The Blues Music Essay examples

A single source of blues music cannot be traced, but Ma Rainey is rightfully credited with introducing it to the world. Hence the reason she was dubbed as “The Mother of the Blues”. During an interview in the 1930s, Ma told musicologist John Work, that she heard what would be called blues, for the first time around 1902. She was in a small town in Missouri working a show at the time, and one morning a local girl came into the tent singing about a man whom had left her. This new style of soulful music drew in Ma Rainey so much she later had the girl teach her the song. Rainey performed the song as an encore in a show soon after, earning a special place in the show, and marking the start of her career (Jas Obrecht Archive).

The blues is a musical style of feeling, a style about playing what comes from your heart. It came from work songs, field chants, spirituals, field hollers and revivalist hymns from the African American communities. Blues is associated with the sad times

     The Blues musical move was prominent during the 1920s and '30s, a time known as the Harlem Renaissance. Blues music characteristically told the story of

Elvis Presley, Macy Gray and many other players have conveyed the value of blues. They tried to attract the audience by using the devise of early blue practitioners. Blues have finally spread the globe. In Japan, Brazilian and many other countries, there are blue bands. Blue contains some properties such as honest and enduring. Since blues initiated from people’s struggling and personal identifying, it represents the American story. That is the reason that the blues is convincingly and having strong beats

Rhythm and blues, also known today as “R & B”, has been one of the most influential genres of music within the African American Culture, and has evolved over many decades in style and sound. Emerging in the late 1940's rhythm and blues, sometimes called jump blues, became dominant black popular music during and after WWII. Rhythm and blues artists often sung about love, relationships, life troubles, and sometimes focused on segregation and race struggles. Rhythm and blues helped embody what was unique about black American culture and validate it as something distinctive and valuable.

“When first entering in America, British folk music was distinguished by three-chord tunes, sparse instrumentation (with some fiddlers), mostly male performers, improvisation, the singers’ sporadic shouts (Scottish “yips”), Christian themes served up in hundreds of hymns, and a secular collection of songs that told stories, generally about love and lost love, using metaphor and symbol to tell those stories” (Allen 101). By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British music changed and became Americanized. Vocal harmonizing slowly evolved, and fiddlers were accompanied by those who played banjo, an African American opening. “Tambourines and “bones” (tapping out rhythms using pork rib bones) were a minstrel show contribution” (Allen 102). When African Americans were forced into slavery and brought to North America in the 1600s, they brought their own musical traditions and sounds. Slaves who were on the Mississippi River Valley delta soil developed what will later be introduced as blues music. On the plantations, slaves greatly changed British American hymn singing. They took non-religious British American songs and turned it into their own forms of music that followed their culture and taste of music. Blues emerged in the early twentieth century at the same time country music became settled from its folk roots. Blues music talked about the indifferences African American slaves were going through at that time. “The blues voiced human

Blues began in the south and slowly made its way into the great cities of the North. As

The musical structure of the blues is very easy to understand. Blue was created upon three main chords. The standard blues, called the 12 bar blues, a certain idea is expressed twice in a repeated lyric and then responded to or completed in a third line. This was a way to put his or her own signature on a song. Blues artist will at spefic points use vocal scoops, swoops, and slurs, imitate sounds of the instruments, or add percussive style to the execution.

The music styles of Jazz and Blues are both considered to be great American musical art forms (Covach, 2015). These styles are also two very important “roots” of music and have evolved from the late 19th century and early 20th century to lead to the development of Rock and Roll. Jazz and Blues both originated from African-American communities when slaves were brought over to North America from Africa (Schuller, 1986). As time passed and the culture of America was constantly changing, so was the music of that time period. The country was starting to recover from slavery and many Caucasians and African Americans were beginning to emerge in the music scene together. From the Blues era, we get artists like B.B.

This new modern, urbanised type of blues kept the glissando (sliding) techniques from the Delta blues (Blues Guitar Plus, 2011) that were prevalent on the guitar. However, Chicago Blues had its own unique features as well, such as walking basslines and call and response (AKAM Music Department, 2015). They also kept the traditional AAB structure that was typical to most blues music before, especially in the vocals and lyrics of each song. The Chicago blues, as stated earlier, was more modern and industrialised and this is evident in the fact that practitioners replaced the acoustic guitars of the Delta Blues with new, electric guitars and, hence, made a new form of blues that was more dynamic than its predecessor (UPchicago.com,

Nowadays the blues revolve around the meaning of sadness but doesn’t have a true message of fighting for survival or deprivation of freedom. In the process of searching for the modern day blues, it was discovered that the music is compiled by mostly Caucasian artist compared to the past where it was conceived by blacks to prompt their practices and beliefs.

“3 O’Clock Blues” follows the conventional lyrical structure of most twelve-bar blues (AAB, with no distinguishable chorus).

Blues guitar originated around the 19th century in the deep south of the United States. In the Deep South, a large black population existed and many of them succumbed to slavery and racial oppressions. In these hard times, music became a common language between them. The blacks that were being culturally oppressed expressed their emotions by playing Blues music. One of the earliest forms of blues was being formed in the Mississippi delta which is known as Delta Blues. It reflected the oppressive nature of life the blacks had. It displayed short repetitive phrases and was more percussive than melodic. The delta blues encompasses bottleneck guitar style as it utilizes tons of sliding techniques. The slides techniques were adopted by later

2.      The blues first emerged as a distinct type of music in the late-1800s. Spirituals, work songs, seculars, field hollers and arhoolies all had some form of influence on the blues. Early blues were a curious mixture of African cross-rhythms and vocal techniques, Anglo-American melodies and thematic material from fables and folktales, and tales of personal experience on

Blues music was described as an African folk music harmonized with Western chords. It was the main influence of the development of rock and roll and basically every other sub-genre of rock and roll. Its rhythm comes from African traditions. A variety of the melodies found in this genre of music come from slave work songs, and the main source of music that was very influential to it was Southern religious music.