ABSTRACT
The blues began as a vocal music, with its origins deep in the heart of the work songs and field hollers of the black man's slavery days. The most important aspect of the blues music tradition is that it has been an oral rather than a notated one. Singers and musicians learn by listening to others. European writers and musicians have often failed to recognise the importance of the lack of musical notation in blues music. Musical notation can indicate the fixed pitches and precisely measured rhythmic durations that are essential to classical music, but it cannot convey the bent pitches, variety of tone and degrees of rhythmic accentuation which are at the heart of the blues. Tin Pan Alley, the commercial American popular music industry, has always used watered-down elements of black music, from ragtime to bop harmonies, to spice up popular songs.
