The Carolina blues--traditional music of mid '20s Southeastern black culture--still survives, as danceable and evocative today as in the era of its birth. Two other UNC-TV productions that have focused on Piedmont Blues are Step It Up and Go and Piedmont Blues: A North Carolina Now Special .

Until the early decades of this century, Southeastern blacks called their instrumentally-accompanied secular music "reels" or "rags," terms used interchangeably to denote differences in tempo. By the mid-'20s, this music had evolved to emphasize lyrics in standard tune structures, and the guitar had replaced the banjo as the music's lead instrument. The result--Carolina Blues.

As one area songster recently declared, the blues is but one fish in a well-stocked musical pool. But that one "fish" swims in several schools of distinct style, determined by geographic region and population. As the blues evolved, unique forms of the music took their shapes in the Southwest, the Mississippi delta and Southern Central states area, and the Southeast.

What characterizes the Southeast's Carolina blues is that tunes are picked from the strings of the guitar instead of strummed as in other blues styles. Though its name implies trying times and forlorn feelings, the Caroline blues is first and foremost a dance music that actually expresses a sweeping range of emotions.

In an earlier era when the livelihoods of Southeastern working-class blacks usually depended on hard, physical labor, the music paved a creative way to express life's dreams and disappointments, lost loves and raucous romances, today's despairs and tomorrow's promises. Settings for the music's development included private homes, town streets, tobacco fields and warehouses, and houseparties. The houseparty offered the chance for neighbors and friends to relax and forget their hardships, swap jokes and wisecracks and, of course, perform and dance to the Carolina blues.

Musicians heightened the sense of community celebration in renditions that encouraged spontaneous interaction between them and the audience. These "coperformances" constantly blurred and sometimes erased the line between entertainer and audience.

Just as waves of Mississippi delta blacks followed railroad lines and the Mississippi River to St. Louis, Detroit and Chicago in the '20s, '30s and '40s, so did thousands of Southeastern blacks begin to look northward to the new "Promised Land." Seeking freedom from the uncertainties of farm life and Southern society's repression, they migrated and resettled along the Atlantic seaboard. And they took with them their Carolina blues, planting musical seeds that took root ad flourished in places such as Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark and Harlem.

Born of rags and reels, primed and flavored in tobacco fields and warehouses, celebrated at houseparties and on street corners, the Carolina blues gave distinct voice to the cultural creativity, tradition and strength of Southeastern blacks in the early 20th century. That voice is still strong today.