Anomale Used Blog

At some point in my own education I discovered the limitations of just theorizing about the music, sitting in your room and mulling over lyrics you could never fully decipher or going to see Lightnin’ Hopkins perform at a college concert... The way that we had been introduced to the music, the blues was dead almost by definition because we had encountered it only on records, we never heard it on the radio, it wasn’t presented, like rock & roll, say, at shows. It seemed somehow as if it was something that had been tucked safely away in the past, even if in many cases it was the very recent past, a subject for historical study, however passionate that study might be. The light only dawned for me with the coming of soul music... It has long been my firmest belief that in order to write, fiction, nonfiction, it doesn’t matter, you need to make the empathetic leap. But, really, in order to live you have to make that same leap, whether or not in certain harsh literary and political circl...

One of the things that characterizes early blues music is an unusual amount of repetition and a distinctive song form. American music in the first two decades of the twentieth century, whether the popular music of Tin Pan Alley or the religious music of the mainline black churches, gravitated towards a sixteen bar verse format, with popular music often adding a sixteen bar bridge. Blues, by contrast, offered itself in a three line, twelve bar format, and without a bridge... a bridge bearing blues and the exception that proves the rule. By the mid 1920s, with the advent of recording and especially with the popularity of Blind Lemon Jefferson as a recording star. Vocalizations are an important element of blues expressiveness, along with AAB structure and call and response procedure. A fourth aspect of blues expressiveness is something I will call blues idiomatic language. By this I mean the rich linguistic stew in which members of the blues subculture, musicians, audiences, and assorted ...

Through music, many young children are able to implement more diverse customs to society. Music is a means of enculturation and socialization helping the youngsters of the culture to integrate into their societies. Similarly, children singing songs from foreign countries can also be informed of unfamiliar cultures and increase their knowledge and understanding of those cultures. It is important that children would be able to learn about other cultures to become conventional through the exposure of different cultural songs. With the fulfillment of children becoming more accustomed to different cultures, many would be able to contribute different outlooks within society. As more schools implementing diversity, cultural music has become more apparent. Music teachers can encourage children to explore the musical traditions of their own cultural heritage as well as those of other countries. More schools with music programs have been striving to supply students with more culturally different...

Sometimes the people held on to old forms, like lining hymns, in which the preacher sings the first line and the congregation follows... or spirituals, which the whole church sings, preferring them to a fancier program by the choir, to which the congregation passively listens. Bringing choirs and organs and musical directors into the southern folk church silenced the congregation and the spiritual in the once folky Baptist and Methodist churches, so that the folk moved out and founded the song heavy sects of the Holiness movement. Use of instruments likewise expressed traditional preferences. Strict old fashioned groups, like the Primitive Baptists, simply banned all instruments as tools of the devil, and this conservatism fostered the preservation of the older songs with scales and with ornamentation. The fiddle and the banjo were called the devil's stalking horses, the square dancers and jollifications where they were played were out of bounds for the straitlaced, and church me...

 Transitioning from Newspapers to Radio Image by Nihal Demirci Erenay Style A newspapers is written so that it may be edited from the bottom up. As old editors liked to say, a page form is not made of rubber. It won’t stretch. What doesn’t fit is thrown away. Historians trace the inverted pyramid, which is not the traditional style of British or other foreign newspapers, to the American Civil War, when correspondents, fearing that the telegraph would break down before they could finish transmitting their dispatches, put the most important information into the first paragraph and continued the story with facts in descending order of news value. The radio must be consumed sequentially, that is, the listener does not hear the second song without hearing the first. The eighth song waits on the first seven, which means in practice that all seven are chosen to be interesting to a significant number of listeners and are presented at a length, which maintains that interest. In addition to ...

Nomads, by tradition, move around the Sahara region in northwest Africa, through the Sahel, to the Niger River. They wear tunics, turbans, veils, and other loose clothing to let air flow underneath, while still protecting them from the relentless desert sun. The history of the Tuareg people spans centuries of migration, miscegenation, and cultural mixtures. All of this, of course, explains the rise of musical expressions such as Tishoumaren or Assouf, known as desert blues, a magical fusion of rock instrumentation and regional roots, Tuareg, Malian, and North African music. If we’re going to get into the desert blues, we have to start with its pioneers. Tinariwen’s origins date back to 1979 when Ibrahim Ag Alhabib formed a band to play at parties and weddings. They had no official name, but people began to call them Kel Tinariwen, The Desert Boys. During his childhood, which he spent between refugee camps and exile neighborhoods in Algeria and Libya, Ibrahim saw a western movie in whic...

In the Carolinas, African American musicians around the first decade of the twentieth century developed a style of music known as the Piedmont blues. An important form of traditional music in North Carolina, the Piedmont blues is characterized by a guitar style that contains a distinct bass line played on the lower strings of the guitar as well as a melody picked on the higher strings. The bouncy, fingerpicked guitar style of Piedmont blues distinguishes it from Delta blues, which is often slow and mournful. Vocals, often paralleled by the melody played on the guitar, tell about the triumphs and trials of everyday life, such as work, love, heartbreak, loneliness, and the pitfalls of drinking and other overindulgences. Within the Piedmont blues tradition, women developed a distinctive sound, and many of the best exponents of this tradition were North Carolinians, including Etta Baker of Morganton, Alga Mae Hinton of Johnston County, and Elizabeth Cotten of Carrboro. Cotten's inimita...

Vocal harmony groups performed in the 1930s and ’40s with jazz bands and as independent groups... featured smooth harmonies based on barbershop, jazz, and sacred music. These groups, as well as the Ravens, Old Man River, 1947, established the model for the 1950s teenage a cappella groups that popularized the vocal harmony style on inner city street corners and the stoops of crowded apartment buildings as well as in parks and school gyms. Many of these bird groups... sang in a romantic style emulating the Orioles... who began recording in the late 1940s. Although they primarily sang a cappella, producers added sparse instrumentation, including guitar and drums played with brushes, to their commercial recordings... The addition of orchestral arrangements, sing along choruses, and Latin rhythms to rhythm and blues made this sound more compatible with the musical tastes of mainstream American adults. The producers for Motown added these pop production elements over a rhythm and blues found...

Talking to artists about how they had adjusted to the pandemic yielded information that normally doesn’t come up during artist interviews. While some musicians lost their main source of income, others were able to continue with their regular day jobs that, given the generally low pay for gigs, often allowed them to be active in the blues. Others were forced to turn to webcasting. In Clarksdale, Lucious Spiller was one of the first to do these shows and was likely the most active, for a year he played every Wednesday night, on Thursday afternoons, a time amenable to Europeans, and on most Saturdays, about as often as he normally performed. Aside from a fall off after the first weeks, support for the gigs, which was almost enough to pay the bills, remained steady until things began to open up in May of 2021. About five years ago, Clarksdale reached the milestone of live music seven days a week, 365 days a year, but that ended abruptly... The contemporary Southern soul market is largely s...

If the west begins in Fort Worth, the South begins in East Texas, in the rich bottomlands along the Colorado, Brazos, Navasota, and Trinity rivers, where cotton has been king, it seems, forever. The blues came from cotton... and while Mississippi gets most of the credit for creating the blues, with native sons like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and B. B. King, Texas is where some of the earliest blues pioneers lived and played, including the man who would become Johnson’s teacher, though the two never met. Musicians in rural East Texas had to be versatile. They had to play to the whims of black and white folks on the streets of towns like Navasota and Wortham, and they had to keep the dancers happy at Saturday night suppers that went on into Sunday morning. They called themselves songsters or musicianers, and they sang and played spirituals, vaudeville tunes, work songs, prison songs, English ballads, local sagas, children’s songs, and eventually, the blues. Most were born into unimagi...

Memphis is a textbook example of how changing attitudes toward its musical past helped turn its economy around. By the 1990s city officials were indifferent to its many legacies because they assumed the stories were known and there was nothing new to say. That changed when Kevin Kane became head of the Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau. He switched the city's slogan from Give Me Memphis to Home of the Blues and Birthplace of Rock 'n' Roll and rebranded the city to highlight its music heritage. That meant creating an entertainment district along historic Beale Street where music is played seven nights a week to 4.5 million visitors each year, courting the Smithsonian Institution in Washington to build the Memphis Rock 'n Soul Museum... and helping the Blues Hall of Fame. In Chicago, the dialogue between City Hall and music leaders has traditionally been weak. All these clubs were on the South Side or West Side, and none were touted by the city as tourist attractio...

Blues scholar David Evans breaks down early blues performance styles into three regionally differentiated approaches, one that includes East Texas and adjacent portions of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, a second stylistic region in the Deep South extending from the Mississippi Valley eastward to Central Georgia, and a third style, often referred to as Piedmont blues, that encompasses the East Coast from Florida to Maryland, stretching westward through the Piedmont, the Appalachian Mountains, and the Ohio River Valley to central Kentucky and Tennessee. Geographically, the Lower Chattahoochee Valley fits within the Deep South, but musically its blues is much closer to the fingerpicking Piedmont style, which often features alternating bass notes or an alternating bass note and chord, in the manner of ragtime, with spectacular virtuoso playing in the treble range. Mitchell recorded several Lower Chattahoochee blues artists covering songs by Blind Boy Fuller, one of the most popular of ...

With increasing middle class prosperity, the 1920s saw a rise in consumer oriented culture. As buying on credit became the norm, families purchased new, or newly affordable, technologies such as cars, washing machines, refrigerators, radios, and toasters. Women, both black and white, enjoyed new means of self expression during the decade that started with being granted the right to vote. Some paid more attention to clothing and cosmetics, wore scandalously short dresses, men’s hats, and smoked cigarettes. Women, and men, enjoyed the new freedoms afforded by developments in birth control and its gradual acceptance in society. The blues queens embodied these changes in society. They were glamorous pop stars who performed and appeared in photographs wearing glitzy dresses and jewelry. They headlined large shows that included dancers, comedians, and other entertainers... No longer beholden to the tropes of minstrelsy, blues queens presented themselves as sophisticated professionals. Race r...

During the 20th century, this melancholy music was the sound of the rural South. The blues came out of the life of struggle... It came out of what was going on in the Delta, whether it was weather or slavery and sharecropper lives that were difficult. As a music form, the blues has certain distinct features. The melody usually goes up and down a six note scale. If you’re starting on a C, that scale would go C, E flat, F, G flat, G, B flat, C. The lyrics tend to follow what’s known as an AAB pattern, with the first line of each verse repeating itself, The thrill is gone, the thrill is gone away / The thrill is gone, the thrill is gone away. The B line usually answers or resolves whatever is in the A line, You know you done me wrong, baby, and you’ll be sorry someday. The blues also evokes a particular response in the listener... Rock arouses and pumps up, it is intense and rebellious. R&B soothes and often seduces, its lyrics tend to be externally focused. Blues is more introspectiv...

Strong trembling sounds, melisma, changing the note of a syllable while it is being sung, wavy intonations, elongated notes, long pauses between sentences, glissandos, and a certain nasality are characteristic features of reciting and singing in the Islamic world...  Middle Eastern singing is tense sounding and has a harsh, throaty, nasal tone, with a certain flatness. Unsurprisingly, music was among the cultural exchanges that took place between North Africa and the western Sahel, defined here as the area stretching from Senegal/Gambia to northern Nigeria. Music in North Africa was distinctly different from music in the Middle East, having been influenced by the indigenous black populations living in the southern parts of the Maghreb and later by non Muslim victims of the trans Saharan slave trade. Often employed as musicians, these enslaved West Africans brought their music and rhythms to North Africa. In western Sahel, especially in the urban zones, Muslims adopted, adapted, and...

A story doesn’t do any good unless it is told, and singing is how the blues story is told. When sung, the blues offer a ritualistic way to affirm the essential worth of human existence. After facing the indignities of life, one can release the pain and frustration by stomping the blues, knowing full well that the expression is temporary and most likely ineffectual in terms of changing anything in a fundamental way. The stomp lasts Saturday night, and then you get up Sunday, go to church and repent, and start the cycle all over again. The blues, therefore, acknowledges that there is more to trouble and suffering than simply being in a bad mood or having a lousy string of luck, rather, these conditions are simply the structure of existence, for which the blues provides a kind of cathartic metaphysic, identifying what is real but in terms that are concrete, not abstract, and encompassing a full range of human expression. Linked to improvisation, the ability to worry the line is a powerful...

Throughout its history, the sounds that have come to define R&B have derived from a range of musical characteristics, instrumentation, and ensembles, ranging in size from tight piano trios to large groups with full rhythm and horn sections. Performed with a core of acoustic instruments in the 1940s, R&B was plugged in and electric from the late 1950s forward. Rhythmically, R&B now encompasses a wide breadth from blues shuffles with a back beat to boogie woogie, modified rumba rhythms, and syncopated variations of eight beat rhythm patterns that are the hallmark of rock ’n’ roll, and more. Even slow R&B ballads feature a palpable rhythmic pulse, while up tempo songs might include polyrhythmic arrangements to create rhythmic density. At its core R&B is dance music that compels the listener to respond. It is the creative melding and mixing of antecedent song forms including blues, gospel, swing, and other harmonic structures with new innovations that keep the evolving ...

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 ...