Blues

:For other uses, see blues (disambiguation)

Characteristics

There are few characteristics common to all blues, as the style takes its shape from the peculiarities of each individual performance {{ref|noabsolute}}. Some characteristics, however, have been a presence since prior to the creation of the modern blues, and are common to most styles of African American music. The earliest blues-like music was a "functional expression, rendered in a call-and-response style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure" {{ref|pre-blues}}. This pre-blues music was adapted from the field shouts and hollers performed during slave times, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content" {{ref|origins}}.

Related Topics:
African American music - Call-and-response

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Many of these blues elements, such as the call-and-response format, can be traced back to the music of Africa; author Sylviane Diouf has pointed to several specific traits, like the use of melisma and a wavy, nasal intonation, that suggest a connection between the Muslim music of West Africa and the blues {{ref|Muslimmusic}}. The blues can be seen as based on European ideas of harmonic structure, with the African call-and-response transformed into the interplay of the singing and the guitar {{ref|interplay}}.

Related Topics:
Music of Africa - Melisma - Muslim music

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Blues later adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs" of minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment {{ref|bluesevolution}}. The style was also closely related to ragtime, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music" {{ref|ragtimeblues}}.

Related Topics:
Minstrel show - Negro spiritual - Ragtime

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Songs from this period had many different structures, although the twelve-, eight-bar, or sixteen-bar structure based on tonic, subdominant and dominant chords became the most common {{ref|barschords}}. Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the lowered third and dominant seventh (so-called blue notes) of the associated major scale {{ref|bluenotes}}. The use of blue notes, as well as the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics, are indicative of the blues' West African pedigree.

Related Topics:
Twelve- - Eight-bar - Sixteen-bar - Tonic - Subdominant - Dominant - Blue note - Major scale

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What is now recognizable as the standard 12-bar blues form is documented from oral history and sheet music as appearing in African-American communities throughout the region along the lower Mississippi River during the decade of the 1900s (and performed by white bands in New Orleans at least since 1908). One of these early sites of blues evolution was along Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee.

Related Topics:
Oral history - Sheet music - Mississippi River - 1900s - New Orleans - 1908 - Beale Street - Memphis, Tennessee

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Lyrics

Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often with the singer voicing his or her "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, hard times" {{ref|lyrics}}. Many of the oldest blues records contain gritty, realistic lyrics, in contrast to much of the music being recorded at the time. One of the more extreme examples, "Down in the Alley" by Memphis Minnie, is about a prostitute having sex with men in an alley. Music such as this was called gut-bucket blues. The term gut-bucket refers to a type of home-made bass instrument.

Related Topics:
Down in the Alley - Memphis Minnie - Prostitute - Gut-bucket

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Gut-bucket blues and the rowdy juke-joint venues where it often was played earned early blues an unsavory reputation. Proper, church-going people shunned it, and preachers railed against it as sinful. And because it often treated the hardships and injustices of life, the blues gained an association in some quarters with misery and oppression, however it was some of America's first socially aware music. But the blues was about more than hard times; it could be humorous and raunchy as well.

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:Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,

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:Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,

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:It may be sending you baby, but it's worrying the hell out of me.

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Author Ed Morales has claimed that Yoruba mythology played a part in early blues, citing Robert Johnson's "Crossroads" as a "thinly veiled reference to Eleggua, the orisha in charge of the crossroads" {{ref|orisha}}.

Related Topics:
Yoruba mythology - Robert Johnson - Crossroads - Eleggua - Orisha

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The original lyrical form of the blues was probably a single line, repeated three times. It was only later that the standard stanza of a line, repeated once and then followed by a single line conclusion, became standard. This form was called the twelve-bar blues {{ref|lyricalform}}

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:Woke up this morning with the blues all in my bed

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:Yes, I woke up this morning with the blues all in my bed

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:Fixed my breakfast, the blues was all in my bread

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In addition to the conventional twelve-bar blues, there are many blues in 8-bar form, such as "How Long Blues," "Trouble in Mind," and Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway." There are also 16-bar blues, as in Ray Charles's instrumental, "Sweet 16 Bars".

Related Topics:
Big Bill Broonzy - Ray Charles

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Musical style

The basic twelve-bar lyric framework of a blues composition is reflected by a standard harmonic progression of twelve bars, in 4/4 or 2/4 time:

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:Tonic/subdominant/tonic/tonic// subdominant/subdominant/tonic/tonic// dominant/subdominant/tonic/tonic-dominant.

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The lyrics generally end on the last beat of the tenth bar or the first beat of the eleventh bar, and the final two bars are given to the instrumentalist as a break; the harmony of this two-bar break can be extremely complex, sometimes consisting of single notes that defy analysis in terms of chords. The final beat, however, is almost always strongly grounded in the dominant seventh (V7), to provide tension for the next verse. Musicians sometimes refer to twelve-bar blues as "B-flat" blues because it is the traditional pitch of the tenor sax, trumpet/cornet, clarinet and trombone.

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Even more characteristic of blues is the melodic scale. While the twelve-bar harmonic progression had been intermittently used for centuries, the revolutionary aspect of blues was the frequent use of the flatted third and flatted seventh, and even flatted fifth, in the melody, together with techniques of crushing (playing directly adjacent notes at the same time, i.e. diminished second) and sliding (similar to using grace notes) {{ref|Mozart}}. A classical musician will generally play a grace note distinctly, however, a blues singer or harmonica player will glissando; a pianist or guitarist might crush the two notes and then release the grace note. Blues harmonies also use the subdominant major-minor seventh, and the tonic major-minor seventh is often used in place of the tonic.

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Blues is occasionally played in a minor key. The scale differs little from the traditional minor, except for the occasional use of a flatted fifth in the tonic, often crushed by the singer or lead instrument with the major fifth in the harmony. Janis Joplin's rendition of "Ball and Chain", accompanied by Big Brother and the Holding Company, provides a recent example of this technique. Also, minor-key blues is most often structured in sixteen bars rather than twelve -- e.g "St. James Infirmary Blues" and Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me" -- and was often influenced by evangelical religious music.

Related Topics:
Janis Joplin - Big Brother and the Holding Company - Trixie Smith

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The blues chords (also named twelve-bar blues) are typically a set of three differents chords played over a twelve bar scheme:

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:I - I - I - I

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:IV - IV - I - I

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:V - IV - I - I

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That would mean, if we're playing in the tonality of F, the chords would be as follow:

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:F - F - F - F

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:Bb - Bb - F - F

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:C - Bb - F - F

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Note that most of the time, every chord is played in the dominant seventh (7th) form.

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Frequently, the last chord

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Dance

Blues is sometimes danced as an informal type of swing dancing with no fixed patterns and a heavy focus on connection, sensuality and improvisation, often with body contact. However, most blues dance moves are inspired by traditional blues dancing. Although usually done to blues music, it can be done to any slow tempoed 4/4 music, including "club" music.

Related Topics:
Swing dancing - Connection - Improvisation - Body contact

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