How to Appreciate the Blues

The blues is a truly American musical form created by slaves, who drew on their suffering and oppression. It is a combination of African and European musical and verse elements.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Acoustic Guitars
• Banjos
• Harmonicas
• CD Players
• West African Music CDs
• Blues CDs

1. Imagine the color blue, which has always been thought of as the color of sadness or melancholy.
2. Read historical accounts of slaves brought to the southern United States and take note of the various musical forms they brought with them. The percussive elements, the rhythm of blues, come from West Africa, which is the area many slaves were taken from.
3. Buy and listen to CDs of present-day music from Ghana, Senegal, Gambia, Congo, Gabon and Cameroon.
4. Be aware that "the blues" came about on Southern plantations as a combination of the call and response of field chants, or work songs, and spirituals, which were songs to God that begged for deliverance. They expressed common themes of anger, loneliness and despair.
5. Familiarize yourself with the blues scale. It is a major scale with third, fifth and seventh notes lowered half a step, making it almost a minor scale.
6. Familiarize yourself with the construction of blues songs, which is formal in the extreme. It consists of definite progressions of harmonies in 8, 12 or 16 measures (12 is the most common).
7. Listen for the sound of the banjo. This was the primary blues instrument until the turn of the 20th century, when the guitar took over.
8. Listen for the release of anguish in the music. Blues is sung with bent pitches and other emotionally inflected sounds, and its lyrics are some of the most autobiographical and revealing in the history of music.
9. Know that there are two kinds of blues: Delta and Chicago. The former came first, is slow and mirrors the humid heat and slower lifestyle of the Mississippi Delta.
10. Know that, as African-Americans migrated north, blues moved into the nightclubs and honky-tonks of Chicago. Chicago Blues is faster and uses more instruments, which are often amplified.
11. Buy and listen to CDs from some of the Blues greats: Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Buddy Guy, Robert Johnson, Lonnie Johnson, B.B. King, Albert King and Freddie King.