Blues Music, History of the Blues

The growing popularity of blues music in African American culture was evidence of a change in the attitude that African Americans had about musical expression and how they viewed it. Before the advent of blues music most African American music was done in tandem and rarely seen as a solo performance. Due to the nature of the field calls and hollers the method required more than one participant to be successful. These expressions of music were used not only in the fields of the south by the slaves but by other workers in the industrialized north in the factories and foundries of the developing nation.

Unlike the prior hollers and calls having multiple participants the blues was an a form of personal dialogue in which the individual would express to himself what his response was to the statements he would issue in song. The blues was reflective of the overall attitude of the African American community in the period following the American Civil War.

With the blues African Americans were free for the first time to truly express their feelings in song without being punished. With this freedom came the desire to tell the world about the troubles of prejudice, racism and poverty. Many credit the scholarship of Booker T. Washington and his popularity for the success and growth of the blues as a form of musical expression. 
Because of Booker T. Washington's stance that the individual was important in his own right and the emphasis he put on individual achievement he gave rise to the expression that was felt in the early blues music.
When traveling musicians and vaudeville performers caravan in carnivals and shows around the southern United States the blues began to become increasingly popular and more accepted form of artistic expression particularly on the part of African Americans.
When the freedmen of the early 20th century began to move into the northern part of the United States they often brought the musical expressions that were popular among African Americans in the south with them. The New Orleans and southern styles of Arkansas, and the Carolinas merged with other regional styles and eventually made their way to major cities in the northern United States. The blues was soon hugely popular in Chicago, Detroit, and New York. This new style of blues music became popular in the clubs, dance halls and the vaudeville theaters of the major cities and small towns all over the country and especially in urban environments where African Americans lived.
The Classic Blues style was popular among newly arrived blacks in the cities. The migration of many blacks to the cities gave them a new freedom from the church and community that had not been experienced in rural areas. Blacks demanded entertainment, and black theaters, dance halls, and clubs were opened. Many African American women went from singing in churches and instead began to perform in vaudeville shows, theaters, clubs and other dance halls.
The blues would change over the years spawning several new forms of artistic expression most notably jazz, and then rock and roll. African American music and culture were changed forever.