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Reports of blues music in southern Texas and the Deep South were written at the dawn of the 20th century. Charles Peabody mentioned the appearance of blues music at Clarksdale, Mississippi, and Gate Thomas reported similar songs in southern Texas around 1901–1902.
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The blues is a form of secular folk music created by African Americans in the early 20th century, originally in the South. Although instrumental accompaniment is almost universal in the blues, the blues is essentially a vocal form. Blues songs are usually lyrical rather than narrative because the expression of feelings is foremost.
Where did the blues get its name?
In the 19th century the English phrase blue devils referred to the upsetting hallucinations brought on by severe alcohol withdrawal. This was later shortened to the blues, which described states of depression and upset, and it was later adopted as the name for the melancholic songs that the musical genre encapsulates.
How did the blues begin as a musical genre?
The origins of the blues are poorly documented, but it is believed that after the American Civil War (1861–65), formerly enslaved African Americans and their descendants created this genre while working on Southern plantations, taking inspiration from hymns, minstrel show music, work songs and field hollers, ragtime, and popular music of the Southern white population.
Why is the blues considered the “Devil’s music”?
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.
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
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Phrase 2 (measures 5–8) IV–IV–I–I
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The belief that blues is historically derived from the West African music including from Mali is reflected in Martin Scorsese ’s often quoted characterization of Ali Farka Touré ’s tradition as constituting "the DNA of the blues". [8]
Feb 21, 2024 · The originators of blues were the workers in southern fields who faced life’s hardships and newly freed slaves who used music to heal from the traumas of modern life. The music echoed this feeling of struggle, with themes of sorrow and resilience common in early and contemporary blues music.
- Musicnotes
While is there isn’t a definite origin as to who exactly created the Blues, we do have a good idea as to how it came to us today: W.C. Handy. William Christopher Handy was born in Alabama in 1873 and who worked a number of odd jobs before establishing himself as both a musician and a music teacher.
Mar 3, 2024 · Blues music began in the late-nineteenth century in the southern United States, drawing inspiration from African musical traditions brought by enslaved Africans to the plantation colonies of North America.
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Apr 25, 2017 · The earliest forms of what we now know as blues music originated from the Southern regions of the United States among communities of African Americans in the second half of the 19th Century. It came about as a result of fusing African musical traditions with Black Americans' work songs and European-American folk music.
