Blues chord progressions tablature3/7/2024 ![]() Many blues elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa. ![]() The blues, as it is now known, can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and the West African call-and-response tradition, transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar. ![]() The earliest blues-like music was a "functional expression, rendered in a call-and-response style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure." This pre-blues music was adapted from slave field shouts and hollers, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content". However, some characteristics have been present since before the creation of the modern blues and are common to most styles of African American music. There are few characteristics common to all blues, because the genre takes its shape from the peculiarities of individual performances. In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood. Though usage of the phrase in African American music may be older, it has been attested to since 1912 in Memphis, Tennessee with W. Later during the 19th century, the phrase was used as a euphemism for delirium tremens and the police. An early reference to this can be found in George Colman's farce Blue devils, a farce in one act (1798). The phrase the blues is a synonym for having a fit of the blue devils, meaning low spirits, depression and sadness. The blues has been a major influence on later American and Western popular music, finding expression in ragtime, jazz, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and country music, as well as conventional pop songs. The use of blue notes and the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics are indicative of the blues' West African pedigree. The form evolved in the United States in the communities of former African slaves from spirituals, praise songs, field hollers, shouts, and chants. The blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on a pentatonic scale and a characteristic twelve-bar chord progression.
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