Blues Historian Speaks At Chappaqua Library

Peter Muir, author of Long Lost Blues: Popular Blues in America, 1850-1920, treated an audience at the Chappaqua Library to an intricate mix of historical lecture and performances on a genre that he argues influenced much of today's popular music.

"So there's very little popular music, really, from today that doesn't ultimately, when you trace it back, have its roots in blues," he said, tracing its relationship to genres that include rock, jazz and R&B.

The blues, which Muir in his Saturday talk said has its origins in southern black slave communities, really began to take off around the turn of the 19th century and into the 20th century. Its rise also coincided with the music indutry's transition from sheet music to recorded music.

The first known use of "the blues" in a song could be traced all the way back to 1850 with a song called I have got the blues today, he said, and subsequently performed with a stage piano in the auditorium. While the song did not have a beat that one would associate with the blues, Muir explained that it was the first to have bluesy subject matter.

The blues is a genre that is therapeutic in nature, said Muir, and used the power of music to heal.

"So the purpose of the blues as a genre is to rid yourself of the blues," he said.

Two factors at the end of the 19th century converged to help the genre pick up steam: blues ballads and black vaudeville. Muir treated the audience to a rendition of a famous ballad about an 1899 murder in St. Louis, in which a woman shot and killed her lover because he was found to have been cheating on her. Black vaudeville performances were noted in the late 1900s, and helped carry the blues to a wider geographical audience beyond the south, according to Muir.

Muir also performed a rendition of St. Louis Blues by W.C. Handy, a famous blues musician of the 1910s. Interestingly, Muir noted, Handy's first hit, Memphis Blues, started out as a campaign song for a mayoral candidate in the city, who ran in the late 1900s.  Finally, he gave a rendition of The Royal Garden Blues by Spencer Williams, which was named after a Chicago night club – a notable ending in chronological terms, as Chicago was on the receiving end of the genre as it spread.