Why is it called the blues?
The name of this great American music probably originated with the 17th-century English expression “the blue devils,” for the intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal. Shortened over time to “the blues,” it came to mean a state of agitation or depression.
idiom. : feeling sad and discouraged. He's been singing the blues since he lost his job.
The blues is a form of secular folk music created by African Americans in the early 20th century, originally in the South. Although instrumental accompaniment is almost universal in the blues, the blues is essentially a vocal form.
Blues is both a musical form and a musical genre. Blues gets its name from its original association with melancholy subjects and sounds: when we have 'the blues', we're feeling sad.
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture.
"When you ain't got no money, you've got the Blues. When you ain't got no money to pay your house rent, you've still got the Blues. A lot of people holler 'I don't like no Blues', but when you ain't got no money, and you can't pay your house rent, and can't buy no food, you damn sure got the Blues!" life."
The social significance of Blues music resides in the revolutionary element of African Americans creating their own aesthetics. Blues music represented the opposing voice that refused to be silenced by oppression and segregation. The Blues expressed this with unprecedented clarity, honesty and simplicity.
If you have the so-called blues, you might feel sad or tearful, want to spend time by yourself, and lack your usual energy or motivation. These feelings usually tend to be pretty mild, though, and they generally pass before too long.
They remind you that you're not the first to struggle with situations such as relationships or money problems. They give you perspective. You start to think maybe your problems aren't as bad as you think they are. You find humor in your situation and laugh about it.
Blues comes in many different flavors, roughly 25 of them, each with their own nuances and style. Here are a few of the most popular genres of blues music and how you can recognize them from the first note!
How do you describe blues music?
Traditional blues music is often characterized by emotive lyrics, guitar-driven accompaniment, and a twelve-bar AAB song form that blues musicians can embellish as they wish. Blues bands and solo artists can play the style of music on acoustic or electric instruments.
(idiomatic, by extension) To complain, especially in order to obtain sympathy for one's own purportedly sad situation.
Musically, Blues is a scale and chord progression that expresses the emotions of being depressed very well, but it CAN have happy lyrics.
The earliest references to blues date back to the 1890s and early 1900s. In 1912 Black bandleader W.C. Handy's composition “Memphis Blues” was published. It became very popular, and thereafter many other Tin Pan Alley songs entitled blues began to appear.
- Nurture Physical Health. Eat and Move. Eat healthy and get some exercise no matter what — even during vacations, holiday seasons and stressful times. ...
- Care for Emotional and Spiritual Health. Be Honest. ...
- Make Time to Relax. Move Gently. ...
- Minimize Stress. Don't Overbook.
The blues originated on Southern plantations in the 19th Century. Its inventors were slaves, ex-slaves and the descendants of slaves—African-American sharecroppers who sang as they toiled in the cotton and vegetable fields.
The blues are often referred to as the mother of modern musical forms.
The origins and birth of the blues
Enslaved people would sing work songs while working the plantations and religious spirituals in church. Combined with the African rhythms, these musical styles were the foundation of blues. Work songs were sung rhythmically in time with the task being done.
blues and twos noun earlier than 1985
Blues and twos is a colloquial British phrase referring to the blue flashing lights and two-tone siren of a police car or other emergency vehicle which is responding to some incident (although the lights are no longer necessarily blue, nor the siren necessarily two-tone).
Muir, pianist, composer and lecturer, explains that a piano work titled I Got the Blues (1908), written and published in New Orleans by Antonio Maggio, is the first both to include the word blues and to use a twelve-bar blues sequence.
What is the relation between slavery and the blues?
The birth of the blues
The majority of blues musicians had descendants from Africa who were transported to America in the slave trade and were forced to work on plantations in the South, and factories in the North. Enslaved people would sing work songs while working the plantations and religious spirituals in church.
The term "rhythm and blues," often called "R&B," originated in the 1940s when it replaced "race music" as a general marketing term for all African American music, though it usually referred only to secular, not religious music.