The earliest blues music was primarily call and response vocal music, without concord or accompaniment and with none formal musical construction. Slaves and their descendants created the blues by adapting the field shouts and hollers, turning them into passionate solo songs. When mixed with the Christian spiritual songs of African American church buildings and revival conferences, blues grew to become the basis of gospel music.
Music intertwines with features of American social and cultural identity, including through social class, race and ethnicity, geography, faith, language, gender, and sexuality. The relationship between music and race is perhaps the most potent determiner of musical meaning within the United States. The growth of an African American musical identity, out of disparate sources from Africa and Europe, has been a constant theme in the music history of the United States.
It is a mixture of music influenced by music of the United Kingdom, West … Read More