CHAPTER FIVE: “ST. LOUIS BLUES”: RACE RECORDS AND HILLBILLY MUSIC
Key Terms and Definitions
Black Swan:
African American–owned record company founded in
1921 in New York by Harry Pace, a former partner of the
bandleader and songwriter W. C. Handy.
blue notes:
“Bent” or “flattened” tones lying outside traditional
European-based scale structures; tones that reflect
particular African American melodic characteristics.
blues:
A musical genre that emerged in black communities of
the Deep South—especially the region from the
Mississippi Delta to East Texas—sometime around the
end of the nineteenth century.
classic blues:
Blues written by professional songwriters and performed
by professional female blues singers such as Bessie
Smith and Ma Rainey.
country blues (also referred
Performed by sharecroppers and laborers in the
to as “rural,” “down-home,”
Mississippi Delta and East Texas; developed from an oral
or “folk” blues):
tradition, in which versions of a song were passed down
from generation to generation, learned by ear and carried
in memory. Country blues performers were usually
itinerant musicians who traveled the Southeast.
“hillbilly” or “old-time”
Music that was performed by and mainly intended for
music:
sale to southern whites. It developed mainly out of the
folk songs, ballads, and dance music of immigrants from
CHAPTER FIVE: “ST. LOUIS BLUES”: RACE RECORDS AND HILLBILLY MUSIC
the British Isles. It was later rechristened “country and
western music” or simply “country music.”
Mississippi Delta:
A region of fertile land that stretches some two hundred
miles along the river, from Memphis, Tennessee, in the
North to Vicksburg, Mississippi, in the South. In the
nineteenth century, the Delta had been the site of some of
the most intensive cotton farming in the Deep South, and
home to one of the largest populations of slaves in North
America. Most scholars agree that the folk blues first
emerged in the Mississippi Delta.
race records:
Recordings of performances by African American
musicians produced mainly for sale to African American
listeners.
syncopation:
Rhythms that play “off” or “against” or “between” the
main beats that define the meter of a piece.
twelve-bar blues:
The standard form of a blues song: a twelve-bar structure
made up of three phrases of four bars each; a basic threechord pattern; and a three-line AAB text.