Blues

Vocal and instrumental musical form, originally derived from African American work songs.

Early blues forms of the blues evolved in the southern parts of the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, using simple instruments such as acoustic guitar and harmonica. Songs tended to have a simple twelve or eight bar structure based on tonic, subdominant and dominant chords. Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the flattened third and dominant seventh (so called blue notes) of the associated major scale.

Lyrically, verses of early blues songs tended to consist a single line repeated two or three times before, such as:

:Woke up this morning with the blues down in my soul

:Saying "My baby gone and left me, got a heart as black as coal"

In the 1940s and 1950s, increased urbanisation and the use of amplification led to electric blues music, popular in cities such as Chicago and best exemplified by such artists as Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters.