109_5-2013.pdf

We say we have the Blues when feeling down. But the "Blues" is also a genre of music, one that is difficult to define but is most characteristically defined as something with a specific chord progression - one that includes the twelve-bar and the 'blue note', one that is flattened or bent in relation to the pitch of the major scale.

Nobody knows for sure how the Blues got its name or how it originated but many theorize that it started with unaccompanied vocal music of poor black laborers between 1870 and 1900. Prior to this, many of Blues characteristics is said to be traced back to the music of Africa, most particularly in the way it uses a wavy, nasal intonation.

The progression of Blues from this early time then rolls into early spirituals or religious songs at camp meetings. Like Blues, spirituals were passionate songs that conveyed to listeners the same feeling of rootlessness and misery as the Blues. Spirituals, however, were less specifically concerning the performer and rather instead about the general loneliness of mankind. Despite these differences, the two forms are similar enough that they could not be easily separated — many spirituals would probably have been called Blues had that word been in wide use at the time.

Country music was not country in its time as it too was considered the 'blues'. Both types of music during the nineteenth century were also