The Blues Portal
Welcome to Wikipedia's blues portal! This portal is intended to facilitate discovery of blues music and to encourage editors to contribute to and improve articles involving blues music.
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre created primarily within the African-American communities in the Deep South of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll is characterized by specific chord progressions—the twelve-bar blues chord progressions being the most common—and the blue note, notes that for expressive purposes are sung or played flattened or gradually bent (minor 3rd to major 3rd) in relation to the pitch of the major scale.
The blues genre is based on the blues form but possesses other characteristics such as specific lyrics, bass lines and instruments. Blues can be subdivided into several subgenres ranging from country to urban blues that were more or less popular during different periods of the 20th century. Best known are the Delta, Piedmont, Jump and Chicago blues styles. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues rock evolved. (more)
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Slide guitar or bottleneck guitar is a particular method or technique for playing the guitar. The term slide is in reference to the sliding motion of the slide against the strings, while bottleneck refers to the original material of choice for such slides, which were the necks of glass bottles. Instead of altering the pitch of the strings in the normal manner (by pressing the string against frets), a slide is placed upon the string to vary its vibrating length, and pitch. This slide can then be moved along the string without lifting, creating continuous transitions in pitch. (more)
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Bessie Smith (April 15, 1894 – September 26, 1937) was an American blues singer. Sometimes referred to as "The Empress of the Blues," Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s. She is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era and, along with Louis Armstrong, a major influence on subsequent jazz vocalists. (more)
Quotes
“ | Blues is really America's finest art form and most dominant art form of the 20th century. | ” |
“ | Blues is a natural fact, something that a fellow lives. If you don't live it, you don't have it. | ” |
“ | The blues is a low-down achin' heart disease Like consumption killing me by degrees. |
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— Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)"
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“ | When you lay down at night, turning from one side of the bed to the other and can't sleep, what's the matter? Blues got you. | ” |
“ | The blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll. | ” |
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