Next, the use of call and response in vocals is a uniquely non-western trait. The caller, or soloist's part is a complex variation on the set response of the group of other singers that respond. There is a strong emphasis on improvisation, a key element that appears in almost all American popular music. Lastly, African singing style and its applied scale had a large impact in America. The singing style is very fluid and expressive, with a slide on almost every pitch. For example, the correlation, between the lullaby sung by Zulu women, and the performance of blues singer, Bessie Smith, is striking in its similarity. Also, the African scale, which contains notes flatted on the 3rd, 7th, and sometimes 5th degrees, is directly translated into blues music, which also incorporates slides into its instrumental form.
The inception of this particular singing style and scale in blues became the catalyst for the genres that followed it. Developed in the rural South, the first form of blues, called 12 bar blues, uses the African derived scale and sliding pitches combined with traditional European meter and chords as its framework. Also, divided into three sets of four bars, 12-bar-blues uses a variation of call and response in which the first two lines vocally are identical, and the third is a response or comment on the first two. This music, first associated with the Mississippi Delta, when brought out of the south and popularized, notably by W.C. Handy. Taken north at the time of the exodus of African-Americans during the Great Migration, blues music took a course through Birmingham and further to Chicago. Once in place, it took only a decade to become renowned a truly unique form of American music.
Also, while W.C. Handy was responsible for bringing blues into the mainstream, blues was also being combined with another African influenced genre, ragtime, to create early jazz style in New Orleans.
