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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.
The term blues scale refers to several different scales with differing numbers of pitches and related characteristics. A blues scale is often formed by the addition of an out-of-key "blue note" to an existing scale, notably the flat fifth addition to the minor pentatonic scale. However, the heptatonic blues scale can be considered a major scale ...
Some characteristics, however, were present prior to the creation of the modern blues, and are common to most styles of African American 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]
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.
The Oxford Companion to Music describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory": The first is the "rudiments", that are needed to understand music notation (key signatures, time signatures, and rhythmic notation); the second is learning scholars' views on music from antiquity to the present; the third is a sub-topic of musicology ...
A French horn, one of the important instruments in blues music. New Orleans is generally credited as the birthplace of jazz music, but has attracted less attention as a center of the blues. The 12-bar blues were well known in the city before most of the rest of the country. Buddy Bolden's
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.
Eight-bar blues progressions have more variations than the more rigidly defined twelve bar format. The move to the IV chord usually happens at bar 3 (as opposed to 5 in twelve bar); however, "the I chord moving to the V chord right away, in the second measure, is a characteristic of the eight-bar blues." [1]