Blues

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 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 discrimination and other challenges experienced by African-Americans.[4]

Etymology

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".[7]

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.[8]

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).[5] 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".[6] 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.[6]