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Philadelphia4 1 2 1 3 Mar 3, 2024 · The history of the blues is a story about American slavery, resistance, overcoming, and the birth of Western popular music. The catastrophic legacy of American Slavery gave rise to the blues, a musical style born in the African-American communities of the southern United States. The blues evolved over generations to include African musical ...
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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
Britannica Quiz
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Phrase 2 (measures 5–8) IV–IV–I–I
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Blues is a music genre [3] and musical form that originated amongst African-Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. [2] Blues has incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture.
The most important American antecedent of the blues was the spiritual, a form of religious song with its roots in the camp meetings of the Great Awakening of the early 19th century. Spirituals were a passionate song form, that "convey (ed) to listeners the same feeling of rootlessness and misery" as the blues. [ 5 ]
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 ...
- Musicnotes
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 ...
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Oct 17, 2010 · Blues. African-American folk and pop music with a vocal and instrumental tradition; also a song form. Though by origin and nature a folk music, the blues enjoyed wider popularity with the advent of commercial recording. "Race records," as 78-rpm recordings made in the 1920s and 1930s by blues singers were known, were among the earliest pop records.
