This
week's lecture is “Overview”, the 1st topic of “Blues”, which is a summary of the contents
of “110. Blues: 1. Overview”
introduced on November 11th, 2017.
Blues
is a music genre and musical form that originated in the southern United States
around the 1860s by African-Americans as a music rooted in African-American
work songs and spirituals. Blues includes spirituals, work songs, field
hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form,
found in jazz, rhythm and blues and rock and roll, is characterized by the
call-and-response pattern, the blues scale and specific chord progressions, of
which the twelve-bar blues is the most common.
In
addition, the blue notes, which refers to the scale in which the thirds and
sevenths are lowered by a semitone in the diatonic scale of Western music, is
also an essential part of the blues sound.
Blues
as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines and instrumentation.
Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times,
and it was during the first decades of the 20th century that the current
structure became standard. Early blues was a loose narrative form related to
racial discrimination and many of the difficulties experienced by
African-Americans.
The
origins of many elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of
blue notes, date back to African music, and the origins of blues are also
closely related to the spirituals, the religious music of the African-American
community. The first appearance of blues dates back to juke joints, associated
with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves, that developed after
slavery was over. According to chroniclers, reports about blues music began in
the early 20th century, and the first blues sheet music was published in 1908.
Since then, blues has evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral
traditions of slaves into a variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres
include country blues such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues and urban blues
styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues. World War II marked the
transition from acoustic blues to electric blues and the progressive opening of
blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. A hybrid form
called blues rock, which mixed blues style with rock music, was developed in
the 1960s and 1970s.
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