Where is the blues from

Exactly how, when and where the blues began is really unknown, however researchers have spent lots of time searching for the origins of blues and given great insights into the environment that help nurturing the blues. The word spread so fast and far for anyone to write down the details or put it out on records. When the blues was recognized in any medium that has survived, it was far down the road.

African America was still predominantly an oral culture back then, and surely that had something to do with it, but not everything. Very early and often white people also heard the blues, but only as idle entertainment and nothing to take serious and write about. The literate leaders of the black community had somewhat the same attitude. Educated Americans still had the notion from before the Revolution that the only true musical culture was European musical culture and the only African-American music worth preserving was that which could be made into "European" as concert arrangements of spirituals and such.

The early development of blues took place in an information vacuum and began taking shape right around the year 1900 and was invented by African-Americans, descendants of millions of Africans who were forcibly transported to the United States as slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries. Blues is sung in English, and played primarily on instruments of European design which accounts for the European elements in blues. Blues is obviously distinct from anything white Americans were singing or playing at the time of its origin. Even though today's indigenous African music doesn't resemble blues very much, it is however safe to say that African influences account for some of this distinction.

Nobody in the U.S.A. paid any attention to what music the slaves sang or played when they arrived, or for many years after. There is very little documentation of rural African-American music from the late 19th century and often written by people with little understanding of what they were hearing. When serious efforts in the 1950s were made to document the African ancestry of the blues, it was almost too late, since very few African-Americans performed or remembered their traditional music as it had sounded before radio and records changed it profoundly.

Researcher Alan Lomax was in 1959 able to find record and film of a few rural singers and musicians playing music with some striking African aspects from the pre-blues era. His extensive field recording experience in the U.S.A. and abroad, dating back to the 1930s laid the foundation for his book "The Land Where the Blues Began" (Pantheon Books, 1993) and pieces convincing theories about the early development of the blues together it comes with a video containing some of the films he made. He found the roots of the blues in many places among them in the gigantic levee that protects the Mississippi Delta farmlands from flooding.

The calls of the African-American mule drivers (muleskinners) who built the levee are the only clearly African melodies found in the United States which appear to be the direct ancestors of the blues. Blues roots are found in the "hollers" of black prisoners in Mississippi and nearby states.
They "hollered" in groups or individually to lighten their work load, each man in his own style, a tradition that lasted well into the 1960s. The traditional blues melodies are in fact holler cadences, to a steady beat and turned into dance music and confined to a three-verse rhymed stanza of twelve to sixteen bars.

Lomax found some remarkable African survivals at country dances in the hills of north central Mississippi, east of the Delta. He recorded and filmed these dance tunes and his book details the similarities between these dance tunes and the music he heard in Africa as well as the way people danced to them. Somewhere around northern Mississippi around the late 1890s, people started combining some of those hollers and mule calls with some of those dance tunes and gave birth to the blues.
More and more people began singing and playing this new music and in the beginning it spread slowly but then as fast as it could in those days without modern media.

The blues was the most popular secular music of the African-American rural South by about 1907. It spread rapidly elsewhere, constantly changing as it interacted with other forms of music. One branch of the blues made it to New York through Memphis, and with the music business, sheet music and record industry concentrated in New York, that branch of the blues accounted for the first nationwide publicity and the first blues recordings.