Blues

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Blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on the use of the blue notes. It emerged in African-American communities of the United States from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed English and Scots-Irish narrative ballads. The use of blue notes and the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics are indicative of African influence. The blues influenced later American and Western popular music, as it became the roots of jazz, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and other popular music forms.

Etymology

The phrase "the blues" is a reference to having a fit of the blue devils, meaning 'down' spirits, depression and sadness. An early reference to "the blues" can be found in George Colman's farce Blue devils, a farce in one act (1798).^[1] Later during the 19th century, the phrase was used as a euphemism for delirium tremens and the police, and was not uncommon in letters from homesick Civil War soldiers.Though usage of the phrase in African American music may be older, it has been attested to since 1912, when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted Blues composition.^[2][3] In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood.^[4]

Main characteristics

Stylistic and cultural origins

Main article: Origins of the blues

There are few characteristics common to all blues, because the genre takes its shape from the idiosyncrasies of individual performances.^[5] However, there are some characteristics that were present long before the creation of the modern blues. An early form of blues-like music was a call-and-response shouts, which were a "functional expression... style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure."^[6] A form of this pre-blues was heard in slave field shouts and hollers, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content".^[7] The blues, as it is now known, can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and the West African call-and-response tradition, transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar.^[8]Many blues elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa. 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 transferral of African performance techniques into the early blues instrumental vocabulary.

Robert Johnson, a Delta blues singer, contributed to the standardization of the 12-bar blues form.

Blues music later adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs", minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment.^[9] 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".^[10] Blues songs from this period, such as Lead Belly's or Henry Thomas's 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.^[11] 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.

Lyrics

The original lyrical form of the blues was probably a single line, repeated four times. It was only later that the current, most common structure of a line, repeated once and then followed by a single line conclusion, became standard.^[12] 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 often 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".^[13] Many of the oldest blues records contain gritty, realistic lyrics, in contrast to much of the popular music being recorded at the time. For example, "Down in the Alley" by Memphis Minnie, is about a prostitute having sex with men in an alley. Music such as this was called "gut-bucket" blues, a term which refers to a type of homemade bass instrument made from a metal bucket used to clean pig intestines for chitterlings (a soul food dish associated with slavery). "Gut-bucket" blues songs are typically "low-down" and earthy, about rocky or steamy man-woman relationships, hard luck and hard times. Gut-bucket blues and the rowdy juke-joint venues where it was played, earned blues music an unsavory reputation; church-goers shunned it and some preachers railed against it. 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".^[14] However, many seminal blues artists such as Son House, 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.Although the blues gained an association with misery and oppression, the blues could also be humorous and raunchy as well: :"Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,:Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,:It may be sending you baby, but it's worrying the hell out of me." ^{[citation needed]}In particular, Hokum blues celebrated both comedic lyrical content and a boisterous, farcical performance style. Tampa Red's classic "Tight Like That" is a sly wordplay with the double meaning of being "tight" with someone coupled with a more salacious physical familiarity.Lyrical content of music became slightly simpler in post war blues in which focus was often almost exclusively on singer's sexual worries. Many lyrical themes that frequently appeared in pre war blues such as economic depression, transportation, technology, horses, cows, devils, gambling, magic, floods and dry periods were mostly left out in post war blues.

Musical style

During the first decades of the twentieth century blues music was not clearly defined in terms of a chord progression. There were many blues in 8-bar form, such as "How Long Blues", "Trouble in Mind", and Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway." Idiosyncratic numbers of bars are also encountered occasionally, as with the 9 bar progression in Howlin' Wolf's "Sitting on Top of the World". The basic twelve-bar lyric framework of a blues composition is reflected by a standard harmonic progression of twelve bars, in 4/4 or (rarely) 2/4 time. Slow blues are often played in 12/8 (4 beats per measure with 3 subdivisions per beat). By the 1930s, twelve-bar blues became the standard. There would also be 16 bar blues, as in Ray Charles's instrumental "Sweet 16 Bars", and in Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man". The blues chords associated to a twelve-bar blues are typically a set of three different chords played over a twelve-bar scheme:

In this example, C is the tonic chord, F the subdominant. Much of the time, some or all of these chords are played in the harmonic seventh(7th) form. Frequently, the last chord is the dominant (V or in this case G) turnaroundmaking the transition to the beginning of the next progression.The use of the harmonic seventhinterval is a characteristic of blues, and is popularly called the "blues seven" ^[15]. At a 7:4 ratio, it is not close to any interval, minor ormajor, on the conventional Western diatonic scale ^[16]. However, through convenience or necessity it is often approximated by a minor seventhinterval, or in terms of chords, a dominant seventhchord.

A minor pentatonic scale; play (help·info)

The lyrics generally end on the last beat of the tenth bar or the first beat of the eleventh bar, and the final two bars are given to the instrumentalist as a break; the harmony of this two-bar break, the turnaround, can be extremely complex, sometimes consisting of single notes that defy analysis in terms of chords. The final beat, however, is almost always strongly grounded in the dominant seventh (V7), to provide tension for the next verse.

Sheet music from "St. Louis Blues" (1914)

Melodically, blues is marked by the use of the flattedthird, fifthand seventh(the so-called blue or bent notes) of the associated major scale.^[17]These scale tones can replace the natural scale tones or be added to the scale, as in the case of the minor pentatonicblues scale, where the flatted third replaces the natural third, the flatted seventh replaces the natural seventh and the flatted fifth is added in between the natural fourth and natural fifth. While the twelve-bar harmonic progression had been intermittently used for centuries, the revolutionary aspect of blues was the frequent use of the flatted third, flatted seventh, and even flatted fifth in the melody, together with crushing—playing directly adjacent notes at the same time, i.e., diminished second—and sliding—similar to using

grace notes.^[18] The blue notes allow for key moments of expression particularly during the cadences, melodies, and embellishments of the blues. Where the three line verses end, for example, there is a falling cadence that approaches just shy of the tonic, merely suggesting it, and combining the falling of a speaking voice with the shape of the blues scale in a unique, expressive way. This melodic fall, placed at the turnaround (end of the verse), is employed most clearly in the modern, Chicago blues sound. A similar sound occurs in gospel and R&B but not to the same effect, where it is usually termed a melisma. Whereas a classical musician will generally play a grace note distinctly, a blues singer or harmonica player will glissando, "crushing" the two notes and then releasing the grace note. In blues chord progressions, the tonic, subdominant and dominant chords are often played as harmonic seventh chords, the harmonic seventh being an important component of the blues scale. (NB: While the harmonic seventh may be voiced easily, on equally tempered instruments like the guitar, it is approximated by means of a minor seventh, which is a third of a semitone higher.) Blues is also occasionally played in a minor key, such as in the style of Paul Butterfield. The scale differs little from the traditional minor, except for the occasional use of a flatted fifth in the tonic, often sung or played by the singer or lead instrument with the perfect fifth in the harmony. * Janis Joplin's rendition of "Ball and Chain", accompanied by Big Brother and the Holding Company, provides an example of this technique. *Minor-key blues is often structured in sixteen bars rather than twelve, in the style of gospel music, as in "St. James Infirmary Blues" and Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me."Blues shuffles reinforce the trance-like rhythm and call-and-response, and form a repetitive effect called a "groove". The simplest shuffles commonly used in many postwar

electric blues, rock-and-rolls, or early bebopswere a three-note riffon the bass strings of the guitar. When this riff was played over the bass and the drums, the groove "feel" is created. The walking bassis another device that helps to create a "groove" . The last bar of the chord progression is usually accompanied by a turnaround that makes the transition to the beginning of the next progression.Shuffle rhythmis often vocalized as "dow, da dow, da dow, da" or "dump, da dump, da dump, da"^[19]as it consists of uneven, or "swung", eighth notes. On a guitar this may be done as a simple steady bass or may add to that stepwise quarter note motion from the fifth to the sixth of the chord and back. An example is provided by the following tablaturefor the first four bars of a blues progression in E:^[20][21]

Blues in jazz is much different from blues in other types of music (such as Rock, R&B, Soul, Funk, and Blues in its own category). Jazz bluesnormally stays on the V chord through bars 9 and 10, emphasizing the dominant - tonic resolution over the subdominant - tonic structure of traditional blues. This final V-I cadence lends itself to many variations, the most basic of which is the ii-V-I progression in bars 9, 10 and 11. From that point, both the dominant approach (ii-V) and the resolution (I) can be altered and "substituted" nearly endlessly, including, for instance, doing away with the I chord altogether (bars 9–12: ii | V | iii, iv | ii, V |) In this case, bars 11 and 12 function as an extended turn-around to the next chorus.

History of the blues genres

Origins

Main article: Origins of the blues

Okahumkee On The Ocklawaha, 1890s photo of the tourist steamer out of Palatka in Florida with guitar toting blacks

Blues has evolved from an unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of African-American slaves and rural blacks into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States and, later, Europe and Africa. The musical forms and styles that are now considered the "blues" as well as modern "country music" arose in the same regions during the nineteenth century in the southern United States. Recorded blues and country can be found from as far back as the 1920s, when the popular record industry developed and created marketing categories called "race music" and "hillbilly music" to sell music by blacks for blacks and by whites for whites, respectively. At the time, there was no clear musical division between "blues" and "country," except for the ethnicity of the performer, and even that sometimes was documented incorrectly by record companies.^[22] Studies have situated the origin of black spirituals inside slaves' exposure to their white Hebridean-originated gospels. African-American economist and historian Thomas Sowell also notes that the southern, black, ex-slave population was acculturated to a considerable degree by and among their Scots-Irish "redneck" neighbours. However, the findings of Kubik and others also clearly attest to the essential Africanness of many essential aspects of blues expression.The social and economic reasons for the appearance of the blues are not fully known.^[23] The first appearance of the blues is not well defined and is often dated between 1870 and 1900, a period that coincides with Emancipation and the transition from slavery to sharecropping, small-scale agricultural production and the expansion of railroads in the southern United States. Several scholars characterize the early 1900s development of blues music as a move from group performances to a more individualized style. They argue that the development of the blues is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the enslaved people. According to Lawrence Levine,^[24] "there was a direct relationship between the national ideologica