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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.
Little is known about the exact origin of the music now known as the blues. [1] No specific year can be cited as its origin, largely because the style evolved over a long period but blues is inarguably a Black American art form as it is noted "it is impossible to say exactly how old blues is - certainly no older than the presence of Negroes in the United States.
In this context, some authors have raised the fundamental question of the motives that prompted white musicians to take up elements of African-American music in the first place, especially in the racist climate that prevailed in the southern states at the beginning of the 20th century. The fact that it was something new initially played a role.
Country blues (also folk blues, rural blues, backwoods blues, or downhome blues) is one of the earliest forms of blues music. The mainly solo vocal with acoustic fingerstyle guitar accompaniment developed in the rural Southern United States in the early 20th century. [ 1 ]
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.
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.
It is frequently used in jazz and the blues. [93] Bluegrass is a subgenre of American country music, born in Kentucky and the mountains of Appalachia. It has its roots in the traditional folk music of the Scottish, and Irish. [94] Blue can sometimes represent happiness and optimism in popular songs, [95] usually referring to blue skies. [96]
In theory, "music history" could refer to the study of the history of any type or genre of music (e.g., the history of Nigerian music or the history of rock); in practice, these research topics are often categorized as part of ethnomusicology or cultural studies, whether or not they are ethnographically based.