Skip to main content

Donny Hathaway - A Song for You

We don’t know what kind of music, exactly, was first called blues. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were singing slow, sad songs about their troubles in love and life by 1910 or thereabouts, but no one seems to have called them blues singers until the late teens, and by that time blues had already come and gone as a hot dance craze, played by brass bands and ragtime orchestras, and been supplanted by jazz. In 1915, the first newspaper article to mention jazz as a musical style was headlined Blues Is Jazz and Jazz Is Blues, which makes perfect sense if you look at how many early jazz bands relied on the basic 12 bar blues form. But there was also a lot of blues that was not jazz, and some jazz that was not blues.

A century later, it is even harder to sort out what blues means, or more to the point, what it doesn’t mean. We often hear that blues is the root of all American music, from country to rock to rap, and it doesn’t stop there, the haunting music of northern Mali is frequently described as African blues, rembetika, fado, and flamenco are described as Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish blues, respectively, and enka is described as Japanese blues. For many people, blues continues to denote emotion and is a catch all term for any music that feels soulful. That might serve as a good general definition, except that the most popular blues style in the United States is a rowdy, bar band sound featuring fast tempos and screaming electric guitar solos.
Source: The State Of The Blues Today by Elijah Wald


Donny Hathaway - A Song for You
  • Released on: April 2, 1971
  • Written by: Leon Russell
  • Genre: Soul

"Donny Hathaway was considered an eccentric by many. He cultivated many unusual interests, and was a devotee of mid-20th century French classical composers. Several anecdotes about Hathaway are contained in Jerry Wexler's book Rhythm And The Blues."

See previous Song of the Day

Labels:
Location: United States

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Copyrights and Public Domain

Copyrighting and Public Domain Music A song is the combination of melody and words. Each is protected by copyright, the melody as a musical work and the lyrics as a literary work. One or the other could be used separately and still be protected. Image by Markus Spiske Public Domain Music Public domain essentially covers creative works that are no longer protected by intellectual property laws, compositions and musical recordings in which the claim to intellectual property has either expired, been forfeited, or been waived. Most people recognize the term public domain in reference to published works, including sheet music or musical recordings, which once were protected by copyright, but the copyright expired several decades after the artist’s death or a considerable length of time after the work’s creation. Once copyright expires on a work like a recorded song, you can use it for any purpose without paying the publisher, the artist, or another institution. The Two Types of Copyright ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Waterboys - Carolan's Weird Welcome

The blues developed during the mid 20th century as technology brought new instruments like the electric guitar, better microphones, and amplifiers to the live music scene. This new form of electric blues started in the Mississippi Delta and Chicago, but soon spread to other parts of the United States. Blues rock and British Blues developed, and soon the blues had spread to most popular genres. Rock was born from the blues, and hard rockin’ blues music is still a staple of club bands around the world. Early British rockers were avid collectors and imitators of early blues records. There’s no denying the blues stylings of modern stars like Adele. Pop star Christina Aguilera loves singing traditional blues songs, most notably her rendition of At Last at Etta James’s funeral. An incredible fusion of traditional African music, African American songs, and folk music, the blues had a worldwide impact that continues to flow through the melodies and harmonies of musical artists today. With its ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Modern Jazz Quartet - Animal Dance

Although Louisiana in general and New Orleans in particular never regained the widespread popular influence it enjoyed during the 1950s and early 1960s, the state’s R&B traditions remained very much alive. In the state’s southwestern region, swamp pop music by white musicians immersed in R&B traditions like The Boogie Kings, remains locally popular. Pioneered in the 1950s by Clifton Chenier, zydeco remains vital today... The Meters, helped to advance the rhythmically muscular descendent of R&B known as funk. They became precursors to The Neville Brothers. Also in the 1970s, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, an annual celebration of Gulf Coast cultures, began to receive national attention, setting the stage for a revival of veteran New Orleans R&B figures... Concurrently, the city generated a new wave of small, neighborhood brass bands, beginning with The Dirty Dozen Brass Band and the aptly named Rebirth Brass Band, mixing traditional and modern jazz with el...
Post a Comment
Read more