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Originally Posted by finding nobody
You are certainly correct about blues music being the beginnings of at least two thirds of modern music.
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Wow. The thing is with this sort of thing is that... well, it's really difficult to know where to start. The blues had a massive influence on popular music; unlike jazz, country & western (itself an agglomeration of earlier white folk music in the states), the blues retained a sort of popularity after its hayday. 'The blues', as we understand it, didn't appear out of no-where. You ask 20 musicologists what the 'roots' of blues are and you'll get 20 different answers, so I'll not go into that. For a lot of people on this forum, the blues has very little to do with the music they like. I think its influence on reggae (in the tradition stretching from mento to modern day dancehall) is vastly overplayed. Its influence on hip-hop is absolutely minimal, musically speaking, but a lot of hip-hop cats empathise with the black struggle represented in the blues (and I think we mostly mean Delta blues rather than Jelly Roll Morton etc here). Those of us who listen to a lot of dance music of the last 30 years or so aren't hugely interested in the blues, as its influence is greatly diminished by comparison to, say, the Rolling Stones. By the time metal came to mean Maiden, Slayer, Napalm Death and so on, any noticeable blues vestiges were largely elided (which isn't true of Sabbath, Zeppelin, Purple).
This is a very rough sketch of popular guitar music. I've deliberately not mentioned what some call the griot axis, high life, soukous, classical African traditions and dynastic players, mbira etc etc. It is, whatever, a massive sprawling musicological sphere which has minimal influence from black American Delta blues - except in so far as some of those 20 musicologists would say that the blues comes from north African pentatonic systems. Some people (bizarrely) offer that the classical Chinese system - which you'll note is only an iffy 6th away from being
authentically blues - is big influence.
Anyway. 2/3rds is an absolutely massive amount of music. I think, even if you limited yourself
solely to Anglo-American music, 2/3rds is still way over-estimating the blues' influence. Someone mentioned opera earlier, and I think it's fair to say that the blues, as I understand it, has probably influenced
one significant composer of the last 100 years (Philip Glass, who's shite). Shostakovich's jazz period doesn't count, because jazz comes from a very different place at that time (big band and military classical). Nigel Kennedy doesn't count because he's a cunt.
Generally speaking, name a continent and you've got a mass of music; in that music will be authentic folk traditions, with regional variations. There will also be court music, dance music, function music and quite often highly formalised classical forms. From my own perspective as a Brit in the South West, if you look at the
highly particular field of Welsh Morris Dancing, there's a
massive amount of music which has
absolutely fuck all to do with the blues.
This is a bit tl;dr, but I just want to say it to finding nobody because, unlike sway, he's actually mildly receptive to people picking him up on talking shit (sorry, it's a compliment really).