Blues rock is a fusion genre and form of rock and blues music that relies on the chords/scales and instrumental improvisation of blues. It is mostly an electric ensemble-style music with instrumentation similar to electric blues and rock (electric guitar, electric bass guitar, drums, and sometimes with keyboards and harmonica). From its beginnings in the early 1960s, blues rock has gone through several stylistic shifts and along the way it inspired and influenced hard rock, Southern rock, and early heavy metal.
Blues rock started with rock musicians in the United Kingdom and the United States performing American blues songs. They typically recreated electric Chicago blues songs, such as those by Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Reed, at faster tempos and with a more aggressive sound common to rock. In the UK, the style was popularized by groups such as the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Animals, who put several blues songs into the pop charts. In the US, Lonnie Mack, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and Canned Heat were among the earliest exponents. Some of these bands also played long, involved improvisations as were then commonplace on jazz records. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the style became more hard rock-oriented.
The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Blues rock”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.
blues rock is music genre combining elements of blues and rock, 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. 1
The source record links this tradition to 22 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. 1
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