So Why Do They Call It the Blues?

The origin of the blues is impossible to pinpoint in time or space, but the world-weary sadness the musicians so often describe is universal. The first recorded instance of the word “blues” to describe that chain-smoking, far-staring mood comes from the diary of Charlotte Forten, an African-American schoolteacher working with recently freed people on South Carolina’s Sea Islands, who described herself as having the blues as early as 1862 (as one might well imagine under such circumstances), later writing that the songs some of her pupils sang “can’t be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit.” That sure sounds like the blues, even if the honor for the first formally published blues song goes to Hart Wand’s 1912 “Dallas Blues.” (If you’ve spent much time in Dallas, that fact won’t amaze you either.)

The blues would go on to have many epicenters across the southern United States and would follow African-Americans on the Great Migration to the cities of the Midwest. Blues bloomed where it was planted: jazzy in New Orleans, twangy in Tennessee, and bristling with industrial energy in Chicago. In Baton Rouge, partly insulated from the up-tempo inflection of jazz, a slower, rural blues emerged, more notably influenced by styles like Zydeco and Cajun music and centered not technically in Baton Rouge but across the river in Port Allen, where looser blue laws meant that bars and juke joints could stay open later. (Even today, Port Allen boasts later closing times and New Orleans-style drive-thru daiquiri shops—the next great genre may just arise from our little sister to the west.) Later, records from Baton Rouge blues artists like Slim Harpo and Lightnin’ Slim would influence (and be covered by) British Invasion bands like the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, and others.

In homage to Port Allen’s place in blues history, the West Baton Rouge Museum has built a replica juke joint on its grounds. Designed to function both as a museum exhibit and a concert venue, the juke joint has been lovingly curated, often with advice from blues musicians themselves, to evoke the look and feel of the casual, often intimate establishments that nurtured this distinctive style of American music. Join us for another demonstration of one of the great paradoxes of music—after an evening of listening to the blues, you’ll leave with a smile on your face.  

Read up on Chef David Crews here, and get tickets to join us today at bontempstix.com.