What is the blues?
The blues is a musical form that took shape in African-American communities of the southern United States, drawing on older West African traditions of and bent pitch. You can recognise it by three things happening at once: a repeating chord pattern built on ; a or swung feel; and the blues , whose flattened 'blue' notes give it that aching sound.
Those West African practices traveled with enslaved people and became work songs, field hollers, and spirituals. Out of that music, around the turn of the 20th century in the southern United States, the blues took its familiar shape — and became the system of jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. It traveled again from the 1950s: Britain's blues boom sent the music back to America amplified, and scenes grew from Ireland and Norway to Mali, Japan, and Australia. What makes a piece sound like the blues is rarely one thing — it's a stack of layers working together, which is exactly what this page pulls apart.
More on the history of bluesWhat makes it blues
- View the full lessonWhat is the blues scale? Taught from zero, every idea playable.
The blues scale is a set of six notes that gives blues, rock, and jazz solos their sound. Five of them are the minor pentatonic scale; the sixth — the flattened fifth, or 'blue note' — is the one note that turns the pentatonic into the blues scale. Counted from the root, the six are 1, ♭3, 4, ♭5, 5, ♭7.
1 – ♭3 – 4 – ♭5 – 5 – ♭7 · in A: A – C – D – E♭ – E – G
OctaveA4 - 2HarmonyThe chords and how they move — the progression under the melody.Coming soon
- 3RhythmWhere the weight sits — which beats are loud, which are silent on purpose.Coming soon
- 4FormThe repeating shape of a section — how many bars before it comes around again.Coming soon
Related
Where blues lives
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