2023: 1930 Chronology: Appendix 18: The Blues

Appendix 18

The Blues

Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call and response pattern, the blues scale, and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove.

One of the first wholly American styles of music to gain traction and recognition across the world was blues music, developed in the American South by African slaves, many of whom were Muslim.  An estimated thirty percent (30%) of African slaves brought to America were Muslim. Blues music is heavily influenced by "field holler" songs, songs sung by the slaves as they worked in the fields. The Muslim slaves added their own flair to their field holler songs with the way they sang words that seem to quiver and shake being very reminiscent of the Adhan, or the Islamic call to prayer.

Blues, as a genre, is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation.  Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the racial discrimination and other challenges experienced by African Americans.

Many elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa.  The origins of the blues are also closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery and, later, the development of juke joints -- African American drinking, dancing and gambling establishments.  Blues is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century. The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues.  World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues rock developed, which blended blues styles with rock music. 

The term 'Blues' may have originated from "blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness. An early use of the term in this sense is in George Colman's one-act farce Blue Devils (1798). The phrase 'blue devils' may also have been derived from a British usage of the 1600s referring to the "intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal". As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils and came to mean a state of agitation or depression. By the 1800s, in the United States, the term "blues" was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase "blue law", which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday.

In 1827, it was in the sense of a sad state of mind that John James Audubon wrote to his wife that he "had the blues". The phrase "the blues" was written by Charlotte Forten, then aged 25, in her diary on December 14, 1862. She was a free-born black woman from Pennsylvania who was working as a schoolteacher in South Carolina, instructing both slaves and freedmen, and wrote that she "came home with the blues" because she felt lonesome and pitied herself. She overcame her depression and later noted a number of songs, such as "Poor Rosy", that were popular among the slaves. Although she admitted being unable to describe the manner of singing she heard, Forten wrote that the songs "can't be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit", conditions that have inspired countless blues songs.

Though the use of the phrase in African American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition. In lyrics, the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood.