Blues (English: Blues, meaning "blue", also transliterated as blues) is a kind of vocal and instrumental music based on the pentatonic scale. Another feature of it is its special harmony. Blues originated from the soul music, hymns, labor songs, shouts and hymns of African American slaves in the past. The "blues sound" used in the blues and the way it is sung show its West African origins. Blues had a great influence on later American and Western pop music. Ragtime, jazz, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, rock music, country music and ordinary pop songs, and even modern classical music all contain blues elements or elements. Developed from the blues. [1] In poetry, this word is often used to describe melancholy. The word blues has the same meaning as "Blue devils", which means low-key mood, sadness and melancholy. As early as 1798, George Corman wrote a farce called "The Blue Devil, a Farce." In the 19th century the word was used to refer to delirium tremens and police. The use of the term in African American music may be older. "Memphis Blues" by William Christopher Handy in Memphis in 1912 is the earliest written record of the term in music. Blues music began in the American South in the early 20th century. It is also mixed with the rhythm and rhyme similar to the recital form in the church. This kind of music has an obvious special style, which is to use the "call and response" form similar to Chinese folk songs, which is called "Call and Response" in English. At first, the musical phrase will give people a feeling of tension, crying, and helplessness, and then the subsequent musical phrase will seem to comfort and relieve the suffering people. It’s like a suffering person crying to God, and then receiving God’s comfort and response! Therefore, blues music places great emphasis on the catharsis of self-emotions and originality or improvisation. This improvisational playing method later slowly evolved into various types of music, such as Rock and Roll, Swing, Jazz... ..So blues is also the root of modern pop music. The harmonica has been widely used in blues music since about the mid-twenties. At that time, there were many street performers in the United States performing music. Their common instruments were banjos, drums, and something called "pan quill pipes" of wind instruments. Since guitars and harmonicas have better performance than these traditional instruments and are more suitable for performing in rough places, harmonicas are gradually used to play blues music. Around the 1930s, many black people moved to the big city of Chicago, and blues music and blues harmonica also spread in Chicago, and later formed a genre of their own called Chicago Blues. When listening to blues music, you will find that they all seem to follow the same musical form. The reason is because a standard form of music commonly used in blues concerts is called 12 Bar Blues. Origins of the Blues Because the blues were shaped by individual performances, it is difficult to pinpoint the unique characteristics of all blues. But before the emergence of modern blues, all African American music had certain similarities. The earliest blues-style music was a "functional expression, and its response singing had no accompaniment, harmony, was not restricted to any form, and did not have any special musical structure." These shouts and calls originated from slaves working in the fields. The pre-blues music gradually expanded into "simple, single-vocal songs with emotional content." Today's blues can be seen as music based on European chord structures and the alternating playing of singing and guitar developed from African inspiration traditions. Many elements of blues, such as the form of response and the use of blues sounds, can be traced to African music. Sylviane Diouf points out certain features - such as the use of melisma and light, nasal tones - that seem to indicate the blues' connection with the music of Central and West Africa. Ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik was probably the first to point out that certain elements of the blues came from Africa.

For example, Kubik points out that the Mississippian technique of using a blade to play the guitar, which Handy describes in his autobiography, is very common in West and Central African cultures, where the guitar-like twenty-one-string harp (kora) is the most commonly used. Singing accompanied by string instruments. This technique involves the guitarist pressing a knife against the strings of the guitar and may be the origin of the slide guitar technique. Later, the blues absorbed the minstrel show and black spiritual songs of black music, including their instruments and chord accompaniment. Blues is also closely related to ragtime, but blues better preserves "the melodic structure of original African music." [5] The structure of the early songs was very different. Songs from this period can be found on recordings by Leadbelly and Henry Thomas. But later the blues form based on tonic harmony, subdominant harmony and all-orange fifth note harmony became the most popular form. What is considered today the quintessential 12-bar blues emerged in the black communities of the lower Mississippi River in the early 1900s, a process documented both in oral history and in musical notation. Beale Street in Memphis was one of the places where the early blues was formed.

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