Blues," Ma Rainey traveled the vaudeville circuits with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels as a girl, and later helped launch the career of Bessie Smith. Lively and upbeat, hokum was also associated with "hot jazz". Hokum style music played on a piano was eventually called "honky-tonk." The hokum sound is illustrated by bottleneck guitarist blues great Tampa Red (1904-1981), who formed a band called the "Hokum Boys" with pianist "Georgia" Tom (1899-1993) in the late 1920s. Another classic example of a hokum is from the influential Robert Johnson (1911- 1938) and his song, "They're Red Hot." The hokum genre is where jazz and blues intersected for a period while still following their separate paths. black migration from rural to urban areas in the 1920s and the simultaneous development of the recording industry. "BLUES" became an industry code word for a record designed to sell to black listeners. In 1923 Sylvester Weaver (1897-1960) was the first to record the slide guitar style in which a guitar is fretted with a knife blade or the sawed-off neck of a bottle. In the late 1960s, blues-rock guitarist Duane Allman (1946-1971) would use an empty Coricidin bottle. The (Mississippi) Delta blues was a rootsy, sparse, almost folk style, with passionate vocals accompanied by what became the most essential of all components, the slide guitar. The sound migrated to Chicago where Chess records recorded the peak of blues prominence from 1956 to 1965. During WWII the rest of the world had been exposed to American music. The French loved jazz and Britain warmly welcomed the blues. The Blues directly influenced and fueled the "British Invasion" of rock music to America during the late 1960's. Etta James: |