Blues
An American twelve-bar song form.
What it means
The blues is a musical form of African American origin that arose in the south of the USA toward the end of the nineteenth century. The word denotes at once a mood — low, melancholy — and a fixed musical form.
The best-known shape is the twelve-bar scheme. It rests on the main functions of the key: tonic, subdominant and dominant in a fixed succession over twelve bars. This succession is run through again and again and forms the framework for singing and improvisation. Alongside the twelve-bar blues there are variants of eight or sixteen bars.
Characteristic besides are the so-called blue notes: notes whose pitch floats between the major and minor third, seventh or fifth and which are produced by bending and gliding. They give the blues its own colouring, which the major-minor system cannot quite capture.
In the notation
The blues is frequently not fully notated but recorded over chord symbols and a melody in a lead sheet. The blue notes appear in the notation as lowered notes; their actual intonation is left to the performer. The rhythm is often notated in even eighths but played unequally — with swing.
Musical use
The blues is one of the foundations of jazz, rhythm and blues and rock music. Its form serves in jazz as one of the most important models for improvisation. Composers of art music too have taken up elements of the blues.
The blues arose around 1900 in the south of the USA out of African American work songs, spirituals and ballads. Among the shaping musicians are W. C. Handy, who spread the blues in printed editions from 1912, as well as Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson and later Muddy Waters. Typical are the twelve-bar scheme, blue notes and call-and-response patterns between voice and instrument.
Performance practice
Learn the twelve-bar scheme by heart before you improvise over it. Listen to recordings to become acquainted with the intonation and phrasing of the blue notes. Play the eighths with swing, unless something else is meant. And take freedom in the expression — the blues lives from personal shaping.