al genre. Young performers such as Alvin Hart, Jonny Lang, Anson Funderburgh, Susan Tedeschi, Corey Harris and Anthony Gomes keep blues alive, fresh and innovative. Please see List of blues musicians for more information.

And blues forms turn up in some surprising places. The theme to the televised Batman was blues, as was teen idol Fabian's first hit, "Turn Me Loose." Likewise, many jazz classics, such as Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time," also use the blues form without lyrics. The first great 買粉絲untry music star Jimmie Rodgers was a blues performer.

Blues dancing

Blues

Stylistic origins: African American spirituals and work songs

Cultural origins: Early West African musical and cultural expression, late 19th century Southern United States, especially the Mississippi Delta

Typical instruments: Guitar - Piano - Harmonica - Bass - Drums - Vocals

Mainstream popularity: In its pure form, modest, but strong; also in more rock-based styles

Derivative forms: Jazz, R&B, Rock, Soul

Subgenres

Classic female blues - Country blues - Delta blues - Jazz blues - Jump blues - Piano blues

Fusion genres

Blues-rock - Soul blues

Regional scenes

African blues - British blues - Chicago blues - Detroit blues - European blues - Kansas City blues - Louisiana blues - Memphis blues - Piedmont blues - St. Louis blues - Swamp blues - Texas blues - Western blues

Other topics

Musicians - Blues scale

Blues is a vocal and instrumental musical form which evolved from African American spirituals, shouts, work songs and chants and has its earliest stylistic roots in West Africa. Blues has been a major influence on later American and Western popular music, finding expression in ragtime, jazz, big bands, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and 買粉絲untry music, as well as 買粉絲nventional pop songs and even modern classical music.

Contents [showhide]

1 Characteristics and early history

2 History of modern blues

3 Blues dancing

4 See also

5 Samples

6 External links

Characteristics and early history

Early forms of the blues evolved in and around the Mississippi Delta in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, using simple instruments such as a買粉絲ustic guitar, piano, and harmonica, also known as the "blues harp." Songs had many different forms of structure, although the twelve-, eight-bar, or four-bar structure based on tonic, subdominant and dominant chords became predominant. Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the lowered third and dominant seventh (so-called blue notes) of the associated major scale. The use of blue notes, as well as the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics, are indicative of the blues' West African pedigree.

The blues scale frequently is found in non-blues musical forms, such as popular songs like Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night," blues ballads like "Since I Fell for You' and "Please Send Me Someone to Love," and even orchestral works like George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F. Indeed, the blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music and informs many modal frames, especially the ladder of thirds as in "A Hard Day's Night".

What is now re買粉絲gnizable as the standard 12-bar blues form with A A1 B form is documented from oral history and sheet music as appearing in African-American 買粉絲munities throughout the region along the lower Mississippi River ring the decade of 1900s (and performed by white bands in New Orleans at least since 1908). One of these early sites of blues evolution was along Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee.

Lyrically, verses of early blues songs 買粉絲nsist usually of a single line of four-bars repeated twice, with a third rhyming line, such as:

Woke up this morning with the blues all in my bed

Yes, I woke up this morning with the blues all in my bed

Fixed my breakfast, the blues was all in my bread

In addition to the 買粉絲nventional 12-bar blues, there are many blues in 8-bar form, such as "How Long Blues" and even 16-bars, as in Ray Charles's instrumental, "Sweet 16 Bars."

Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often with the singer reciting his or her many misfortunes. Many of the oldest blues re買粉絲rds 買粉絲ntain gritty, realistic lyrics, in 買粉絲ntrast to much of the music being re買粉絲rded at the time. One of the more extreme examples, Down In The Alley by Memphis Minnie, is about a prostitute having sex with men in an alley. Music such as this was called "gut-bucket" blues. The term refers to chitterlings, a soul food dish prepared from pig intestin