An introduction to Modern American Folk Music, or "What happened in-between the Blues and Rock'n'Roll?"
When slavery ended in the southern states, the effect on black music was dramatic. Country blues, "*THE* blues" to most people typified by the songs of are in fact the blues of the time when black people in the southern states were still indentured labour. The reason why the names of so many blues men of that era were prefixed "blind" was because a blind man couldn't work his keep on the plantation, and music was one way of keeping body & soul together. After slavery many black workers were cast adrift as the plantations became more efficient and less labour intensive.
The dirty and noisy railroad was usually a way out of town, and the transitory nature of work patterns meant that "jungles" - an area around a railroad station where migrant workers and hobos would congregate to spend the night and sleep in relative safety - became the typical place for swapping stories and songs.Shanty ghettos would crop up on the far side of the station house, on the "wrong side of the tracks", good houses were "whites only" and building in town was expensive.
Urban blues came pretty much as a result of black people looking for work in the towns, and making up their own entertainment in their own "gin joints" and "barrel houses". White folks would go "slumming" in those "gin joints" for the more exciting music and the thrill of danger that being there would give them.
Urban Blues - was travelling blues, often the black version of the Woody Guthrie experience. But urban blues was still too slow and down-beat for the dance halls and casinos that were springing up all over. Black entertainers had the tradition entertaining and soon adapted their style to be more in keeping with a new more positive and hopeful mood. Jump Blues, as it was known, was still the blues, but an up tempo version tinged with the improvisational playing that was to become known as Jazz.
Jump Blues soon lost the depressive, melancholic lyrics of blues and eventually became known widely as Rhythm and Blues. R & B as it was often called, was really a mixture of styles, and at it's broadest definition it has bee described as "popular music of the late 1930s to the early 1950s principally composed and performed by black musicians".
Rhythm and Blues really forms the meeting ground of all popular american musical forms that came after it. Jazz, Soul, Country, Rockabilly and Rock and Roll all have history in R&B. Even forms such as Western and Bluegrass have been influenced by R&B. Rhythm and Blues is to Memphis, as Jazz is to New Orleans, or Country is to Nashville. Rhythm and Blues was borne in Beale Street and it was in Beale Street that Big Joe Turner had first popularised "Shake Rattle and Roll" long before Bill Haley cleaned it up and had an international hit with it.
Memphis is in Tennessee, on the banks of the Mississippi a mere 200 miles from Nashville. But it was just over the Mississippi State line, and was the first major centre of population up from the Delta to be more liberal in terms of fewer seregation and "Jim Crow" laws. Mississippi was the last state to formally ratified the anti-slavery ammendment to the constitution in 1964. Any Blues or Ragtime musician with ambition would head for Memphis, and it was in Memphis that in a black tenement building lived a family whose boy was called Elvis Presley.