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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 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 .
The colonial history of the United States began in 1607 with the colonization of Jamestown, Virginia. Music of all genres and origins emerged as the United States began to form. From the Indigenous spiritual music to the African banjos, music in the United States is as diverse as its people.
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]
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.
One musical influence that can be traced back to African sources is that of the plantation work songs with their call-and-response format, and more especially the relatively free-form field hollers of the later sharecroppers, which seem to have been directly responsible for the characteristic vocal style of the blues.