...musical patterning their own, centuries old?" After noting that white mountain singers had incorporated blues into their repertoires since the beginning of hillbilly recording in 1923, Green pointed out that the "puzzling story of the musical borrowing and interaction of race and hillbilly singers has yet to be demonstrated" (231). Over forty years later, the puzzle is still incomplete, but several pieces have been suitably placed. We know, for example, that white Appalachian musicians admired African-American folk music immensely and readily included it in their performances, borrowing not only blues but also ragtime tunes, religious pieces, breakdowns, reels, and other types of songs, as well as both vocal and instrumental techniques. And while white mountain musicians assimilated rags and religious music well enough, their adaptations of the blues displayed a rather dim understanding of the form, with only certain elements--structure, harmonic patterns, lyrical content, and tonality--weathering the transition; Appalachian pickers have indeed rarely performed in the so-called primary blues tradition. This process can be documented quite clearly in the music of three representative white Appalachian performers--Dock Boggs (1920s), "Doc" Carter and his family (1930s), and Doc Watson (1940s on).

An exploration of the influence of African-American blues on Appalachian white blues should begin with solid definitions that establish some bases for comparison. The jury is still out on the nature of white blues, (1) but there have been many attempts at defining black blues. (2) The problem with defining blues precisely lies in the fact that several diffused and dispersed subgenres have developed from the original form over the past hundred years, making it difficult to focus on a single definition.

Some of these subtypes include, for example, jump/up-tempo blues, rhythm and blues, hokum blues, barrelhouse blues, blues reels/breakdowns, blues rags, comic blues, risque blues, gut-bucket blues, blues ballads, boogie-woogie blues, and on and on. Most blues scholars would probably agree, however, that a kind of core blues served as the paradigm for all of these other forms. For example, the folklorist Norm Cohen (1996, 273) characterizes the album Mister Charlie's Blues (1926-1938)--white musicians playing black music--as presenting "some of the most heavily African-American-influenced ... of the hillbilly white blues artists of their day ... [and] may offer the most listenable introduction to the genre for pure blues aficionados." The implication here is that there is something impure about white blues that distinguishes it from pure black blues. We may assume, too, that pure blues are to be distinguished from the qualified kinds of blues listed above. One of the earliest authorities on the blues, the white scholar Abbe Niles, a perceptive critic who wrote the introduction and song notes to Wo C. Handy's Blues: An Anthology (1926), also perceived a difference between "pure" blues and other forms:

Many verses in the folklore are in the blues spirit, yet are excluded from the blues form, ... [which is] the singers' own distinction. In this usage, it was only the verses that could be fitted to the three-cornered [three-line] tunes like Joe Turner [perhaps the archetypical blues song] that came to be called "blues," and, conversely, they would say of a new melody to which they could not sing one of their three-line verses: "That ain't no blues!" (Niles 1972, 17)

For purposes of comparison, then, it seems useful to put forth a description of what can be thought of as core or primary blues: "basic," "fundamental," "being the first in order of time and development," "of first importance" (Webster's 1966).

When one thinks of blues in this way, several songs come to mind: Billie Holiday's "Stormy Blues," Elmore James' "The Sky Is Crying," Charles Brown's "Drifting Blues," Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues," Lightnin' Hopkins' "Blues Is a Feeling," Blind Blake's "Bad Feeling Blues," Ray Charles' "A Fool for You," Ivory Joe Hunter's "Since I Met You Baby," Muddy Waters' "Burying Ground Blues," Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell's "Blues before Sunrise," T-Bone Walker's "Stormy Monday," and Joe Turner's "Chains of Love." These songs are all good examples of primary blues. What they have in common may be thought of as the primary blues aesthetic, which can be analyzed according to its basic folk nature. The blues emerged as a kind of African-American folk music sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, and in important ways, it continues to function as folk music. Consequently, core blues can be conceptualized according to the basic elements of a folkloric event: text, texture, and context (Dundes 1964).

Primary blues texts are melancholic--"mournful, depressed," "pensive" (Webster's 1966)--expressions of musicians' personal experiences with life's problems, performed in such a way as to elicit responses from their listeners that together with their creative discourses could perhaps lead to catharsis, understanding, and peace of mind. The songs, whether supplications, laments, protestations, or exhortations, function individually and collectively as ways to deal with human suffering. Indeed, Abbe Niles (1972, 207) insisted that any impression that the blues "are brave efforts of optimism, will be corrected for such as may hear with what desolate sadness they are invested by their high priestesses [the "classic" blues singers], who do not sing, but suffer the blues" (emphasis in original). These songs are pretty serious business and do not lend themselves to broad comic humor. Although there is some humor in primary blues, it is understated and wise, not raucous and goofy; what "gaiety" there is is usually ironic. Niles believed that in African-American blues, "it is the gaiety that is feigned, while in the white, it is the grief" (17).

The harmonic structure of basic blues texts is fairly simple, moving usually in a I-IV-V-I progression: that is, from the first degree of the scale (the tonic) to the fourth degree (the subdominant) to the fifth degree (the dominant) and back to the tonic. Slight variations of this pattern occur occasionally, but they do not violate the music's harmonic clarity.

The formal structure of the text in primary blues is also relatively simple but is absolutely crucial to its function: a series of three four-measure lines in [??] time that provide an opportunity for antiphony. Typically, the singer articulates a problem in the first two bars of the first two lines, leaving the remaining two measures of each open for a responsorial voice that can come from listeners, from the singers themselves, or from various instruments. The third line generally offers a comment on the problem, often taking the form of a recommendation--an attitude to cop, a course of action to take, a piece of advice to consider--and also leaves space for group comment. As one scholar put it, this antiphonal "pattern became a rigid one, almost a ritual, but neither this rigidity nor its apparent simplicity has ever seemed to restrict the blues" (Blind Lemon Jefferson 1974). This ritualization of the give-and-take dynamics of the blues experience is directly related to the contexts of the performances.

While blues singers no doubt derived consolation from expressing their emotions privately, they also felt a need to communicate with others; consequently, the social context of a blues performance became a critical element in the experience. The listeners who are engaged in the performance are encouraged to respond to the singer, especially during the last two measures of each line; those who do so spontaneously co-create the song. It is this antiphonal process that has become ritualized: "Scholars often point out that African-American genres, like their West African antecedents, resist the European cult of personality: they tend to take the form of a collective ritual, not of a declamation by a charismatic star to a passive crowd" (Ross 2003, 92). As to the matter of cooperative creativity, Barry Lee Pearson (2004, 260) has suggested that antiphony provides the group support necessary for improvisation, that it allows self-expression "within a communal or participatory context, setting boundaries for individual creativity within traditional norms." Improvisation, he writes, "connects with antiphony, as the call and response form suits the criteria of collective participation" (260). Abbe Niles, in fact, believed that the competition between musicians filling the two-bar response breaks in the blues was the very foundation of jazz: spontaneous, competitive improvisation. Much more than a simple folkway or custom, the antiphonal reflex became a well-prescribed practice with important cultural significance, that is, a ritual. The twelve-bar formal structure of the blues by its very nature cradles and nurtures this ritual; the eight- and sixteen-bar blues forms, on the other hand, provide too little space and time for the antiphony to develop.

The texture of blues performances--the manner, or style, of expression--is as important as the text and context. Niles (1972, 207) begins his annotations to Handy's section on blues, for example, with this admonition: "A note on blues at the piano [for which Handy's published blues were intended]: 1) they should be played slowly; 2) but in meticulous time." The tempo factor seems reasonably obvious:fast is simply not sad. Lady Day, for example, performs "Stormy Blues" at a fraction under sixty beats per minute (bpm); Blind Blake's "Bad Feeling Blues" is at about fifty-five; and Elmore James' "The Sky Is Crying" is around fifty-four. These tempi of course vary somewhat both internally and from performance to performance, as most musicians lack a mechanical metronomic sense. Even so, the pulse of primary blues regularly falls somewhere in the ranges of Largo (40-60 bpm), Larghetto (60-66), and Adagio (66-76). A tempo beyond, say, eighty propels the music into a different mood, a different feel, a different texture; for example, a common tempo of the sexy Chicago-blues shuffle beat, a [??]-ish humpty-dumpty groove that by no means suggests unhappiness, is around eighty-five bpm. Time is "meticulous" when all the notes, measures, and strains of a song are given their proper metrical value, a quality frequently absent in the white blues of Appalachia.

Another critical textural ingredient of the blues is sound, which supports sense in songs as well as in poetry. The sound of the blues is based on what has been called the "blues tonality" or "blues scale," which comes from partially flatting the third, seventh, and less often, the fifth notes of the European major scale. Some scholars believe, in fact, that the flatted third is the most distinguishing characteristic of the blues. Rather than attacking these notes directly, blues musicians approach them aslant, sliding either up or down until they settle on a final pitch. These subtle glides are known as portamento when employed as a vocal technique and glissando when performed on an instrument. This sliding to and from notes is not limited to the blue notes but is used on other notes as well, creating a legato effect in which groups of notes are seamlessly connected. Furthermore, certain notes in the scale are "blued" or "'worried" in that they are bent into microtones appropriate to African scales, sounds produced vocally and by playing two adjacent notes together on a piano, or by pulling or pushing a fretted guitar string. Another vocal technique used by many blues singers is melisma--florid, embellished vocalizations--which involves the use of a...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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