Early Urban Blues
Located in 2 routes
Early Urban Blues is the first commercial city form of blues, shaped by publishing houses, vaudeville stages, theater orchestras, cabarets, and race-record studios. Its sound is more formalized than rural blues: piano or small-band accompaniment, 12-bar and 16-bar structures, theatrical projection, blues-jazz instrumentation, and lyrics tailored for record buyers and stage audiences.
History
The style began before the first blues record through sheet music and stage performance, with W. C. Handy's compositions helping establish blues as a named commercial idiom. Mamie Smith's 1920 "Crazy Blues" triggered the race-record boom, after which Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, Ethel Waters, Lonnie Johnson, and Victoria Spivey recorded city blues that traveled nationally. Early Urban Blues supplied the infrastructure for classic female blues, jazz-blues singing, piano blues, and postwar R&B's professional studio model.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues
- Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues
- Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls
- AllMusic