“Black and Blue” by Louis Armstrong

Introduction

In the early twentieth century, a new style of music was being created in New Orleans. This style of music, known as Jazz, was performed with the audience in mind. It was heavily influenced by ragtime and washboard bands. Jazz is also highly competitive since the musicians wanted to stand out from the rest of the crowd. Their differences were accomplished through the use of timbres, improvisation, and many other characteristic of Jazz. Louis Armstrong's version of “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” illustrates the characteristics of Jazz, is completely unique to his style of preference, and advocates against racial discrimination.

Improvisation was the most unique and challenging style utilized in the Jazz era. Musicians used this skill set to differentiate themselves from other artists within their original musical scores along with remakes of other artist's songs, as no two performances of a song were the same.

Discussion

In Armstrong's version, the lyrical section of the song starts about midway through the song whereas in the original it starts almost immediately. The lyrics in the original version told how heartbroken this woman was. It displayed her passion on how she felt when she was left by her husband. It describes how she felt alone in the world and that her life was not worth living because of what happened after her loss. While Armstrong transforms that context into displaying discrimination. The majority of the original lyrics were cut out and what little remained was changed to show how he felt about the mistreatment happening because of his race. The original was shown to be on a more personal level where as Armstrong's version was intended to display how the whole race was feeling. An example of this would be when Waller uses the verbiage of ...