From the Medicine Show to the Stage: Some Influences upon the Development of a Blues Tradition in the Southeastern United States

Abstract

Oral histories of both jazzmen and bluesmen make frequent reference to small touring shows which influenced their early development and in which they took part as they commenced to shape their playing careers, whether they were to remain professional musicians, as was often the case of the jazzmen who frequently played in dance bands rather than jazz bands as such, or whether they could rarely have been considered professional musicians, which was the case with the vast majority of bluesmen. Broadly speaking, these two groups of musicians seldom overlapped. The jazzmen, often formally taught by trained musicians, tended to gravitate toward a middle-class role, but often recalled bluesmen from their early days. The bluesmen, almost to a man formally untrained and illiterate, emerged from the lowest economic group. Blues was to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s as one of the most popular forms of black secular music, but it was by no means the only form of music to be performed by touring entertainers. However, the place of these small shows both in helping to spread aspects of the blues and in providing work for traveling bluesmen has never been properly appreciated. Occasional contemporary documentation and more recent recollections hint at a permanent cross-fertilization of ideas and musical styles made available by these itinerant shows, by no means insignificant as influences upon the newly emerged blues tradition of the southeastern states. The division between rural and urban was never quite as simple as earlier critics maintained, with separation of blues into supposed country and city styles.

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