Before the blues

In the slavery days, black slaves provided music for their owners and for their fellow slaves. Good musicians were an asset to any home since records, radio or TV did not exist, and the homes of wealthy slave-owners were no exception.
European-style musical instruments were given to slave musicians and they were taught to play them in the European manner mainly for dancing purposes.
Gradually they developed distinctive variations on the European music they learned. They composed their own music and often played them on home-built fiddles as well as what may well have been an early banjo, invented by the African-American.

After Emancipation, the music continued and in large and small towns across the South there were concert brass bands of black musicians, similar to those heard throughout white America at the time, as well as dance bands that combined brass and string instruments.
An especially lively and innovative black dance band scene developed in New Orleans in the 1890s, which would lead to what the world would later know as "jazz".

Rural African-Americans used stringed instruments to accompany solo and group singing, fiddles, banjos, mandolins and later on guitars. Most of the songs they sang before the Civil War are lost in history, even if a few were picked up by the popular "Ethiopian minstrel" shows and a few more were preserved by folklore collectors.

Because of men like Henry Thomas, Gus Cannon, Furry Lewis, and the mighty Lead Belly, known as "songsters" by latter day historians, we do have a much better idea of what the solo vocal repertoire was like about the time the blues began. These artists sang primarily story songs and dance tunes, along with varying quantities of Tin Pan Alley pop songs, children's songs and religious material. They also recorded blues, leading to an interesting question as we try to figure out which of their songs represent the very earliest stages of blues, and which ones they learned or composed later on, after blues became widely popular. Johnny Watson alias Daddy Stovepipe, was the oldest songster to make a records. He was born in Alabama between 1867 and 1870. Though Henry Thomas (1874-1930 app.) "Ragtime Texas" is the greatest revelation to the past.

For most of the 19th century the "Ethiopian minstrel" shows were America's most popular form of musical theatre. White performers dressed as African –Americans with blackface makeup gave white America their first exposure to black music, and later on more black performers could be heard and seen in minstrel shows, laying the groundwork for the later popularity of jazz and blues.
"Oh Susannah" and "My Old Kentucky Home" written by Stephen Foster who was white, are examples of minstrel songs from that time that are still sung today.

Some bluesmen, country singers and different black and white performers, got their start in "medicine shows". These shows often visited small towns all over America in the early 20th century. Before the doctor's could promote their tonics from their flatbed trucks in town, the medicine show would begin with free musical entertainment to draw a crowd so that the good doctor could sell different oils and tonics that probably did not work at all, and then head for the next town.