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Blues Music

Blues music originated in the early 20th century among African Americans in the Southern United States. It developed from the musical traditions brought by enslaved Africans, including work songs and spirituals. Early blues styles included country blues performed solo with guitar accompaniment. The blues spread north during the Great Migration and influenced other genres like jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, and country music. Blues songs typically use a three-line stanza form and musical techniques like bending guitar strings or applying slides to convey feelings of melancholy or despair.

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75 views10 pages

Blues Music

Blues music originated in the early 20th century among African Americans in the Southern United States. It developed from the musical traditions brought by enslaved Africans, including work songs and spirituals. Early blues styles included country blues performed solo with guitar accompaniment. The blues spread north during the Great Migration and influenced other genres like jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, and country music. Blues songs typically use a three-line stanza form and musical techniques like bending guitar strings or applying slides to convey feelings of melancholy or despair.

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BLUES MUSIC

Livia Claire 11F


What is blues music?
Definition: African Americans originated the secular
folk music known as "blues" in the South at the
beginning of the 20th century. By the 1960s, the
straightforward yet expressive blues genres had
become one of the most significant factors
influencing the growth of popular music across the
country, including jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, and
country.
Where did blues get its name?

Though it typically exclusively referred to secular, not


religious, music, the term "rhythm and blues," also
known as "R&B," first appeared in the 1940s when it
took the place of "race music" as a generic marketing
term for all African American music.
How did the blues begin as a
musical genre?
The emergence of rhythm and blues occured with the
growing societal discontent surrounding social issue in
American culture. On the street corners of many urban
centers, mixed groups of adolescents sang doo-wop
together, and both Black and White youngsters were
eager to see the prominent singers of the day.
Who first created blue music?
Despite having originated in the southern areas of the United areas in the late 1800s,
African music has had a significant influence on the development of the blues.
When Africans were brought to serve in the colonies of North America as slaves, they
took their musical traditions with them. Work songs and spirituals, which are religious
songs with vocal harmony, were among the earliest genres of African American music.
Slaves would sing spirituals at church and labor songs while toiling on the plantations.
The African rhythms and these musical genres together formed the basis of blues.

Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Lead Belly are well-known performers of
the country blues genre.
When did blues music rise?
Among the years after the American Civil War (1861–1865), the blues
originated among the oppressed, economically impoverished African-
American communities in the rural southern states of America. The "Great
Migration," in which millions of Black people from the South relocated to
northern cities like Chicago and Detroit in pursuit of employment, was
portrayed in numerous blues songs. In the 1930s, songs like "Sweet Home
Chicago" by Robert Johnson spoke optimistically of this voyage.
Where was blues most popular?
Early in the 20th century, the Mississippi Delta region of rural America
gave rise to the blues music genre known as "country blues." Often
sung by Black American singers with an acoustic guitar
accompaniment, it was also known as folk blues.
What makes the blues blue?
Blues artists express their thoughts through their songs, which are lyrical
rather than narrative. The predominant feeling conveyed is typically
melancholy or despair, frequently brought on by love issues but also by
oppression and difficult circumstances. Blues musicians utilize a variety of
musical techniques to convey this, including melisma (a single syllable
sustained across multiple pitches), instrumental methods like "choking" or
bending guitar strings on the neck, and the application of a metal slide or
bottleneck to the guitar strings to produce a whining voicelike sound.
What makes the blues blue?
A three-line literary stanza of the pattern AAB, 12-measure form, and expressive
"microtonal" pitch inflections, or blue notes, are characteristics of the blues musical
style. Typically, a line consists of two and a half measures of singing, followed by an
instrumental "break" in the last measure and a half that either repeats, reacts to, or
develops the vocal line. In terms of functional harmony, also known as classical
European harmony, the simplest blues harmonic progression is as follows (where I,
IV, and V represent the first or tonic, fourth or subdominant, and fifth or dominant
notes of the scale, respectively):
Citations

https://www.britannica.com/art/blues-music

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zkbh2v4#:~:te
xt=The%20origins%20and%20birth%20of%20the%2
0blues&text=Enslaved%20people%20would%20sing
%20work,with%20the%20task%20being%20done.

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