subject: Blues Music Employs The Basic Beat Of African Sounds - A Short Study Of The Early Blues Rhythms [print this page] Playing blues guitar in the present day is a strange thing to do. Even the least well off in countries in the West are much better off than the classic blues men who eventually created the music that was the foundation of all jazz, rock and pop music of today. Even using blues guitar tabs, it's hard for us to grasp that feeling. The fundamental rhythms obviously descended from African roots, but present day African music is much richer in rhythmic variation and complexity, so what happened to it? It seems that the first 'guitars' were elementary single stringed instruments made with a cigar box, or something like that. It wasn't possible to make music of a really intricate nature, and probably produced a musical 'thud', with very little variation in melody.
For a long time in the Southern states of America, drums were prohibited, as was anything else that lifted the spirit of the negro slaves and promoted thoughts of bravery or liberty. Perhaps the pulsating sound of the blues came to sound like a drum, which may explain why the monotonic thumb strike way of playing was popular. In this style of playing, the beat was simpler and the thumb strike sounded like a drum beat. In those wretched years, a proficient player would play a monotonous bass line which might be at the same tempo as a man's heart. This meant that the music would have an emotional appeal and didn't need to be thought about, or be musically complex. Modern blues guitar lessons frequently fail to teach this aspect of the blues.
Another possibility relates to the tasks that negro slaves were made to carry out. Many types of hard labor involved rhythmic repetitive movements, such as scything down corn, turning the earth with a hoe, hitting with an axe or easing over steel train rail. We can see examples of the latter in old black and white films, where a line of slaves with long iron bars chant a repetitive work song and plan their movements so that the heavy steel rail is pushed over a fraction of an inch at the end of each line or chorus. Frequently the work song or field holler was divided into a request and an answer performed by several groups in the crew. This interaction of call and response was employed in subsequent blues songs when sung by just two people, and was additionally very conspicuous in gospel music.
Although modern music has developed complex patterns and danceable variations, the basic rhythms are still detected - the basic guitar boogie is unmistakable in a great number of rock standards over the past sixty years. The more complex rhythms of ragtime blues guitar was the foundation of early jazz.
