by Carl Settles

Many of us are aware of the on-going crisis in America's homes and educational institutions. As an educator I struggle with the apathy of my students whose families are too often overburdened with odd work hours and a lack of two-parent support. As an African American musician, I also bemoan the low interest among my people and other people of color in jazz, its related forms and fundamental antecedent -- the blues.

The blues is a seminal form of American music. Developed primarily during the 1800s, it contains most of the major rhythmic and tonal elements of African musical forms while retaining European elements of harmonic function, instrumentation and motivic development. Moreover, it has had a profound affect on our culture and is now more practiced and accepted by white Americans than the African Americans from which it originated.

The blues as a musical form is based on oral calls and responses which were developed by African slaves forced to work in the fields. These field hollers functioned simultaneously as simple inspiration to carry on the harsh work and as metaphorical codes or instructions for others trying to literally escape their oppressive surroundings.

Nowadays the blues has a much more benign existence. White America discovered it in the form of artists like Elvis, the Beatles and Rolling Stones while at the same time black America has generally shunned the music moving on to soul, funk, disco and more recently the urban music of artists like Janet Jackson and the controversial emergence of hip hop.

Closer to its beginnings, blues musicians were regarded in much the same way as today's rappers. Generally black, poor and with little formal education, these musicians stirred up both controversy and fascination as they sang tales of love and despair. Blues legend, Robert Johnson, sang about going down to the "crossroads" as he traveled throughout the country "making deals with the devil" and such. Country-blues singer and guitarist Huddie "Leadbelly" Leadbetter, a convicted murderer, spent time in prison and achieved a "bad boy" image much like present day rappers Snoop Doggy Dogg and the recently deceased Tupac Shakur.

Later, as African Americans migrated to urban areas like New York and Chicago, the common knowledge of the blues reached a new sophistication and helped spawn the Harlem Renaissance. Jazz masters such as Duke Ellington based most of their extended works on permutations of the blues form. Louis Armstrong defined many of the motivic elements now common in jazz and other American styles of music while playing primarily in the blues idiom.

The swing era of the '30s set the stage for the re-discovery of extended harmonies of 19th century European composers like Claude Debussy. Charlie Parker and other be-bop musicians combined this harmonic approach with elements of swing and virtuostic technique. Be-bop also created a good bit of controversy as it took popular tunes of the day, sped them up and spontaneously created an advanced musical language. All along, the blues has been there having a profound affect on the music of Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk and countless other jazz players as well as more recent popular artists.

Is hip-hop the new blues?

Returning to my role as an educator and acknowledging the general disinterest of youth along with their current socio-economic and educational status, is it unreasonable to say at least in function, that rap music and the hip-hop culture it accompanies are the new blues? One of my elders told me "the blues is about sufferin'," and rap music, although not exclusively, explores today's inner city problems. Like the blues once did through veiled metaphors, hip-hop exposes unattended longings in black America for among other things fathers, jobs and safety. It has been the methodology for young talented black youth, that for one reason or another lack well-paying job opportunities, to carve out an economic and cultural niche in America.

In its infancy, the blues spoke of such hardship, but due to the segregation of "race records" white audiences were mostly exposed to it through a filter of Anglo artists' renderings of the form like George Gershwin. Later, with the emergence of Elvis Presley in the late '40s and '50s, the blues became widely accepted by young white audiences under the new name of rock and roll. Many black blues artists of the time lacked the media access of today's rappers and consequently missed out on much of its financial rewards.

Some believe rappers are able to exploit their peoples' sufferings and resent their ability to become millionaires in doing so. When South Central Los Angeles rapper Ice Cube chants "Once upon a time in the projects" it strikes a raw nerve for too many Americans while for others it unfortunately has some resonance. But is this statement much different than a popular blues phrase like "No...oh...oh...oh... Body seems to love me... No...oh...oh...oh... Body seems to care!?" The major difference seems to be that, through technology and the media, the race-based filter between artists of color and their audiences has virtually disappeared.

MTV, who at its inception tacitly pledged to exclude most African American artists, now regularly features their street life Yo-MTV Raps, in its prime time hours.

Hip-hop, a subconscious return to rhythm and rhyme as the rule, also at times ignores harmonic function for the sake of a groove. Like the blues it employs riffs and melodic hooks into an asymmetrical tapestry of rhythm and rhyme. Both styles are rooted in a struggle to overcome and persevere as well as having dramatic affects on American culture.

The questions remain. Will there be a time when hip-hop becomes as universally accepted as the blues is today? Are there figures as seminal as a Duke Ellington or Jelly Roll Morton that link hip-hop to the bedrock of the American experience? Is there the rapping equivalent of a Charlie Parker studying all of the masters and summing up the next logical extension of American music? Will we look at today's gangsta rappers much the same way as we now do Leadbelly and Robert Johnson?

If not, the alternative is at the least very bleak.