blues

The tradition & historical record

Blues is a music genre and musical form that originated among African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues has incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale, and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove. Blues music is characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the racial segregation, discrimination, and other challenges experienced by African Americans. ¹

The term 'Blues' may have originated from "blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness. An early use of the term in this sense is in George Colman's one-act farce Blue Devils (1798). The phrase 'blue devils' may also have been derived from a British usage of the 1600s referring to the "intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal". As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils and came to mean a state of agitation or depression. By the 1800s in the United States, the term "blues" was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase 'blue law', which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday. In 1827, it was in the sense of a sad state of mind that John James Audubon wrote to his wife that he "had the blues". In Henry David Thoreau's book Walden, he mentions "the blues" in the chapter reflecting on his time in solitude. He wrote his account of his personal quest in 1845, although it was not published until 1854. The phrase "the blues" was written by Charlotte Forten, then aged 25, in her diary on December 14, 1862. She was a free-born black woman from Pennsylvania who was working as a schoolteacher in South Carolina, instructing both slaves and freedmen, and wrote that she "came home with the blues" because she felt lonesome and pitied herself. She overcame her depression and later noted a number of songs, such as "Poor Rosy", that were popular among the slaves. ¹

Early traditional blues verses often consisted of a single line repeated four times. However, the most common structure of blues lyrics today was established in the first few decades of the 20th century, known as the "AAB" pattern. This structure consists of a line sung over the first four bars, its repetition over the next four, and a longer concluding line over the last bars. This pattern can be heard in some of the first published blues songs, such as "Dallas Blues" (1912) and "Saint Louis Blues" (1914). According to W.C. Handy, the "AAB" pattern was adopted to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times. The lyrics are often sung in a rhythmic talk style rather than a melody, resembling a form of talking blues. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative. African-American singers voiced their "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." This melancholy has led to the suggestion of an Igbo origin for blues, because of the reputation the Igbo had throughout plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and outlook on life when they were enslaved. Other historians have argued that there is little evidence of Sub-Sahelian influence in the blues as "elaborate polyrhythm, percussion on African drums (as opposed to European drums), [and] collective participation" which are characteristic of West-Central African music below the savannah, are conspicuously absent. According to the historian Paul Oliver, "the roots of the blues were not to be found in the coastal and forest regions of Africa. Rather... the blues was rooted in... the savanna hinterland, from Senegambia through Mali, Burkina Faso, Northern Ghana, Niger, and northern Nigeria". ¹

The blues form typically uses a repeating chord progression, most commonly the twelve-bar sequence. Vocal and instrumental patterns frequently display a call-and-response structure rooted in African and African-American musical traditions. Early blues at the turn of the 20th century was not governed by a single standardized structure. Folklorist Howard W. Odum documented secular songs from circa 1908–1910 that featured freely repeated or extended verses and flexible stanzaic forms. David Evans likewise notes that early blues allowed considerable structural variation before becoming more standardized through commercial recording. ¹

With the rise of recorded blues singers such as Bessie Smith, the twelve-bar form became increasingly common during the 1920s and 1930s. Other structures, including 8-bar and 16-bar progressions, are also widespread. Examples include "How Long, How Long Blues", "Trouble in Mind", Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway", Ray Charles's "Sweet 16 Bars", and Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man". More unusual forms appear as well, such as the nine-bar "Sitting on Top of the World" by Walter Vinson. A typical twelve-bar blues is set in 44 time signature and uses three closely related chords arranged in a fixed sequence. These bars are often grouped into three four-bar phrases that align with an "AAB" call-and-response pattern: an opening phrase over the tonic (I), a repeated phrase over the subdominant (IV), and a concluding response over the dominant (V), with the final measures frequently forming a turnaround. ¹

Blues historians and historians of African American music such as Paul Oliver and Samuel Charters have suggested that the essential elements of the blues originated in the Sahel region of West Africa, brought over by Africans via the slave trade. Whereas the African slaves brought to South America and the Caribbean were largely from percussion based cultures in southern coastal west Africa (like southern Nigeria), central Africa and Bantu speaking parts of Africa lacked many elements that created the blues. Many of the slaves brought to North America were from the Sahel region and more familiar with stringed instruments, basing the banjo on string instruments from the Sahel such as the akonting. ¹

The American sheet music publishing industry produced a great deal of ragtime music. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Blues”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

blues is vocal and instrumental music form, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 76 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²