Joseph Machlis says that the blues is a native American musical and verse form, with no direct European and African antecedents of which we know. In other words, it is a blending of both traditions. Something special and entirely different from either of its parent traditions. (Although Alan Lomax cites some examples of very, similar songs having been found in Northwest Africa, particularly among the Wolof and Watusi)
The word ’ blue’ has been associated with the idea of melancholia or depression since the Elizabethan era. The American writer, Washington Irving is credited with coining the term’ the blues.’ as it is now defined, in 1807. The earlier (almost entirely Negro) history of the blues musical tradition is traced through oral tradition as far back as the 1860s.
When African and European music first began to merge to create what eventually became the blues, the slaves sang songs filled with words telling of their extreme suffering and privation. One of the many responses to their oppressive environment resulted in the field holler. The field holler gave rise to the spiritual, and the blues, "notable among all human works of art for their profound despair... They gave voice to the mood of alienation and anomie that prevailed in the construction camps of the South," for it was in the Mississippi Delta that blacks were often forcibly conscripted to work on the levee and land-clearing crews, where they were often abused and then tossed aside or worked to death.
Alan Lomax states that the blues tradition was considered to be a masculine discipline (although some of the first blues songs heard by whites were sung by ’ lady’ blues singers like Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith) and not many black women were to be found singing the blues in the juke-joints. The Southern prisons also contributed considerably to the blues tradition through work songs and the songs of death row and murder, prostitutes, the warden, the hot sun, and a hundred other privations. The prison road crews and work gangs where were many bluesmen found their songs, and where many other blacks simply became familiar with the same songs.
Following the Civil War (according to Rolling Stone), the blues arose as "a distillate of the African music brought over by slaves. Field hollers, ballads, church music and rhythmic dance tunes called jump-ups evolved into a music for a singer who would engage in call-and-response with his guitar. He would sing a line, and the guitar would answer it." By the 1890s the blues were sung in many of the rural areas of the South. And by 1910, the word ’ blues’ as applied to the musical tradition was in fairly common use.
Some ’bluesologists’ claim (rather dubiously) that the first blues song that was ever written down was ’Dallas Blues,’ published in 1912 by Hart Wand, a white violinist from Oklahoma City. The blues form was first popularized about 1911-14 by the black composer W.C. Handy (1873- 1958). However, the poetic and musical form of the blues first crystallized around 1910 and gained popularity through the publication of Handy’s "Memphis Blues" (1912) and "St. Louis Blues" (1914). Instrumental blues had been recorded as early as 1913. Mamie Smith recorded the first vocal blues song, ’ Crazy Blues’ in 1920. Priestly claims that while the widespread popularity of the blues had a vital influence on subsequent jazz, it was the "initial popularity of jazz which had made possible the recording of blues in the first place, and thus made possible the absorption of blues into both jazz as well as the mainstream of pop music."
American troops brought the blues home with them following the First World War. They did not, of course, learn them from Europeans, but from Southern whites who had been exposed to the blues. At this time, the U.S. Army was still segregated. During the twenties, the blues became a national craze. Records by leading blues singers like Bessie Smith and later, in the thirties, Billie Holiday, sold in the millions. The twenties also saw the blues become a musical form more widely used by jazz instrumentalists as well as blues singers.
Which description of the blues is right