Listen to a curated playlist of TN's great Blues talents, performers, jug bands and tunes starting all the way back on Beale Street.
blues
TN Blues History
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Call-and-response singing, stringed gourds, mouth bows and diddley bows are among the musical traditions that were brought to America by an African diaspora during the cruelty of the
trans-Atlantic slave trade.
These African instruments and musical traditions would influence many of the styles that would develop in America, even though what we now know as blues music would not be notated or recorded until two centuries later. Around the turn of the century, the piano, the harmonica
and guitar were all still relatively new to African American folk music. When blues musicians embraced these new instruments, they used methods from African folk traditions. Guitar playing was enhanced by concepts from the banjo and diddley bow, and harmonica performances were influenced by panpipes and mouth bows. One blues musician even took his stage name after one of the instruments, calling himself Bo Diddley. To make a diddley bow, a wire was strung between two nails on a piece of wood. As the string was strummed, knives, trinkets or glass bottles were slid along it to produce various pitches. This early "slide guitar" was simple for musicians to build at home, on a porch post or even on the exterior wall of a house. The ability to slide up and down the string allowed players to bend the sound and generate "blue notes," or what sounded like "flattened" tones in the tones
scale. These sliding notes were the instruments’ way of mimicking African Americans' technique and practice of melismatic singing, which involves singing single-syllable words with multiple notes. A player on the piano or harmonica could get a similar effect by rapidly alternating between two adjacent notes. These slides were popularized in "barbershop quartet" singing. The style got its name from the place where this type of singing was frequently heard. Prior to the Civil War, the majority of professional hair cutters in the U.S. were free African American men, and their businesses became centers of social life following the war. In the barbershop quartet, singers would harmonize by singing notes in chords that were closest to one another, usually two or three steps apart. Singers would often "slide" from high or low notes, transitioning from wide voicings into closer harmonies. This became a distinct musical genre in the 1890s that greatly influenced the blues. ...
