Blues Club
by Steve Underwood

Too Blue
by Langston Hughes

I don’t know where to turn.
I don’t know where to go
Nobody cares about you
When you sink so low.

What shall I do?
What shall I say?
Shall I take a gun
And put myself away?

I wonder if
One bullet would do?
As hard as my head is,
It would probably take two.

But I ain’t got
Neither bullet nor gun—
And I’m too blue
To look for one.

It is suggested that the blues emerged in the United States after slavery had been abolished, when African-Americans finally had a chance at individualism and self expression while struggling with being educationally and economically unprepared for freedom in an oppressive society. Though no one can pinpoint when the first blues songs were sung, we do know that it was in the 1890’s that they were first collected and printed. Edison’s first phonograph records came out in 1877, but it was not until 1920 that the blues were recorded for commercial sale. These recordings were immediate successes and became part of the fuel that got the Harlem Renaissance swinging.

From its roots in the rural South, the blues moved to the city and took Langston Hughes right with it. He remembers hearing the blues performed for the first time when he was about six years old in Kansas City with his grandmother. Besides having both a love of this music and the common black folk it was created by and for, one of the reasons that Hughes began to draw on the blues tradition for writing his poetry is that he hoped to capitalize on the blues craze. Though the markets for music and poetry were quite different, he thought he could somehow merge the two.

Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues

Birthplace: Chattanooga, Tennessee
Died: 26 September 1937 (automobile crash)
Best Known As: Classic blues singer dubbed “Empress of the Blues”

Born into poverty and orphaned at an early age, Bessie Smith became the greatest blues singer of her era, recording more than 160 songs between 1923 and 1933. Her early career was influenced by Ma Rainey, and Smith performed on stage throughout the southern U.S. before making records. She recorded with such jazz legends as Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, and Coleman Hawkins, but it was Smith who was the star. Her hits include “Downhearted Blues” and “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out.”

Smith appeared in the 1929 movie St. Louis Blues.

Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/bessie-smith
Source: http://www.milforded.org/schools/foran/turtola/bluesessay.html

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