Blues, Blues

Though several blues form exist, the twelve-bar blues chord progressions are the most frequently encountered. Blue notes are sung or played at a slightly lower pitch than that of the major scale for expressive purposes. Blues emerged at the end of the 19th century as an accessible form of self-expression in African-American communities of the United States from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.

The blues influenced later American and Western popular music, as the blues form became a basic pattern of jazz, rhythm and blues, bluegrass and rock and roll. In the 1960s and 1970s, blues evolved into a hybrid form called blues rock.

The "Trsor de la Langue Franaise informatis" provides this etymology to the word blues and George Colman's farce as the first appearance of this term in the English language, see http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/fast.exe?mot=blues Though the use 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. Davis, Francis.

Ewen, pg. 143 These specialized notes are called the blue or bent notes . These scale tones may replace the natural scale tones, or they may be added to the scale, as in the case of the minor pentatonic blues scale, in which the flattened third replaces the natural third, the flattened seventh replaces the natural seventh and the flattened fifth is added 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 flattened third, flattened seventh, and even flattened 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. Grace notes were common in the Baroque and Classical periods, but they acted as ornamentation rather than as part of the harmonic structure. For example, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 has a flatted fifth in the dominant. In these periods, this was a technique for building tension for resolution into the perfect fifth; in contrast, a blues melody uses the flatted fifth as part of the scale.

Jazz blues normally stays on the V chord through bars 9 and 10, emphasizing the dominant-tonic resolution over the subdominant-tonic structure of traditional blues.

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, the so-called AAB pattern. Ferris, pg. 230 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. Father of the Blues: An Autobiography. by W.C. Handy, edited by Arna Bontemps: foreword by Abbe Niles. Macmillan Company, New York; (1941) page 143. no ISBN in this first printing 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, [1] hard times." Ewen, pgs. 142143 Typical authority figures often include train conductor, judge, landlord/lady, captain (boss), and chief of police.

Lyrical content of music became slightly simpler in post war-blues in which focus was often almost exclusively on singer's relationship woes or sexual worries. Many lyrical themes that frequently appeared in pre-war blues such as economic depression, farming, devils, gambling, magic, floods and dry periods were less common post war blues.

Odum who published between 1905 and 1908 a large anthology of folk songs in the counties of Lafayette, Mississippi and Newton, Georgia. David Evans, in Nothing but the blues, pgs. 33-35 The first non commercial recordings of blues music, coined proto-blues by Paul Oliver, were made by Odum at the very beginning of the 20th century for research purpose.

John H. Cowley, in Nothing but the blues, pg. 265 Recordings which are still available were made in 1924 by Lawrence Gellert. Later, several recordings were performed, in particular by Robert W. Gordon which became head of the Archive of American Folk Songs of the Library of Congress.

Lomax recorded in the 1930s together with his son Alan a large amount of non commercial blues which testimony the huge variety of proto-blues styles, such as field hollers and ring shouts. John H. Cowley, in Nothing but the blues, pgs. 268-269 A testimony of blues music as it was before the 1920s is also given by the recordings of artists such as Lead Belly The banjo seems to be directly imported from the western African music.

Samuel Charters, in Nothing but the blues, pg. 14-15 However in the 1920s, at the time country blues began to get recorded, the use of the banjo in blues music was quite marginal and limited to individuals such as Papa Charlie Jackson and later Gus Cannon. Samuel Charters, in Nothing but the blues, pg. 16 Blues music also adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs", minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment. Garofalo, pg. 44 Gradually, instrumental and harmonic accompaniment were added, reflecting increasing cross-cultural contact.

Schuller, cited in Garofalo, pg. 27 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.

Mark A. Humphrey in Nothing but the blues, pg. 110 When the blues appeared, before blues gained its formal definition in terms of chord progressions, the blues was defined as the secular counter part of the spirituals.

Other harp players such as Big Walter Horton were also influential. Muddy Waters and Elmore James were known for their innovative use of slide electric guitar. B. B. King and Freddie King (no relation), who did not use slide guitar, were influential guitarists of the Electric blues style, even though they weren't from Chicago. Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters were known for their deep, "gravelly" voices.

Chicago blues also influenced Louisiana's zydeco music, Herzhaft, pg. 236 with Clifton Chenier Herzhaft, pg. 35 using blues accents.

White performers had brought African-American music to new audiences, both within the US and abroad. However, the blues wave which brought artists such as Muddy Waters to the foreground had stopped.

J. B. Lenoir from the Chicago blues movement in the 1950s recorded several LPs using acoustic guitar, sometimes accompanied by Willie Dixon on the acoustic bass or drums. His songs commented on political issues such as racism or Vietnam War issues, which was unusual for this period. His Alabama Blues recording had a song that stated: I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me (2x) You know they killed my sister and my brother, and the whole world let them peoples go down there free White audiences' interest in the blues during the 1960s increased due to the Chicago-based Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the British blues movement.

A complete directory of contemporary blues labels can be found at http://blues.about.com/cs/recordlabels/ Young blues artists today are exploring all aspects of the blues, from classic delta to more rock-oriented blues, artists born after 1970 such as John Mayer, Sean Costello, Shannon Curfman, Anthony Gomes, Shemekia Copeland, Jonny Lang, Corey Harris, Susan Tedeschi, Joe Bonamassa, Michelle Malone,The White Stripes, North Mississippi Allstars, Gracie B, Everlast, The Black Keys, Bob Log III, Jose P and Hillstomp developing their own styles.

Source: Wikipedia > Blues