Just memorizing the words in this box is not the same as understanding the material well enough to use it in the world, or to do well when you are tested on it. Some of this material is explained in depth starting at the left of this box, or on the main study site
Three intertwining themes will be making their appearance along the way:
Blues starts out in the mid- to late 1800s as an organic folk creation of African Americans. Songs have their origins in the cotton fields and taverns, though church music also has some influence, and it is even possible that the “Irish” sentimentalism imported by Stephen Foster into his minstral songs may have in turn trickled back into some of the African American creation.
In those days, amateur musicians would trade lyrics, music, and ideas around fairly freely. No one was wholly responsible for any particular song. No one owned any song or could claim sole authorship of it. At first, nothing was written down or published and there was not yet sound recording. Folk music like this was transmitted in performance alone. Each performance was a unique re-creation.
Like other folk music, the early blues was a musical practice that seems very alien to our present commercialized world of music as recorded products. In much folk music creation
In an episode that has been much commented on, the legendary blues performer Muddy Waters was interviewed by musicologist Alan Lomax about how his song “Country Blues” came about. The response given by Waters was analyzed by Siva Vaidhyanathan in his groundbreaking book Copyrights and Copywrongs (2001; perhaps the earliest full-fledged study of intellectual property in remix culture in the broader sense). Vaidhyanathan’s discussion is largely repeated in Jonathan Lethem’s clever and diverse article about appropriation, “The Ecstasy of Influence” (2007):
In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was entitled “Country Blues,” Waters described how he came to write it. “I made it on about the eighth of October ’38,” Waters said. “I was fixin’ a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing.” Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called “Walkin’ Blues,” asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. “There’s been some blues played like that,” Waters replied. “This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out — Robert Johnson. He put it out as named ‘Walkin’ Blues.’ I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House.” In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own active authorship: he “made it” on a specific date. Then the “passive” explanation: “it come to me just like that.” After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters, without shame, misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by Johnson, but that his mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that complex genealogy, Waters declares that “this song comes from the cotton field.”
Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of “open source” culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked.
In other words, appropriation is normal and organic in music created by real people, as opposed to commodity music created by professionals.
Jazz is generally considered to have arisen out of the “creole” culture of New Orleans, where many Black musicians had traditionally been trained to play European music. Ragtime – a parallel creation and influence on jazz – was essentially an adaptation of European light classical piano music and John Philip Sousa’s incredibly popular patriotic American marches with African polyrhythms and “swing” and playful ornamentation. Ragtime jazz was largely written and performed by African Americans. It was the first music created by African Americans to be consumed by a broader White audience. The mix of European instrumentation and song structures with African American elements and blues conventions led to jazz, which incorporated many elements of the blues, and often involved the adaptation of blues songs for bands and orchestras.
As live jazz progressed at the beginning of the 20th century, the free appropriative methods of blues became part of the culture. One of the most common practices in “classical” jazz is improvisation on “standards” – popular songs that survive the test of time and become part of the jazz repertoire, for instance “Bye Bye Blackbird” or “Stormy Weather.” A jazz artist will add “swing,” syncopation, “blue notes” (notes that bend up or down from the standard pitch imitating the emotions of a human voice), playful or virtuoso ornamentation; and sometimes they play their instrument in a way that imitates the expressive characteristics of the human voice (including its imperfections. especially in joy or sorrow).
Around the same time jazz was emerging as an art form, the most popular music in mainstream White America was a form of upbeat and stirring patriotic march that we associate today with the composer and bandleader John Phillip Sousa. Sousa’s marches are still heard in parades, in the American military, or at football games sometimes even in the 21st century, and they were among the first popular music that was recorded. Here is part of an old wax cylinder recording (forerunner of the vinyl record) of “Stars and Stripes Forever” with members of Sousa's band playing:
Ragtime, the first jazz heard by White people, took the elements of Sousa’s marches, among other Euro-American creations, and added swing and blues to them, as in this demonstration by Jellyroll Morton, recorded later in 1930:
In Ken Burns’s Jazz (2001), Wynton Marsalis talks about Buddie Bolden, one of the very first jazz musicians, and demonstrates early jazz technique with Sousa’s march:
A main formula in instrumental jazz is to improvise in these and other ways on such well-known themes, often taking them very far away from the "pop: originals.
Here’s an excerpt showing a couple of street musicians in Kensington Market (Toronto) performing improvised jazz appropriations on Ed Sheeran’s “The Shape of You” (you won’t probably recognize the original until near the end of the excerpt when they quote the melody more literally):
If you’d like a more commerical example, check out this performance of Nirvana’s “Smells like teen spirit” by Brad Mehldau and Joshua Redman (thanks to the student – whose name I don’t know – who suggested Mehldau to me as someone doing jazz on the pop music of recent years).
James Weldon Johnson, one of the earliest Black literary figures in the Harlem Renaissance after World War I, wrote about how blues tunes and lyric motifs were latched onto and turned into commercial hits by White arrangers and publishers in the Jazz Age. In his Preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), he writes:
The earliest Ragtime songs, like Topsy, “jes’ grew.” Some of these earliest songs were taken down by White men, the words slightly altered or changed, and published under the names of the arrangers. They sprang into immediate popularity and earned small fortunes. […]
Later there came along a number of colored men who were able to transcribe the old songs and write original ones. […] I remember that we appropriated about the last one of the old “jes’ grew” songs. It was a song which had been sung for years all through the South. The words were unprintable, but the tune was irresistible, and belonged to nobody.
By “unprintable,” Johnson means the words were dirty. The White appropriaters cleaned up these songs and turned them into popular hits for White audiences. The songs had developed in this organic “Jes’ Grew” collaborative way over decades in some cases, but then got standardized, typically “vanillized,” and published for sale, with credit often given to White arrangers or publishers. This was a form of exploitation that continued up into the 1960s, with rock and roll.
Phonograph records and jazz came of age at roughly the same time, in the early years of the twentieth century, and both sort of “hit” in the 1910s. In the miniseries Jazz, Ken Burns tells the story of the famous cornet-player Freddie Keppard, a major sensation in the emerging jazz scene (or “jass” as it was originally called):
Interestingly, Keppard chose not to be recorded because he was afraid of having his stuff appropriated. Unfortunately, the appropriative technology of recording marched forward without him. In the early days of jazz, both Black and White musicians were developing the genre, but it was the White ones who had greater access to capital, technology, and the large and more affluent White audience, many of whom were racist. This is not to say that Black musicians didn't sometimes profit from recordings too, and Black performers and songwriters definitely found a new source of prosperity because of jazz's popularity. It is also not to say that White musicians took advantage of Black musicians. It's just to point out in a society with a large White majority, where a large portion of those White people were racist, there were many opportunities where White people had unfair advantages and got disproportionate recognition.
I found a surprisingly early recognition of this development in an early “fan” magazine, the sophisticated, even rather avant-garde magazine Shadowland, which covered the world of modern dance, theatre, motion pictures, music, and photography from 1919 to 1923. Only a couple of years after the first recording of jazz ever made, this author was talking about its evolution in a way that – for all the stereotypes and glib ambivalent irony – seems to recognize how the genre was appropriated and adopted/adapted:
Jazz—no one knows the derivation of the word—had its origin in the African jungles. Savage, monstrously masculine, primitively passionate, it formed an integral part of the negro’s character just as certain as did his plaintive folk songs that sprang from the cotton plantations and his flashing era of ragtime. With curiously sensual wriggles of the body he danced it. With tom-toms, human bones and various other noise-making devices he played it. Gradually it crept out of Africa. It made its way via the slave ships to New Orleans, where it definitely established a foothold; stole triumphantly north to Chicago, finding access to shadowy retreats in the so-called Black belt, and made its way into the gaudy resorts of New York’s tenderloin.
The negro had done his part. It remained for the White man to take up the burden and capitalize it for the benefit of a jaded world. The latter, with his keener commercial sense, his greater lust for life, his insatiable greed for novelty and excitement, made it a supreme melodic atrocity, a fascinating grotesquerie of noise, a prehistoric combination of innocence and vice. (Lewis Raymond Reid, “The Evolution of Jazz,” Shadowland, Nov. 1919)
Consequently, in the 1920s – which came to be called “The Jazz Age” – Caucasian performers often flourished even more than the Black innovators. For instance, the (almost unbelievably named!) band leader Paul Whiteman was crowned “The King of Jazz” in the predominantly White media – rather than Louis Armstrong or any of the other Black musicians who were well-known only to some White audiences. Whiteman claimed he wanted to “make a lady of jass,” and his generally pretty and mellow recordings are largely weak in the bluesy and wilder aspects of jazz. Some would say he "vanillized" jazz in making it tamer for his White audience. The hipper White people and most of the Black audience probably preferred the more edgy jazz typcally being created by Black musicians.
Jazz did ultimately bring added legitimacy to African American culture in White American minds (and certainly for White Europeans, who loved it) and it also moved a segment of the White population into closer alliance with and understanding (or at least "love") of the Black population.
Recording studio technology advanced by leaps and bounds in the 1960s and after, and new potentials for creating recorded music in the studio began to suggest themselves. To mention a famous example, the Beatles's producer George Martin collaborated with the band on their later works to create recordings that were not a direct reflection of live performances. In the 1950s, most recordings had still been made by taping live performances "from the floor": the band would get together in the studio and play their songs and the tapes would record their live performance in the studio. Gradually, all that started to change. Band members would record their parts separately, including overdubs, creating cleaner sound and allowing a mix of the best takes by each member in the final product. In the 60s, bands started to experiment with adding effects in the studio, bringing in outside musicians to play along behind their recorded performances (a string orchestra for instance), and using loads of overdubbing to achieve new sounds.
An album like Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), for instance, uses studio effects, tape manipulation, outside musicians and sound sources, and overdubbed vocals and instruments that the Beatles would not have been able to produce live to achieve its psychedelic and genre-bending effects. By the 1970s this kind of production was common. An extreme example would be Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" (1975), where Freddie Mercury's vocals and Brian May's guitar lines are overdubbed to create orchestral and choral effects. Most of the songs on the album were not really performable live, and people who went to see Queen live in those days were often disappointed by attempts to use echo machines and other tricks to try to create some of the symphonic richness of the record.
The studio was becoming "an instrument," as many people said, and the producer was increasingly becoming a composer.
Around the same time that rock musicians were creating the earliest "over-produced" records (as they called them when I was young), and Glenn Gould was trying to convince the world that technology would turn music from a consumer product into a creative act of interpretation for the home listener, some very interesting things were happening in Jamaica.
Dub is a brand of musical creation that originated in Jamaica around 1970. Many people credit King Tubby, the most famous early dub artist, with having created the studio “remix” in his dub versions of songs he and others produced for the Reggae market. Dub arises out of the popularity of “versions” in Jamaica in the 1960s. Versions were the instrumentals from songs, commonly released as b sides of singles. The full version of the song was released on the a side, and the version without the vocals on the b side.
These instrumentals became popular at dance events, and the mobile “soundsystem” disc jockeys (known as MCs in Jamaica, not to be confused with MCs in hip hop: rappers) would sometimes fiddle with the controls on their amplifiers or mixers to create special effects as they played the music. It is believed this was an inspiration for the early studio experiments that led to dub. Similar to the evolution of hip hop from live djing to sampling, dub started out as a live "performance" of the MC, creating spaced-out instrumental versions of songs that people would then "toast" over, one of the many inspirations for rap in America.
To create dub versions of a song, music producers would use the filters and other mixing board effects in the studio to make instrumental versions of pop reggae songs that were often very far from the originals, usually creating a trippy alternative the “straight” vocal track.
You can get a quick sense of what dub is often like by comparing the beginning of the vocal version of Earl Zero’s 1975 Reggae hit “Please Officer” with Tubby’s b side dub “Officer Dub.”
Tubby produced the Earl Zero track, and then messed with the source tracks to create a mostly instrumental remix, "Officer Dub."
Much of dub involves a “subtractive remix” approach – meaning instruments are removed from the mix or severely filtered to direct the listener's attention to other parts of the mix, typically the bassline and drums. Among the most characteristic practices in dub are heavy echo and reverb effects, heavy filtering of instrumental tracks, temporary or total cutting out of various instruments, and cutting up and rearrangements of (usually fragmentary) parts of the vocal track. Sometimes someone will “toast” (the Jamaican precursor to rap) over the instrumentals at various parts as well.
Dub has influenced many other forms of music, including drum and bass, dubstep, and trip hop. Arguably it was the first true remix form, in that it takes parts of a recording and changes them, adding and subtracting other elements, to create a new piece of music partly from parts of an existing recording.
Another interesting practice in Jamaican music – particularly dancehall – is for a producer to create a basic rhythm track (bass and percussion) and to then solicit a variety of artists to create songs over it. The track is called a riddim. A riddim is a sort of “invitational appropriation,” in which sometimes dozens or even hundreds of artists will put their own melodies and harmonies, additional instrumentation, and above all vocals over the same beats. Imagine if Kanye produced accompaniment tracks and then invited other artists to do with them as they liked. An intriguing alternative model, which has things in common with other forms of musical appropriation, but in some ways is almost an inversion of hip hop practice and sampling.
Since the advent of the Internet, a number of websites have sprung up that catalogue riddims and the songs made from them, and sometimes provide access to the songs. DJs frequently compile continuous mixes of songs based on a single riddim and release them on records or cds. To get a taste of what that is like you can listen to this short excerpt from a compilation of some of the songs that were created over the “Bam Bam Riddim,” produced by Sly and Robbie in 1992. The riddim has been used in many songs since 1992, including the song at the end of the video, “El Taxi” (2015).
I find the concept of the riddim really interesting, because again it invites not passive consumption but active creation.