Examining The Genre Of The Blues
The Blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience
alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre created within the African-American communities in the Deep South of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.
It is a form of Afro-American origin in which a modal melody has been harmonized with Western tonal chords and has evolved from an unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of African-American slaves (imported from West Africa; principally present day Mali, Senegal, the Gambia and Ghana) and rural blacks into a wide variety of styles and sub-genres, with regional variations across the United States. Blues music also adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs", minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment.
Blues lyrics are often intensely personal, frequently contain sexual references and often deal with the pain of betrayal, desertion, and unrequited love or with unhappy situations such as being jobless, hungry, broke, away from home, lonely, or downhearted because of an unfaithful lover.
It can be subdivided in several sub-genres ranging from country to urban blues that were more or less popular during different periods of the 20th century. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and call-and-response, and they form a repetitive effect called a groove.
Blues is as honest a musical form as it is uplifting. It is life-with all its ups and downs intact and it is responsible for most American music forms. The Blues is the foundation on which all other 20th century music was built. And, is one of America's greatest musical treasures.
The blues is survival music but quality survival. It is marked by the use of what are called "blue notes" and call-and-response patterns, and the name blues music came from the longer term "having a fit of the blue devils," which means being in low spirits. The blues is a type of music that incorporates blue notes to create tension and the unique sound we recognize as the blues.
The blues is, when polio freezes your fingers and shrivels your legs, you play a baby-blue Epiphone guitar on your lap in a wheelchair, chording the strings with a butter knife. It is, when you find the fine, big woman of your dreams, she dies in your arms of a heart attack just before dawn.
The blues is, when the searing light from your welder's torch slowly, gradually burns much of the sight from your eyes, you sit on your porch in the cool damp of the afternoon and sing to the rhythms in your own mind, then go into town for a bottle of Wild Irish Rose.
The blues is the foundation of every major American music form in the United States but it is often overlooked or misunderstood by both students and adults. The blues is history, art, music, literature, and much more. It is so simple that it is capable of endless evolution and interpretation.
by: Jackie Spivey
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