The African American and Blue Culture

Tanganikya Ramsey

Professor Tiffany Smith

English Composition I

April 2, 2017

The African American and Blue Culture

When I was a little girl, I offended wondered  why my parents played the blues. I can recall every Saturday morning my mother would be up cleaning the house  listening to blues.  I finally understood when I  became an teenager why my mother played the blues every Saturday morning it helped her to relax. It was this one particular  song that she played I always loved No Pain No Gain, this song has helped me through a lot of hard  times. The understanding I get from this sing is you have to go through pain in life in order to gain in life.  Blues developed right after the Civil War from short solo calls which were known as field hollers. Field holler were used as communication among the black workers on plantations in the South. Later, the saying “down-home” blues was developed from this into the blues we know today. When the blues became popular in the early 1900s’, W.C. Handy began to perform blues songs in public. Bessie Smith, of the 1920s’ is one of the most talented blue singers and she and others famous singers, helped the blues reach a larger audience.

      Women of the blues brought the black culture to a all new chapter of recognition. These women made blues as a popular music, and gave an much needed opportunity to black culture to be accepted. Women brought blues to a performance  stage and made it more universal so that not only blacks but also whites can enjoy. On their first performance  women blues were considered to be a man culture. Singers like Bessie Smith were pioneers and a inspiration to other black singers. Women transformed blues into a pop culture that emerged into something great.  Blues was no longer merely a personal expression  but also a way of earning a living. As historian Giles Oakley said that  the  blues women: frequently worked with jazz bands which, in contrast to the greater isolation of the male country blue singers, provided a visible display of togetherness.  For the new and struggling migrants desperately  trying to create a new community in the cities, the singer and the band represented a shared communal feeling (http://www.calliope.org/blues/blues2.html0).