Valley Blues

Valley Blues

 

 

Do you?

 

• listen to the blues

• play the blues

• watch the blues

• promote the blues

• teach the blues

• want to learn the blues

• buy blues music

• or just plain got the blues!

•  

Then this is the site for you and others like you in Torfaen to meet, advertise your gig, band, CD or class. In fact anything to do with blues and related music in and around the Afon Lwyd delta! Contact us with your information and we'll put it online free of charge and help keep the blues alive in Torfaen.

 

 

What Is It?

 

'In the 1890's jazz was emerging in New Orleans as a kind of instrumentalized blues, before the vocal blues was really born. As blues historian Paul Oliver has written in The Story of the Blues,

"It was this period of social upheval which seemed to have inspired a revolution in the culture of the American Negro and which gave rise to the gospel song of the sanctified and Pentacostal churches, the piano syncopations of ragtime, the polyphonic collective improvisation of the New Orleans jazz band and the narrative ballad of the black hero. It was also the period which inspired, from the fusion of a number of elements, both traditional and innovatory, the beginnings of the blues." Says Peter Guralnick in The LIstener's Guide To The Blues.

 

On the other hand...

 

'The blues are not wrote; the blues are lived. Here's a boy born a millionaire - the onliest way he can have the blues if he lose it all and, boom! he's thrown flat out on his face. Then he's gonna have the blues.'   Johnny Shines, Delta bluesman.

 

 

 

 

Contact: valleyblues@webster.uk.net|