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Blues is a vocal and instrumental musical form which evolved from African American spirituals, shouts, work songs and chants and has its earliest stylistic roots in West Africa. Blues has been a major influence on later American and Western popular music, finding expression in ragtime, jazz, big bands, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and country music, as well as conventional pop songs and even modern classical music.

Early forms of the blues evolved in and around the Mississippi Delta in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, using simple instruments such as acoustic guitar, piano, and harmonica, also known as the "blues harp." Songs had many different forms of structure, although the twelve-, eight-bar, or four-bar structure based on tonic, subdominant and dominant chords became predominant. Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the lowered third and dominant seventh (so-called blue notes) of the associated major scale. The use of blue notes, as well as the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics, are indicative of the blues' West African pedigree.

The blues scale frequently is found in non-blues musical forms, such as popular songs like Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night," blues ballads like "Since I Fell for You' and "Please Send Me Someone to Love," and even orchestral works like George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F. Indeed, the blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music.

What is now recognizable as the standard 12-bar blues form with A A1 B form is documented from oral history and sheet music as appearing in African-American communities throughout the region along the lower Mississippi River during the decade of 1900s (and performed by white bands in New Orleans at least since 1908). One of these early sites of blues evolution was along Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee.

Lyrically, verses of early blues songs consist usually of a single line of four-bars repeated twice, with a third rhyming line, such as:

Woke up this morning with the blues all in my bed

Yes, I woke up this morning with the blues all in my bed

Fixed my breakfast, the blues was all in my bread

In addition to the conventional 12-bar blues, there are many blues in 8-bar form, such as "How Long Blues" and even 16-bars, as in Ray Charles's instrumental, "Sweet 16 Bars."

Blues frequently takes the form of a loose narrative, often with the singer reciting his or her many misfortunes. Many of the oldest blues records contain gritty, realistic lyrics, in contrast to much of the music being recorded at the time. One of the more extreme examples, Down In The Alley by Memphis Minnie, is about a prostitute having sex with men in an alley. Music such as this was called "gut-bucket" blues. The term refers to chitterlings, a soul food dish prepared from pig intestines, then associated with slavery, deprivation and hard times. Gut-bucket blues and the rowdy juke-joint venues where it often was played, earned the blues an unsavory reputation. Proper, church-going people shunned it, and preachers railed against it as sinful. And because it often treated the hardships and injustices of life, the blues gained an association in some quarters with misery and oppression. But the blues was about more than hard times; it could be humorous and raunchy as well.

Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,

Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,

It may be sending you baby, but it's worrying the hell out of me.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, W.C. Handy took the blues across the tracks and made it respectable, even "high-toned." The formally trained musician, composer and arranger was a key popularizer of the blues. Known as the "Father of the Blues," Handy was one of the first to transcribe and then orchestrate blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers. Extremely prolific over his long life, Handy's signature work was the " St. Louis Blues".

In the 1920s, the blues became a major element of American popular music. With the rise of the recording industry, there was increased popularity of country blues singers and guitarists like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake, who recorded for Paramount Records, and Lonnie Johnson who recorded for OKeh Records. Son House, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Mississippi John Hurt are a handful of musicians who greatly influenced the blues and many later "rock" artists. These recordings came to be known as "race" records, since they were targeted almost exclusively to an African-American audience. In addition, women blues singers were extremely popular in the 1920s, among them Mamie Smith, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Victoria Spivey .

In the 1940s and 1950s, increased urbanization and the use of amplification led to electric blues music, popular in cities such as Chicago and Detroit and best exemplified by such artists as Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. Electric blues eventually would give rise to rock and roll.

The appeal of blues remained strong in later decades. The music of the Civil Rights, Black Pride and Free Speech movements in the U.S. prompted a resurgence of interest in American roots music in general and in early African-American music, specifically. Artists such as Eric Clapton, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, influenced by both early and electric blues musicians, brought the blues to a new, younger audience. Through these artists and others both earlier and later, blues music has been strongly influential in the development of Rock and Roll.

As well, blues masters like John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, and Muddy Waters continued to perform to enthusiastic audiences, inspiring new artists steeped in traditional blues, such as New York-born Taj Mahal. Mahal's music was featured prominently in "Sounder," a 1972 Hollywood Oscar-nominated movie set in rural Louisiana in the 1930s, starring Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield. "Sounder" did much to revive interest in old-school, acoustic blues. Eight years later, the film The Blues Brothers helped increase awareness of mid- 20th century-style urban blues among a younger audience.

Since then, the blues has continued to thrive in both traditional and new forms through the continuing work of Taj Mahal and the music of Robert Cray , Bonnie Raitt, Keb' Mo' and others.

Performers in the blues style appear virtually in almost every musical genre. See List of blues musicians for more information.

And blues forms turn up in some surprising places. The theme to the televised Batman was blues, as was teen idol Fabian's first hit, "Turn Me Loose." Likewise, many jazz classics, such as Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time," also use the blues form without lyrics. The first great country music star Jimmie Rodgers was a blues performer.

See also: List of genres of the blues, List of blues musicians