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Mar 27, 2024 · The blues, with its deep-rooted history in African American culture, has significantly shaped the landscape of modern music. This article aims to explore the blues' foundational role in modern music, highlighting how its core elements continue to resonate and influence today’s musical trends. Through this exploration, we will understand the blues not just as a genre confined to history, but ...
A: Blues music continued to evolve and adapt to changing musical trends and tastes throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. It has incorporated influences from various genres and subgenres, resulting in the development of different styles, such as electric blues, Chicago blues, and Delta blues.
The blues inside the music—the self-styling, the low furor, the professions of pride and desire—was given a narrower berth. In the 1950s, many jazz musicians migrated away from dance music and into the small combos of bebop. The blues’ core truths stayed lodged inside of it, but they were often relegated to instrumental expression.
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The blues is a form of secular folk music created by African Americans in the early 20th century, originally in the South. Although instrumental accompaniment is almost universal in the blues, the blues is essentially a vocal form. Blues songs are usually lyrical rather than narrative because the expression of feelings is foremost.
Where did the blues get its name?
In the 19th century the English phrase blue devils referred to the upsetting hallucinations brought on by severe alcohol withdrawal. This was later shortened to the blues, which described states of depression and upset, and it was later adopted as the name for the melancholic songs that the musical genre encapsulates.
How did the blues begin as a musical genre?
The origins of the blues are poorly documented, but it is believed that after the American Civil War (1861–65), formerly enslaved African Americans and their descendants created this genre while working on Southern plantations, taking inspiration from hymns, minstrel show music, work songs and field hollers, ragtime, and popular music of the Southern white population.
Why is the blues considered the “Devil’s music”?
Although instrumental accompaniment is almost universal in the blues, the blues is essentially a vocal form. Blues songs are lyrical rather than narrative; blues singers are expressing feelings rather than telling stories. The emotion expressed is generally one of sadness or melancholy, often due to problems of love but also oppression and hard times. To express this musically, blues performers use vocal techniques such as melisma (sustaining a single syllable across several pitches), rhythmic techniques such as syncopation, and instrumental techniques such as “choking” or bending guitar strings on the neck or applying a metal slide or bottleneck to the guitar strings to create a whining voicelike sound.
As a musical style, the blues is characterized by expressive “microtonal” pitch inflections (blue notes), a three-line textual stanza of the form AAB, and a 12-measure form. Typically the first two and a half measures of each line are devoted to singing, the last measure and a half consisting of an instrumental “break” that repeats, answers, or complements the vocal line. In terms of functional (i.e., traditional European) harmony, the simplest blues harmonic progression is described as follows (I, IV, and V refer respectively to the first or tonic, fourth or subdominant, and fifth or dominant notes of the scale):
Phrase 1 (measures 1–4) I–I–I–I
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Phrase 2 (measures 5–8) IV–IV–I–I
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Dan Stubbs
- SONG: Robert Johnson – Crossroad Blues (1937) What it did: Popularised Johnson’s great creation myth – that his fame was the result of a deal made with the Devil at a rural crossroads.
- SONG: Lead Belly/Nirvana – Where Did You Sleep Last Night (1944/1994) What it did: Lead Belly’s 1939 recording of this tragic blues song – which he frequently called ‘Black Girl’ – combined two traditional blues songs dating back to the 1870s, showing how blues itself is rooted in folk traditions.
- SONG: Elmore James – Dust My Broom (1951) What it did: Originally written by Robert Johnson (see ‘Cross Road Blues’, above) under the name ‘I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom’, Elmore James’s version (credited as Elmo James) added a boogie rhythm and slide guitar – and was a watershed moment in the electrification and amping up of the blues sound.
- ALBUM: Etta James – At Last! (1960) What it did: As you’ll see in Netflix’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, women were at the centre of the ‘urban blues’ scene that stormed the cities in the 1920s and 30s.
Feb 21, 2024 · 1920s: The Blues Takes Flight. The years from 1920 to 1930 were critical in the history of blues music. The boom of the recording industry added fuel to the spread of blues music, allowing artists to distribute their music further than ever. Record labels started to actively record African-American artists as they led the way in popular new ...
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Feb 22, 2007 · Paul Oliver, probably the world's foremost scholar of the blues, first heard African-American vernacular music during World War II when a friend brought him to listen to black servicemen stationed in England singing work songs they had brought with them from the fields and lumber camps of the Deep South. Oliver was enthralled by the rhythm and drive of the music and the spontaneous ...
