Language of the Blues - Edmonton Blues Society

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Songs:
- Blind Blake (Arthur Blake)
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B L U ES
The most popular version of the
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bar, I-IV-V chord progression, and typically repeats a lyric line twice at the beginning of
each verse. The blues form is described in European musical terms as based on a major
scale with the third and dominant seventh notes flattened, or as a twelve-bar sequence of
tonic, subdominant, and dominant seventh chords.
Blues People
the cart before
system in terms of another, to describe a non-diatonic
35
51 The
blues cannot be defined in strictly African terms either, however. The best way to define
the blues may be to say that blues music is an American music that reflects African
musical devices and aesthetics.
Even though their native languages and music were forcibly suppressed, African slaves in
the American colonies managed to hold onto the aesthetic values of African music- and
these profoundly influenced the development of American popular music. Blues, jazz,
and rock reflect not only African musical and vocal techniques, but also African
principles regarding musical improvisation and such aesthe
In Yoruba culture, for example,
described as (itutu
cool or
soulful musician. Interestingly, the color most often used to symbolize this quality in
African art is blue.
th
-century English expression, "the blue devils," which
described the intense visual hallucinations of delirium tremens, the trembling and
phrase came to mean a state of emotional agitation or depression. Although there are
happy, up-
), most blues songs mine a
melancholic vein, and express feelings of loss and emotional turmoil.
52 Among African
Americans, an intimate couples dance called the slow drag that involved plastering as
slowly was also called
jammed on a Saturday night with couples getting their drink on and doing the precoital
shuffle to the accompaniment of a bluesman on guitar, stomping the beat out on the floor
with his foot.