Activities Involving the Blues

The blues today is widely available on popular websites, iTunes, and commercially available for purchase.  Blues originally, like ancient Greek storytelling, was only shared through oral performance.  Similarly, blues used to be sung and performed by day laborers either during work in order to make it through the deplorable work conditions that many faced or after work as a community activity.  Today though, most blues performers use music as their career.  All of the performers that I saw at the House of Blues were either professional musicians or aspiring musicians.  Blues has also been traditionally an African American music genre, but in more recent years, white music artists such as Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan have become famous for their blues style, although the genre is still dominated by African Americans.  The roots of blues includes spirituals, so much of blues even today contains Christian elements, but is not as prominent as it used to be.  At the Dallas House of Blues, food is a very common activity shared by people listening to the blues.  In most cultures, partaking of a meal with others is a sign of friendship and fellowship.  And this holds especially true at the House of Blues and Dallas blues culture.  Since the blues is so strongly tied to Southern culture, and food plays an integral part of Southern style, a meal and music are commonly put together.  The food at the House of Blues greatly enhances the total experience there.  For instance, at my second visit to the House of Blues Dallas, I had dinner at the restaurant before the show.  I ate chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes and green beans- an iconic Southern classic.  I also have had fish and chips and an all-you-can-eat crawfish boil, which I will tell y’all about in a later post.