz song.
Columbia opens up a ‘Negro music’ section.
1892.
The Boll weevil crosses the mexican border into Texas and eventually spreads to most cotton growing regions, including the Mississippi delta.
The first known recording by a black artist is ‘Mama’s black baby boy’ by the ‘Unique Vocal Quartet’. Music’s first million seller is ‘After the ball’, by J.Aldrich Libbey.
1893.
First public showing of an Edison Kinescope.
1894.
Berliner launches the United States Gramophone Company, from Washington D.C.
1896.
Plessy v. Ferguson. In upholding an 1890 Louisiana statute mandating separate but ‘equal’ railroad cars for blacks, the U.S. supreme court rules that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth ammendment (ratified in 1866) had guaranteed blacks political, but not social, equality. Ironically, the railroad lines were among those calling for repeal of the Louisiana state law. The court’s decision made white compliance with subsequent ‘Jim Crow’ laws mandatory, not discretionary.
1897.
The first recording studio opens over a shoe shop in Philadelphia, where Berliner also opens the first record shop. The Sousa band releases several dance records.
1898.
Bob Cole’s, ‘A trip to coontown’. (Book).
Annexation of the Hawaiian islands.
Eldridge Johnson perfects the first system of mass duplication of pre recorded discs. Johnson improves on Berliners methods by mastering on wax instead of the acid etching method and by using several metal positives which each make multiple stampers.
1899.
Johnson presses the first commercial 2 sided discs, which are children’s records.
Scott Joplin’s, ‘The maple leaf rag’.
Late 1890’s.
An archaeologist, Charles Peabody, was carrying out some excavating near Stovall, Mississippi, when he noticed that his black workers were singing improvised songs that were blues in nature.
ca.1900's.
Jazz started to emerge.
The end of the 19th century up to the start of W.W.1. was the ‘heyday for Delta blacks’. 15% owned land.
By the end of the 20’s there were as many Delta blacks in the northern cities such as Chicago as there were in the delta. There were even rumours that record companies would pay them well to record!
Large families were encouraged in the sharecroppers because of the workload. Charley Patton was one of 12 children. Rube Lacy & Tommy Johnson both had 12 brothers & sisters.
1900.
Columbia starts producing and selling disc records.
By 1900, 14 states had segregation laws.
1901.
Booker T Washinton’s ‘Up from slavery’. (Story).
Oil is discovered at Spindletop, Nr.Beaumont, Texas.
1902.
The Dinwiddle Colored quartet records for Victor.
1903.
The auto industry begins.
The Wright brothers first flight.
W.E.B.DuBois, ‘The souls of black folks’. (Book).
Victor introduces 12 inch and 14 inch disc records under the Deluxe name. Columbia boasts that it is now producing 2 million records a month, a claim which is refuted by Edison.
W.C.Handy, (A black bandleader and ‘Father of the Blues’) – He was sitting on the station late one night in Tutweiler, dozing, and waiting for a train that was 9 hours late. He was woken when another negro with a guitar started playing. He sang the line ‘Goin’ where the southern crosses the dog’ (repeated 3 times)(a reference to the junction of 2 railway lines) and playing the guitar with a knife pressed on the strings. He was used to hearing the jazz band versions of the blues and was hugely affected by this sound, ‘the Delta blues’.
1905.
The first U.S. movie theatre opens in Pittsburgh.
1905-08.
Folklorist, Howard Odum, travelled Georgia and the delta collecting folk songs. Over half of them were blues and many were adapted and recorded in later years. He said they were sung after church and at social gatherings, front porches, dances etc.
1910.
National Association for the Advancement of Coloured people (NAACP) is founded by W.E.B.DuBois and seven whites in response to the lynching of two black men in Springfield, Illinois.
1912.
Leroy ‘Lasses’ White’s ‘Nigger Blues’, Hart Wand and Lloyd Garrett’s ‘Dallas Blues’, W.C.Handy’s ‘Memphis Blues’ and Baby Seals ‘Baby Seals blues’ are all published within a few months of each other; but in a sense, the first published ‘blues’ was Nat D.Ayer & Seymour Brown’s ‘Oh, you beautiful doll’, a pop hit of 1911, whose opening verse had made knowing use of the 12 bar form.
The Titanic sinks.
The Chicago Defender (newspaper) urged black people in the south to flee to the north, thus began the migration to an easier life! Between 1915 & 1925, 1.5 million blacks left the south for a new life. Between 1916-18, 110,000 went to Chicago.
1914.
Handy’s ‘St.Louis Blues’ published, which throws the genre into the mainstream of American popular music.He is later acknowledged as the ‘Father of the blues’.
Borrowing an idea from the meat packing industry, Henry Ford introduces the assembly line to speed production & lowers the selling price of the Model-T. (introduced 6 years earlier).
1915.
Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha is staged in new York.
D.W.Griffith’s The Birth of a nation, based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Klansman (also the source for a long running play), revolutionizes motion pictures and triggers both NAACP boycotts and the revitalization of the Ku Klux Klan (this time a national, rather than an exclusively southern, organisation, as antagonistic towards Jewish & Catholic immigrants as to blacks).
1917.
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band becomes the first Jazz group to record.
The Bolshevik revolution.
The U.S. enters W.W.1.
Birdseye begins to experiment with frozen food, a process not perfected until 1949.
1918-19.
Influenza epidemic kills 500,000 in the U.S. and over 21,000,000 worldwide.
1919.
The underside of the migration: Bloody race riots in a number of northern cities, including Chicago.
Ratification of the Eighteenth ammendment enacts prohibition. Music filled illegal speak-easies, house parties and juke joints attract drinkers. (Juke; West African word; one meaning is wicked or disorderley). Most Juke joints had a bar, dance floor and a back room for gambling. Some were also brothels. Most travelling musicians played the juke joints. It was in one of these that Robert Johnson is known to have studied Son House and Tommy Johnson first studied Charley Patton. The early versions of these joints could be in a persons house and would sell bootleg liquor. Muddy Waters described Juke joint Saturdays as ‘Saturday night fish fries’ or ‘Juke houses’ or even ‘suppers’. A Honky Tonk is the ‘redneck’ equivalent of a juke joint. The difference between the two is the music you’ll find on the jukebox and the colour of the women in the beer adverts. Barrelhouses are much the same and take their name from the fact that beer was kept in barrels. More commonly associated with piano blues, barrelhouses were usually to be found in towns.
1920.
Commercial air travel begins.
Gennett records changed from vertical cut records to lateral and were sued by patent holders Victor. Three years later Gennet won and opened up the market to small independants.
Ca.1920’s.
There were 2 basic styles of blues starting to evolve. The blues played in cities such as Memphis and Chicago were more sophisticated and became known as Urban blues. Rural blues was the type played in the deep southern areas, such as the Mississippi delta; also known as Country blues.
Recording companies concentrated on the Urban style but from 1927 onwards they sent talent scouts to cities such as Dallas, Atlanta, Memphis etc. to try and find rural blues players.
The first blues Superstar was Blind lemon Jefferson.
Memphis’ Beale Street became known as ‘where the blues began’. Charley Patton & Son House recorded some of the greatest blues ever there.
