s, east Texas blues, and Piedmont blues. These different types of rural blues described the location, time, and style of each type of music. Folk blues was extremely popular among the younger members of African American society. It spread from the fields to many different types of work. Rural blues voiced people's concerns about daily life and their environment. Blues lyrics came from two different sources. The first source was individual events and how people viewed things. The second source was African American tradition and heritage that was passed from generation to generation. When African and European music first began to merge and create what eventually became the blues, the slaves sang songs were filled with words telling of their extreme suffering and privation. (Priestley, 36) One of the many responses to their oppressive environment resulted in the field holler. Thefield holler gave rise to the spiritual, and more imporantly, provided a backbone for the blues, "notable among all human works of art for their profound despair . . . They gave voice to the mood of alienation that prevailed in the construction camps of the South," for it was in the Mississippi Delta that blacks were often forcibly conscripted to work on the levee and land-clearing crews, where they were often abused and then tossed aside or worked to death.(Shirmer,233) Tanner states that the blues tradition was considered to be a masculine discipline although some of the first blues songs heard by whites were sung by women blues singers (Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith) and not many black women were to be found singing the blues in the juke-joints. The Southern prisons also contributed considerably to the blues tradition through work songs and the songs of death row, murder, prostitutes, the warden, the hot sun, and hundreds of other privations. (Shirmer, 147) The prison road crews and work gangs thrived upon their prison experiences for their songs, and also is whe...
