Blues Music

The blues influenced later American and Western popular music, and became the roots of jazz, rhythm and blues, bluegrass and rock and roll. The phrase "the blues" is a reference to the the Blue Devils, meaning misery , melancholy, and sadness. Although the blues gained an association with misery and oppression, the blues could also be humorous and raunchy as well

The Blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on the use of the blue notes. It emerged as an accessible form of self-expression in African-American communities in the South of the United States from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The use of blue notes and the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics are indicative of its African influence.

Though the use of the phrase in African American music may be older, it has been suggested the name came from 1912, when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted Blues composition.

There are few characteristics common to all blues, because the genre takes its shape from the idiosyncrasies of individual performances. However, there are some characteristics that were present long before the creation of the modern blues. An early form of blues-like music were call-and-response shouts, which were a "functional expression... style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure."

A form of this pre-blues was heard in slave field shouts and hollers, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content". The blues, as it is now known, can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and the African call-and-response tradition, transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar.

The Diddley bow, a homemade one-stringed instrument found in parts of the American South in the early twentieth century, and the banjo are African-derived instruments that may have helped in the transfer of African performance techniques into the early blues instrumental vocabulary. The style also was closely related to ragtime, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music".

The blues form itself bears no resemblance to the melodic styles of the West African griots, and the influences are faint and tenuous and no specific African musical form can be identified as the single direct ancestor of the blues. Author Ed Morales has claimed that Yoruba mythology played a part in early blues, citing Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues" as a "thinly veiled reference to Eleggua, the orisha in charge of the crossroads".

However, many seminal blues artists such as Charley Patton, or Skip James had in their repertoire several religious songs or spirituals. Reverend Gary Davis and Blind Willie Johnson are examples of artists often categorized as blues musicians for their music but whose lyrics clearly belong to the spirituals.Blues music later adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs", minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment.

Blues songs from this period, such as Lead Bellys or Henry Thomas'  recordings, show many different structures. The twelve-, eight-, or sixteen-bar structure based on tonic (I), subdominant (IV) and dominant chords (V) became the most common forms.

What is now recognizable as the standard 12-bar blues form is documented from oral history and sheet music appearing in African American communities throughout the region along the lower Mississippi River, in Memphis, Tennessee's Beale Street, and by white bands in New Orleans.

The traditional blues verse was probably a single line, repeated four times. It was only later that the current, more common structure of a line, repeated once and then followed by a single line conclusion, became standard.

Two of the first published blues songs, however, Dallas Blues (1912) and St. Louis Blues (1914), each featured lines repeated twice, followed by an "answer" line, played over 12 bars of music. W.C. Handy wrote that he adopted this convention to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times.

These lines were often sung following a pattern closer to a rhythmic talk than to a melody. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative. The singer voiced his or her personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, and hard times.

History of the Blues

• The Delta Blues