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Where did Blues come from?
When did blues music start?
When did blues become popular?
When did blues become an art form?
1912 - The first blues songs, including W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues", are published as sheet music. 1917 – The United States enters World War I. Military and economic mobilization starts the great internal migration of African-America and exposes American troops to blues music, causing a blues music explosion.
- Overview
- Form
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
Britannica Quiz
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Phrase 2 (measures 5–8) IV–IV–I–I
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Feb 21, 2024 · 1870s: Field Hollers and Spiritual Whispers. Looking into “When did blues music start?” will take you back to the 19th Century. By the late 1800s, blues music was beginning to surface among the working class. In the 1870s, people searching for a new way of living after the Civil War started to make songs to sing while they worked.
- Musicnotes
Blues Music History Timeline of Important Dates. Back. More. How It All Went Down. 1619. Slaves Arrive in the Americas. The first African slaves are brought to the American colony of Virginia. Jan 1, 1808. The End of Slave Importation. Congress legislates an end to the importation of slaves to the United States. 1830.
t. e. Blues is a music genre [3] and musical form that originated amongst African-Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. [2] Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture.
- 1860s, Deep South, U.S.
Sep 3, 2021 · Blues has its origins in the late 1800s. The spirituals, work songs, and "field hollers" of the time served as popular music within this community. Over the latter decades of the 19th century, these melodies inspired a new genre unto itself. The blues was born in the 1910s.
May 9, 2018 · The beginnings of the blues can be traced to the late 1860s, arguably the most vicious and violent period in the United States. Vigilante justice was at an all-time high, and by 1889, the lynching of African Americans surged dramatically.
