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Before the blues gained its formal definition in terms of chord progressions, it was defined as the secular counterpart of spirituals. It was the low-down music played by rural blacks. [25] Depending on the religious community a musician belonged to, it was more or less considered a sin to play this low-down music: blues was the devil's music.
The earliest blues-like music was a "functional expression, rendered in a call-and-response style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure". [6] This pre-blues music was adapted from the field shouts and hollers performed during slave times, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with ...
Blues is a music genre and musical form that originated amongst African-Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues has incorporated spirituals , work songs , field hollers , shouts , chants , and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture .
Traditional blues verses in folk-music tradition have also been called floating lyrics or maverick stanzas.Floating lyrics have been described as “lines that have circulated so long in folk communities that tradition-steeped singers call them instantly to mind and rearrange them constantly, and often unconsciously, to suit their personal and community aesthetics”.
From the late 19th century the term ballad began to be used for sentimental songs with their origins in the early ‘Tin Pan Alley’ music industry. [5] As new genres of music, including the blues, began to emerge in the early 20th century the popularity of the genre faded, but the association with sentimentality meant led to this being used as the term for a slow love song from the 1950s onward.
Subsequently, the early Delta blues (as well as other genres) were extensively recorded by John Lomax and his son Alan Lomax, who crisscrossed the southern U.S. recording music played and sung by ordinary people, helping establish the canon of genres known today as American folk music.
The acoustic roots-focused movement also gave rise to the terms "folk blues" and "acoustic blues", especially being applied to performances and recordings made around this period. [1] "Country blues" has also been used to describe regional acoustic styles, such as Delta blues, Piedmont blues, or the earliest Chicago, Texas, and Memphis blues. [1]
African blues is a genre of popular music, primarily from West Africa. The term may also reference a putative journey undertaken by traditional African music from its homeland to the United States and back. [ 1 ]