The Theatricality of the Blues

Abstract

The blues is commonly defined as style of jazz evolved from southern American Negro secular songs and usually distinguished by flatted thirds and sevenths and a slow tempo (this definition appears in Webster's II New Riverside University Dictionary of 1988). My frustration with this kind of definition is the starting point of my investigation. Most definitions stress the musical aspect of the blues. However, this is limiting. The blues is much more than music, and all of its aspects should be studied. The blues performer relies on three principal modes of expression-poetry, drama, and music-to convey a message not only through words and music, but also through the here and now on stage. This quite provocative point of view, that the blues is a ceremonial event encompassing several facets, is increasingly present in a new trend of blues research. In Going to Chicago, Laurence Hyman (1990, 12) observed in Chicago blues clubs the call-and-response pattern that unifies the performer and the audience into a single community: Much of what has been written about the Blues has been done by Blues scholars who seem to have confined their research to listening to old records and transcribing lyrics. Many have missed the point about the Blues: that it is a performance music. Certainly the lyrics are central to the Blues, but it is the delivery of the song, and the Blues persona adopted by the singer, that takes the Blues to new levels.