Blues

Blues was not the only new musical development that emerged in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. It should be viewed as part of a wave of innovation in black American music—a wave that saw the first stirrings of ragtime, jazz, gospel music, and barbershop-style vocal harmony. This wave broke alongside important developments in literature, theater, the arts in general, and black political and religious life. The creativity behind it coincided with a hardening of white resistance...