Blues music has emotional resonance. It is the wail of the battered psyche. It invites the listener to share every existential pain.
Yes, it's the lyrics. But it's also the sounds.

Recent reports tell of scientific breakthroughs. Researchers have identified specific spots in the brain that are stimulated by certain tones and musical notes. Set frequencies and harmonics can produce predictable emotional responses!

It's the day after New Year's. Consider the incessant shrieks and whirs from your kid's computer game. What is your predictable emotional response? What about all living creatures? Dairy farmers have long known the tangible contentment of a radio in the barn. Science makes sense. Especially when it confirms what we know in the gut, not just the brain.

In an earlier time, the downtrodden in southern prisons and work camps conducted studies that pre-date these recent "discoveries." Real suffering and emotional desolation were the catalysts for experimentation. It started when the first slave boats deposited reluctant passengers on plantation landings. Stripped of freedom and dignity, alone and desolate, slaves soon found solace in two universal balms. Music and religion. The result was lively gospel music and the blues.

Some music was learned. Southern aristocrats trained their slaves to sing and play English ballads and Wesleyan gospel hymns. But, in the fields and shacks, these folks remembered the modal tunes of Africa. When they harmonized these sounds with the European tonal chords, the results were "bent pitches," the half-step tonalities that today are known as the "blue notes."

The blues musician knew the emotive powers of these practiced, pained, sounds. They echoed hurt in the prisoner's heart. But it took the European culture until WWI to make the same emotional connection. Segregated Jim Crow units exposed their French and British hosts to the blues virus. White Americans may have heard these infectious songs in the southern states. Yet the songs of Bessie Smith and later, of Billy Holiday, became a contagion first on the Continent.

Accepted there, blues was re-patriated with doughboys as a validated music form in a caucasian context. Returning soldiers of both races, both receptive to blues music, were matched by an exodus of southern blacks to the urban, industrialized, northern states. The result was a blues pandemic stretching from the 1920's to the present.

Like all living art forms, blues music is in constant transition. The old delta blues artists have faded. Little Walter Jacobs, Professor Longhair, Ida Cox, and hundreds more, birthed an amplified generation of blues artists. Their heirs include Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Howlin' Wolf. Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen and Eric Clapton have based their stylings on the blues. Robert Cray and Stevie Ray Vaughn continue the tradition.

One thing is certain. Pain and hurt are universals and not bound by race or geography. And blues is the audible bruise that best shows these feelings.

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Reference source: Robert M. Baker, "A Brief History of the Blues," found at www.theblueshighway.com