What Are the Blues?
Blues music began as the primary artistic expression of a minority culture: It was created mainly by black working class men and women. Through its simplicity, sensuality, poetry, humor and irony, it mirrored the qualities and the attitudes of blacks in America for three-quarters of a century. The definition and most important extra-musical meaning of “blues” refers to a state of mind. But the blues did not enter popular American usage until after the Civil War as a description of music that expressed such a mental state among African Americans. It is generally understood that a blues performer sings or plays to rid himself of “the blues.” As the blues was created largely by illiterate musicians, scarcely any of whom could read music, improvisation, both verbal and musical, was an essential part of it, though not to the extent that it was in jazz. To facilitate improvisation, a number of patterns evolved, of which the most familiar is the 12-bar blues, Apparently, this form crystallize
