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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.
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.
Many Delta blues artists, such as Big Joe Williams, moved to Detroit and Chicago, creating a pop-influenced city blues style. This was displaced by the new Chicago blues sound in the early 1950s, pioneered by Delta bluesmen Muddy Waters , Howlin' Wolf , and Little Walter , that was harking back to a Delta-influenced sound, but with amplified ...
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.
Country blues ran parallel to urban blues, which was popular in cities. [2] Historian Elijah Wald notes many similarities between blues, bluegrass, and country & western styles with roots in the American south. [3] Record labels in the 1920s and 1930s carefully segregated musicians and defined styles for racially targeted audiences. [4]
The origins of the blues are also closely related to the religious music of the African-American community, the spirituals. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery, with the development of juke joints occurring later. It is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves.
The Piedmont blues was named after the Piedmont plateau region, on the East Coast of the United States from about Richmond, Virginia to Atlanta, Georgia.Piedmont blues musicians come from this area, as well as Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and northern Florida, western South Carolina, central North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama – later the Northeastern ...
Chicago blues is a form of blues music that developed in Chicago, Illinois. It is based on earlier blues idioms, such as Delta blues , but is performed in an urban style . It developed alongside the Great Migration of African Americans of the first half of the twentieth century.