vendredi 11 janvier 2013

Why Blues Music and Roots Music Will Invariably Be Popular

By Rick Hart


Musical tastes change over the years. So far as popular music goes, you can count on what was favored 10 years ago, not being favored today. That is just the way it is.

And the fact that music is becoming so splintered into various classes makes things even that much more confusing. An artist must stay within their "category" or their label and maybe even their audience will become agitated.

Yes, we've become the "give me everything" culture. Take TV. With cable television, there are at present so many decisions that arriving at a decision on what to watch regularly takes so long as the average show lasts. And who does not frequently watch more than one show at a time to aid in avoiding those annoying commercials.

We often feel exactly the same way about our music. We need what we want... And we'd like it now. So we each have our own music on our iPod players and seldom leap into new music. Gone forever are the days of 60's radio when you never knew what was going to be played next and frequently heard new music and new styles all the time. You seldom got stuck in one genre or one genre.

Even the bands themselves back then, often played many styles of music. One minute they played a blues song, next a country song, and next a folk song. You might not specify them into one type of music like today.

But Some Things Never Change

It's strange how some styles of music are always there. Even though they may go out of popular style, they seem to have a following of some degree. The Blues is one of those styles. Although it was created over 100 years back, there's still a big enough following for the style to have many mags and online radio stations devoted to the music.

What's the reason?

I suspect there are 2 reasons.

First, plenty of other styles are based mostly on The Blues. Certainly jazz, and country rock, and all forms of rock and roll came right from the blues. After all , it was Muddy Waters who said... "The blues had a baby, and they called it Rock and Roll."

Second, as folks learn more about the music they adore, whether rock and roll or country or jazz, they need to learn more about where the music came from. And these forms of music came directly from the blues. The chord structure and harmonic tendencies are direct descendants of blues musician's from over 50 years ago.

Yes music connoisseurs want to know the history of the blues music they adore. So that the music of blues guitar players like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, and lots of other creators of this music will invariably be preferred. At some point, they are going to be "discovered" by the next generation who wants to know the history. But in truth they're being "re-discovered" as they have been by each generation for over 100 years.

So the lineage continues. Fans of The Black Keys, are led straight to Howlin ' Wolf. And that leads them to Robert Johnson and Skip James and numerous blues originators who taught him. At some point they're going to get back to the very beginning and W.C. Handy.

This search is inescapable. Just like it's inevitable that popular music tastes will continue to change.




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