The Effects Of Racism And Discrimination On The Blues

Overall, there are many ways that racism and discrimination have influenced the Blues. The goal of this paper is to briefly touch on a few of many ways that racism influenced the blues and blues performers. Individuals who made a living from playing the blues often faced racism and discrimination and this caused many of them to move to ‘less racist’ states. Discrimination is seen very blatantly by examining when the blues was first recorded and by examining which artists were recorded. There are countless other ways that racism influenced the blues and these ideas will be discussed further. At the most basic level, the blues is built from work songs and ballads. The blues featured a call and response pattern that was also present in work
For starters, many blacks were denied an educated. Therefore, in blues history, it was rare for an artist to be literate and able to read sheet music. Also, due to the nature of the south, many blacks worked long, under-payed hours on plantations. Often, the owner would keep most of the profits for themselves and give the workers just a fraction of the money. This made it difficult for many to advance their current situation. It took until the second world war for many blacks to leave plantations. The second world war created many jobs for blacks because a large number of the current work force went off to war. The war forced employers to hire African Americans and this also gave African Americans the ability to move out of the south in search of better jobs. Overall, the south was an awful place to live if you were black. The jobs were grueling and you weren’t properly compensated for your work. The communities were also filled with crime. It was possible to get away with murder and many took advantage of this. If you were a good worker on a plantation, you could murder another person and the plantation owner would be able to get you released from jail. By having most blacks work on plantations, there weren’t many options for a person who was disabled or blind. Therefore, you can find a good number of blues musicians who were blind. Many blind musicians learned to play an instrument and would perform in the streets for money. Since working on a plantation didn’t pay well, many would learn to play music on homemade instruments. However, this created unique performance techniques because the artists had to work with what they had and to be more creative with their