Blues

node · earth · The American South, principally Mississippi, Texas and the Piedmont

A vocal-led practice that took recognisable shape among Black musicians in the American South in the years around 1900 and which, in its rural Southern form, is markedly closer to Sahelian than to coastal West African music: a solo singer, string accompaniment, no percussion, flexible or "wavy" intonation that slides between the pitches a keyboard would fix, pentatonic melodic material, and a relationship between voice and instrument of unison or heterophony rather than harmony. Those are the traits Kubik uses to argue descent principally from the west-central Sudanic belt. Its earliest documentation is anecdotal and specific: the bandleader W. C. Handy, waiting at Tutwiler station in Mississippi around 1903, heard a man press a knife against guitar strings and sing "Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog", and later built a career on adaptations of what he had heard. The twelve-bar form and the flattened thirds and sevenths that later definitions lead with are conventions that settled in print and on record after 1912, not features present from the start. What was present from the start was a way of using the voice, and an instrument used to answer it.