The Blues

Question 0

What did white revivalists prioritize in the blues?

Answer 0

The tune and text

Question 1

How is the lies a combination of European and African musical traditions?

Answer 1

It combines European form, harmony, and instruments with African style.

Question 2

What is Thomas A. Dorsey’s relationship with gospel music?

Answer 2

He says he invented it, but he just composed some famous examples.

Question 3

What song ushered in the contemporary gospel era?

Answer 3

Edwin Hawkins’s “O Happy Day”

Question 4

Where did the harmonic and structural form of the blues come from?

Answer 4

The folk ballad

Question 5

What is the relationship between the instruments and the vocalist in the blues?

Answer 5

The instruments act as a response to the vocalist’s musical line

Question 6

What was characteristic of the Holiness-Pentecostal style of gospel music?

Answer 6

Uninhibited performance with dancing and shouting

Question 7

In the blues revival, what did black artists find difficult about the middle-class audiences or which they were playing?

Answer 7

Behavioral standards discouraged participation in the way of African American performances

Question 8

What was ironic about the blues “revival”?

Answer 8

The blues was never dead

Question 9

True or False: A blues profession is simple and doesn’t give the feeling of moving anywhere.

Answer 9

True

Question 10

What is the persistent myth about Robert Johnson?

Answer 10

He sold his soul to the devil in exchange for amazing guitar abilities.

Question 11

What was the common critique of white blues artists in the 1960s and after?

Answer 11

That one had to “live the blues,” and white people could never truly do that

Question 12

That is a riff?

Answer 12

A short recurrent phrase

Question 13

What blues musician played at the White House in 1999?

Answer 13

B.B. King

Question 14

How does the Tindley style of gospel music incorporate the spiritual tradition?

Answer 14

Call and response

Question 15

Gospel music is best described as a combination of:

Answer 15

Blues, spirituals, and hymns

Question 16

In the early days of gospel music, churches:

Answer 16

Rejected it as sacrilegious because of its in coronation of popular music

Question 17

Which instrument is suited poorly to the blues because of its inability to properly play blue notes?

Answer 17

Piano

Question 18

What British style was a combination of American and British folk music, influenced heavily by the blues?

Answer 18

Skiffle

Question 19

What is jump blues?

Answer 19

Fast, small-combo blues popular in the 1940s.

Question 20

What is one reason that white Americans were attracted to the blues in the 1960s?

Answer 20

It was a vehicle for rebelliousness

Question 21

How did Thomas A. Dorsey promote his music in his early days as a composer?

Answer 21

Singing the songs out on street corners

Question 22

In Bessie Smith’s St. Louis Blues film appearance, she is depicted as:

Answer 22

A drunk

Question 23

The blues form uses a rhyme/lyric scheme that an be best described as:

Answer 23

AAB

Question 24

What is a griot?

Answer 24

A West African music specialist who serves as a custodian of cultural history

Question 25

What does William Barlow mean when he calls patterns of popular music in the first half of the 20th century an illusory “pattern of musical expropriation and racial exclusion?”

Answer 25

Even though many popular songs were rooted in black forms like jazz and blues, the songs were mainly performed by white vocalists

Question 26

How did the folksong movement affect the blues?

Answer 26

Black musicians were featured at performances and race records reissued