The Blues
...for the band to come to the stage. Finally the spotlight shines on the artist on stage. It is a living legend, Robert Johnson. He starts playing and singing the blues and you picture and feel everything he is saying, feeling his pain and experiences. The Blues is emotional, rhythmic, storytelling music that shows the artists feelings and personal experiences, which is shown in the novel Reservation Blues, which includes characters such as blues great Robert Johnson.
It becomes increasingly difficult through time to link blues music and Native Americans. This is because the musical genre of blues has been stereotyped to Afro-Americans. It emerged in African-American communities of the United States from spirituals, praise songs, field hollers, rhymed Scots-Irish narrative ballads, shouts, and chants. The blues influenced later American and Western popular music, as it became part of the genres of ragtime, jazz, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and pop songs. The phrase the blues derived from the devil blues, meaning ‘down’ spirits, or depression and sadness. The blues great Robert Johnson, who was a character in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues was a Delta Blues singer, one of the earliest forms on the blues. It is referred to as Delta Blues because it originated in the Mississippi Delta region.
(Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org)
Robert Johnson is one of the most famous Delta Blues musicians. Also known as the “Grandfather of Rock-and-Roll”, his music styles influenced a large amount of musicians, ranging throughout time. Such artists include Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, and Eric Clapton. Clapton once said that Robert Johnson was “the most important blues musician who ever lived.” Johnson traveled up and down the Mississippi Delta, traveling by bus, hopping trains, and sometimes hitchhiking. According to...
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