Blues

:For other uses, see blues (disambiguation)

Social and musical impact

Like jazz, rock and roll and hip hop music, blues has been accused of being the "devil's music" and of inciting violence and other poor behavior {{ref|criticism}}. In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable, the first of many styles of African American music to be thusly critcized, especially as white audiences began listening to the blues during the 1920s {{ref|1920spop}}.

Related Topics:
Jazz - Rock and roll - Hip hop music - African American music

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As the origin of the blues scale, the blues has exerted a profound influence on many styles of music. The blues scale frequently is found in non-blues musical forms, such as popular songs like Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night", blues ballads like "Since I Fell for You" and "Please Send Me Someone to Love", and even orchestral works like George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F. Indeed, the blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music and informs many modal frames, especially the ladder of thirds as in "A Hard Day's Night".

Related Topics:
Blues scale - Popular song - Harold Arlen - Blues ballad - George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue - Modal frames - Ladder of thirds - A Hard Day's Night

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In the early twentieth century, W.C. Handy made the blues more respectable to non-black Americans. The formally trained musician, composer and arranger was a key popularizer of blues. Handy was one of the first to transcribe and then orchestrate blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers. Extremely prolific over his long life, Handy's signature work was the St. Louis Blues.

Related Topics:
W.C. Handy - St. Louis Blues

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Blues forms turn up in some surprising places. The theme to the televised Batman had a blues structure, as did teen idol Fabian's first hit, "Turn Me Loose". Likewise, many jazz classics, such as Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time", also use the blues form without lyrics. The first great country music star Jimmie Rodgers was a blues performer. Guitarist/vocalist Tracy Chapman's hit, "Give Me One Reason," was a 12-bar blues and has, as a result, become a contemporary blues club standard in Chicago.

Related Topics:
Batman - Teen idol - Fabian - Jazz - Charlie Parker - Country music - Jimmie Rodgers - Tracy Chapman

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Influence on rock and roll

The influence of both the twelve-bar structure and the blues scale on rock-and-roll music was so profound that rock-and-roll can properly be classified as an outgrowth of blues, or even "blues with a back beat". Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog", with its unmodified twelve-bar structure (both harmony and lyrics) and a melody centered on flatted third of the tonic (and flatted seventh of the subdominant) is a blues song, transformed to a new genre by rhythm and sheer energy. One can hardly find a major song from rock-and-roll's revolutionary period that is not, at its roots, a blues composition transformed by rhythm: "Johnnie Be Good", "Blue Suede Shoes", "Whole Lotta' Shakin' Going On", "Tutti-Frutti", "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", "What'd I Say", and "Long Tall Sally".

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The early African-American rock musicians retained the frank sexual themes of blues. "Got a gal named Sue, knows just what to do" or "See the girl with the red dress on, she knows how to do it all night long" are hard to mistake. Even the subject matter of "Hound Dog" contains well-hidden sexual double-entendre.

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More sanitized early "white" rock borrowed both the structure and harmonics of blues, although minimizing harmonic creativity and sexual nuance, such as Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock". Many white musicians who covered black rock songs would go so far as to change the words; possibly the most famous example was Pat Boone's cover of "Tutti Frutti", which originally started "Tutti frutti, loose booty . . . a wop bop a lu bop, a good Goddamn."

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Other influences on rock and roll are often cited, especially country music and R&B. It is more accurate to say, however, from a musical perspective, that artists in these musical subgroups adapted blues structure and harmony to their distinctive styles, accents, and vocabularies.

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