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What is blue notes?
Pitches sung or bent slightly lower than the major expects — most often around the third, fifth, and seventh. They're the 'aching' notes that give blues and jazz their color.
Blue notes are the microtonal pitches that don't sit on the piano's keys — a singer or guitarist slides just below the major third, the fifth, or the seventh, landing in the cracks between notes. Fixed-pitch instruments approximate them with the flattened third, fifth, and seventh, which is exactly what the blues scale freezes into place. The effect is older than the blues: it comes out of the vocal traditions of work songs, field hollers, and spirituals, themselves carrying West African habits of bending and sliding pitch rather than landing square on a fixed note.
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