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Early 20th century
- Urban blues is a genre of music that emerged in the early 20th century and developed in cities with significant African American populations, such as Chicago, St. Louis, and Memphis. It represents a distinct style of blues that evolved from its rural roots and was shaped by the urban environment and cultural influences.
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Urban blues refers to blues that was performed in cities with significant African American populations, such as Memphis, Detroit, and Chicago, from 1930 to the present. Most urban blues falls into one of three categories. First was a sophisticated version of country blues performed by solo artists, duos and trios, chiefly in Chicago from the ...
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B. B. King - History of Urban Blues — Timeline of African...
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Urban blues is a genre of music that emerged in the early 20th century and developed in cities with significant African American populations, such as Chicago, St. Louis, and Memphis. It represents a distinct style of blues that evolved from its rural roots and was shaped by the urban environment and cultural influences.
The simple but expressive forms of the blues became by the 1960s one of the most important influences on the development of popular music —namely, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, and country music —throughout the United States.
- Overview
- Form
The blues is a form of secular folk music created by African Americans in the early 20th century, originally in the South. Although instrumental accompaniment is almost universal in the blues, the blues is essentially a vocal form. Blues songs are usually lyrical rather than narrative because the expression of feelings is foremost.
Where did the blues get its name?
In the 19th century the English phrase blue devils referred to the upsetting hallucinations brought on by severe alcohol withdrawal. This was later shortened to the blues, which described states of depression and upset, and it was later adopted as the name for the melancholic songs that the musical genre encapsulates.
How did the blues begin as a musical genre?
The origins of the blues are poorly documented, but it is believed that after the American Civil War (1861–65), formerly enslaved African Americans and their descendants created this genre while working on Southern plantations, taking inspiration from hymns, minstrel show music, work songs and field hollers, ragtime, and popular music of the Southern white population.
Why is the blues considered the “Devil’s music”?
Although instrumental accompaniment is almost universal in the blues, the blues is essentially a vocal form. Blues songs are lyrical rather than narrative; blues singers are expressing feelings rather than telling stories. The emotion expressed is generally one of sadness or melancholy, often due to problems of love but also oppression and hard times. To express this musically, blues performers use vocal techniques such as melisma (sustaining a single syllable across several pitches), rhythmic techniques such as syncopation, and instrumental techniques such as “choking” or bending guitar strings on the neck or applying a metal slide or bottleneck to the guitar strings to create a whining voicelike sound.
As a musical style, the blues is characterized by expressive “microtonal” pitch inflections (blue notes), a three-line textual stanza of the form AAB, and a 12-measure form. Typically the first two and a half measures of each line are devoted to singing, the last measure and a half consisting of an instrumental “break” that repeats, answers, or complements the vocal line. In terms of functional (i.e., traditional European) harmony, the simplest blues harmonic progression is described as follows (I, IV, and V refer respectively to the first or tonic, fourth or subdominant, and fifth or dominant notes of the scale):
Phrase 1 (measures 1–4) I–I–I–I
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Phrase 2 (measures 5–8) IV–IV–I–I
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The descriptive phrase Urban Blues was first used in the early part of the 20th century to differentiate between the more uptown sentiments pervasive to the style and the cruder, more rural stylings of country-blues artists.
Jul 16, 2024 · Rhythm and blues, term used for several types of postwar African-American popular music, as well as for some white rock music derived from it. Perhaps the most commonly understood meaning of the term is as a description of the sophisticated urban music that had been developing since the 1930s.
Apr 17, 2024 · The urban blues gained momentum in the mid-20th century as record companies began to see the commercial potential of the genre. The commercial recording of blues music marked a turning point in its history, catapulting what was once a regional sound into a global phenomenon.
