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Many blues songs were developed in American folk music traditions and individual songwriters are sometimes unidentified. [1] Blues historian Gerard Herzhaft noted: In the case of very old blues songs, there is the constant recourse to oral tradition that conveyed the tune and even the song itself while at the same time evolving for several decades.
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 has incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture.
A major feature of the blues scale is the use of blue notes—notes that are played or sung microtonally, at a slightly higher or lower pitch than standard. [5] However, since blue notes are considered alternative inflections, a blues scale may be considered to not fit the traditional definition of a scale. [6]
In music, a standard is a musical composition of established popularity, considered part of the "standard repertoire" of one or several genres. [1] [2] Even though the standard repertoire of a given genre consists of a dynamic and partly subjective set of songs, these can be identified by having been performed or recorded by a variety of musical acts, often with different arrangements.
The twelve-bar blues (or blues changes) is one of the most prominent chord progressions in popular music. The blues progression has a distinctive form in lyrics, phrase, chord structure, and duration. In its basic form, it is predominantly based on the I, IV, and V chords of a key.
In jazz and blues, a blue note is a note that—for expressive purposes—is sung or played at a slightly different pitch from standard. Typically the alteration is between a quartertone and a semitone , but this varies depending on the musical context.
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The root movement of the V−IV−I cadential formula found in the blues is considered nontraditional from the standpoint of Western harmony. [7] The motion of the V−IV−I cadence has been considered "backward," [2] as, in traditional harmony, the subdominant normally prepares for the dominant which then has a strong tendency to resolve to the tonic.