blues
What is the blues?
Where did the blues get its name?
How did the blues begin as a musical genre?
How does blues music sound?
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blues, genre of folk music created by African Americans before the turn of the 20th century, originally in the South. By the 1960s the simple but expressive forms of the blues had become one of the most important influences on the development of popular music throughout the United States. As Bobby Rush, one of blues music’s contemporary stars, has said, “Blues is the mother of all music.” Its strains can be heard in jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, country, bluegrass, soul, heavy metal, and hip-hop.
Form and techniques
Although instrumental accompaniment is almost universal in the blues, the blues is essentially a vocal form. Blues songs are lyrical rather than narrative; blues singers are expressing feelings rather than telling stories. The emotion expressed is generally one of sadness or melancholy, often due to problems of love but also oppression and hard times. To express this musically, blues performers use vocal techniques such as melisma (sustaining a single syllable across several pitches), rhythmic techniques such as syncopation, and instrumental techniques such as “choking” or bending guitar strings on the neck or applying a metal slide or bottleneck to the guitar strings to create a whining voicelike sound.
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As a musical style, the blues is characterized by expressive “microtonal” pitch inflections (blue notes), a three-line textual stanza of the form AAB, and a 12-measure form. Typically the first two and a half measures of each line are devoted to singing, the last measure and a half consisting of an instrumental “break” that repeats, answers, or complements the vocal line. In terms of functional (i.e., traditional European) harmony, the simplest blues harmonic progression is described as follows (I, IV, and V refer respectively to the first or tonic, fourth or subdominant, and fifth or dominant notes of the scale):
Phrase 1 (measures 1–4) I–I–I–I
Phrase 2 (measures 5–8) IV–IV–I–I
Phrase 3 (measures 9–12) V–V–I–I
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Many elements of the blues have roots in African musical traditions that were adapted by the descendants of enslaved Africans in the American South. African influences are especially apparent in the blues tonality, the call-and-response pattern of the repeated refrain structure of the blues stanza, the falsetto break in the vocal style, and the imitation of vocal idioms by instruments, especially the guitar and harmonica.
For example, the various talking drums used in East and West Africa imitate the rhythm and the rise and fall of words in languages. They are used as communication devices to send messages and tribal news—therefore, the instruments are made to “talk” or “speak.” In the Southern United States, however, drums were banned on many plantations because of fears that enslaved people would use them to communicate to each other and plan rebellions. In the meantime, the banjo, a stringed instrument of African origin, became popular in the South. As blues developed, the banjo’s popularity was eventually superseded by that of the guitar. Blues guitarists who famously made their instrument “talk” include B.B. King and his “Lucille”; in the blues legend’s signature song “The Thrill Is Gone,” Lucille’s mournful melodic phrasings match the lamenting tone of King’s vocals.
Some historians also see a link between the West African griots—whose role was to preserve the genealogies, historical narratives, and oral traditions of their people—and blues musicians. Similar to the nomadic griots, early bluesmen were itinerant. Their songs, while deeply personal, were also a commentary on the oppressive conditions imposed on Black Americans in the rural South during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, including sharecropping and racial segregation.