This melancholy has led to the suggestion of an Igbo origin for blues because of the reputation the Igbo had throughout plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and outlook on life when they were enslaved. African-American singers voiced his or her "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, hard times". The lines are often sung following a pattern closer to rhythmic talk than to a melody.Įarly blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative. Handy wrote that he adopted this convention to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times. Two of the first published blues songs, " Dallas Blues" (1912) and " Saint Louis Blues" (1914), were 12-bar blues with the AAB lyric structure. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the so-called AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. The lyrics of early traditional blues verses probably often consisted of a single line repeated four times. Some sources state that the term blues is related to " blue notes", the flatted, often microtonal notes used in blues, but the Oxford English Dictionary claims that the term blues came first and led to the naming of "blue notes". In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood. Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, when Hart Wand's " Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition. As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils, and "it came to mean a state of agitation or depression." By the 1800s in the United States, the term blues was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase blue law, which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday. The phrase blue devils may also have been derived from Britain in the 1600s, when the term referred to the "intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal". The term blues may have come from "blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness an early use of the term in this sense is in George Colman's one-act farce Blue Devils (1798). In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues rock developed, which blended blues styles with rock music. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. Blues subgenres include country blues, such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres. The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century. It is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery and, later, the development of juke joints. The origins of the blues are also closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals. Many elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the racial discrimination and other challenges experienced by African-Americans. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation.
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