Blues music examples

Blues songs
Blues music
Blues instruments

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Books

Longlisted for the PEN America Jacqueline Bogard Weld Award for Biography
Named a Best Arts Book of the Year by Library Journal

“A fluent read of a major artist’s evolution . . . de Visé has dived deeply into the world of an American master and discovered that the guitar god was mortal after all . . . The author is at his best when homed in on King’s sound.” —Preston Lauterbach, Wall Street Journal

“A comprehensive and unfiltered look at the complex musical giant . . . De Visé tells King’s fascinating story with great detail and fluid prose . . . King of the Blues helps encapsulate his incredible life and his enduring legacy.”—Jackson Clarion Ledger

“Adds flesh and blood to the standard cultural codification of King as icon. It presents a career full of ambition and a life informed by longing, with triumphs and setbacks, discrimination and canonization.”—Houston Chronicle

“A full-blown hero’s journey . . . Filled with interviews with King’s relatives, band members and managers, the resulting biography feels at once intimate and encyclopedic, offerin

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Blues

Musical form and music genre

This article is about the music genre. For other uses, see Blues (disambiguation).

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. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and 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. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove.

Blues music is characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first de

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5 A short history of the blues

The blues emerged from the oppressed, economically disadvantaged African-American communities in the rural southern states of America in the years following the American Civil War (1861–1865). Blues singers were descendants of slaves and elements of their music reach back to African origins. This course offers just a brief introduction, and only affords a glimpse of the complexities of music that is deeply rooted in social and political history.

Many of the best known blues musicians came from the southern states of America, and some would argue that the Mississippi Delta was the birthplace of the blues. This area had a greater concentration of black people than any other part of the country, and an economy based largely on cotton farming which meant that this was also an area in which segregation and social isolation of black people through lack of economic opportunity was deeply entrenched.

Box 1 Slavery in America

Although the international slave trade ended in 1807, in America slavery continued. The northern states of America had declared