15 Facts About Blues

Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s by African-Americans from roots in African-American work songs and spirituals.

Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.

Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres.

Blues was a free-born black woman from Pennsylvania who was working as a schoolteacher in South Carolina, instructing both slaves and freedmen, and wrote that she "came home with the blues" because she felt lonesome and pitied herself.

Blues overcame her depression and later noted a number of songs, such as "Poor Rosy", that were popular among the slaves.

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Blues form is a cyclic musical form in which a repeating progression of chords mirrors the call and response scheme commonly found in African and African-American music.

Blues has evolved from the unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves imported from West Africa and rural blacks into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States.

Blues music adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs", minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment.

Blues became a code word for a record designed to sell to black listeners.

Blues performances were organized by the Theater Owners Bookers Association in nightclubs such as the Cotton Club and juke joints such as the bars along Beale Street in Memphis.

Blues performers such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters continued to perform to enthusiastic audiences, inspiring new artists steeped in traditional blues, such as New York–born Taj Mahal.

Blues' 12-bar structure and the blues scale was a major influence on rock and roll music.

Blues asked several famous directors such as Clint Eastwood and Wim Wenders to participate in a series of documentary films for PBS called The Blues.

Blues participated in the rendition of compilations of major blues artists in a series of high-quality CDs.

Blues was highlighted in season 2012, episode 1 of In Performance at the White House, entitled "Red, White and Blues".