The blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on the full twelve note chromatic scale plus the microtonal intervals and a characteristic eight and twelve-bar chord progression. The form evolved in the United States in the communities of former African slaves from spirituals, praise songs, field hollers, shouts, and chants. 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 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 phrase the blues is a synonym for having a fit of the blue devils, meaning down spirits, depression and sadness. An early reference to this can be found in George Colman's farce Blue devils, a farce in one act (1798). Later during the 19th century, the phrase was used as a euphemism for delirium tremens and the police. Though usage of the phrase in African American music may be older, it has been attested to since 1912 in Memphis, Tennessee with W. C. Handy's "Memphis Blues".The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition, 1989) gives Handy as the earliest attestation of "Blues."Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 2002, Routledge (UK), ISBN 0415291895 In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood.Tony Bolden, Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture, 2004, University of Illinois Press, ISBN 0252028740

Characteristics

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Origins

There are few characteristics common to all blues, because the genre takes its shape from the idiosyncracies of individual performances.Southern, pg. 333 However, some characteristics have been present since before the creation of the modern blues and are common to most styles of African American music. 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."Garofalo, pg. 44 This pre-blues music was adapted from slave field shouts and hollers, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content".Ferris, pg. 229 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.Morales, pg 276 Morales attributes this claim to John Storm Roberts in Black Music of Two Worlds, beginning his discussion with a quote from Roberts There does not seem to be the same African quality in blues forms as there clearly is in much Caribbean music.

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