The distinctive feature of the blues (musicologists tell us) is the "blue" note, the flatted 5ths and 7ths.
--- ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> On Nov 19, 2007, at 3:48 PM, Chris Doss wrote:
> >
> > Does suffering have a 4/4 rhythm, a I-IV-V chord
> > progression, and a song structure involving
> > alternating verses, choruses, and bridges? Does it
> use
> > a pentatonic scale?
> >
> > I don't know, but I suspect that -- given that
> > slaveowners tried to wipe out traces of African
> tribal
> > cultures, and hence African music, in their slaves
> --
> > "Black" music was derived almost totally from
> > 19th-century "White" Southern folk and church
> music.
> > Since that is the only stuff black people would
> have
> > heard.
> >
>
> On the other hand, I have heard that a lot of the
> wailing and so on,
> in the fields, to which blues roots have often been
> traced, grew out
> of surreptitious ways to continue to use native
> songs and such.
>
> But anyway, my point is to question what
> significance should be
> assigned to where the music is derived from when
> assigning credit to a
> culture. The very thing you point to in fact makes a
> different case: a
> simple three chord progression is not (and cannot
> be) the significant
> differentiating factor that makes the blues what it
> is in distinction
> from southern white folk music.
>
> --ravi
>
>
>
> > --- ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> > And if, as I
> >> asked, a significant contributor to the birth of
> >> Black music (say the
> >> blues) is the suffering meted out to blacks by
> >> whites, then that
> >> negative influence would cancel out (if not
> >> overwhelm) any "roots"
> >> claims, wouldn't it?
> >>
>
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