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Chuck Berry - Broken Arrow

The blues grew up in the Mississippi Delta just upriver from New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. Blues and jazz have always influenced each other, and they still interact in countless ways today. Following the end of the Civil War, black men had few options other than doing backbreaking manual work or something like becoming a traveling minstrel. Many chose to rely on their physical stamina and the soulful and melancholy lyrics of many blues songs to create a powerful, emotive and rhythmic music celebrating the life of black Americans. The lyrics they sang reflected their daily lives including sex, drinking, jail, murder, poverty, hard labor and lost love.

In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable as white audiences began listening to blues. Blues came into its own as an important part of the country’s relatively new popular culture in the 1920s with the recording, first, of great female classic blues singers and, then, of the country folk blues singers of the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont of the Carolinas, and Texas. The first copyrighted song was in 1912, the “Dallas Blues.” As huge numbers of African-Americans left the South at this time due to failed Reconstruction, dismal economic conditions, oppression in the South and the hope of better treatment in the North between 1915 and 1940s, the blues went with them, and settled in the urban centers of the North, especially Chicago. A more urban, electric blues developed as a result, which eclipsed the rural blues of the South and eventually became both rock and roll and what would become known as rhythm and blues.
Source: A History Of Blues Music by Cheryl Fallstead


Chuck Berry - Broken Arrow
  • Released September 1959
    Genres Rock & Roll
  • Rhythm & Blues, New
  • From the album "Rockin' at the Hops"

"On May 21, 1955, Chuck Berry recorded an adaptation of the song "Ida Red", under the title "Maybellene", with Johnnie Johnson on the piano, Jerome Green from Bo Diddley's band on the maracas, Ebby Hardy on the drums and Willie Dixon on the bass. "Maybellene" sold over a million copies, reaching number one on Billboard magazine's rhythm and blues chart."

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Location: United States

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