1112+The+Roots+of+Blues

=__The Roots of the Blues__=
 * //The Blues started in the 1900s in West Africa. The Blues are combined with sounds of the nature and spoken words. The instroments used in Blues were made by the enslaved people with clay, wire , cloth , wood , metal , and rock. The sound and song has its own unique meaning to the enslaved people.[2]//**
 * //Most enslaved people did farm labor on plantations. They often sang songs (jazz) to make them feel better. While laboring in the fields they used a West African technique called call and response. Many enslaved Africans were introduced to Christianity after they were brought to the Americas. They continued to celebrate their own West African traditions.[4] But they also practice their Christianity. The parts that spoke about freedom from suffering were especially popular. Blues music has a major influence on today’s music. You can find elements of the blues in most of the modern popular music styles, including jazz, rock, and soul.[1] //**

==media type="custom" key="12521958" width="130" height="130" align="right"**__History of blues__**== =**//__Blues stars __//**=
 * //The blues has deep roots in American history, particularly African-American history. The //**
 * //Blues originated on Southern plantations in the 19th Century. Its inventors were slaves, ex- //**
 * //Slaves and the descendants of slaves - African-American sharecroppers who sang as they // //toiled in the cotton// //and vegetable fields.[1] It's generally accepted that the music evolved from// **
 * //African spirituals, African chants, work songs, field hollers, and rural fife and drum music, //****//Revivalist hymns, and country dance music.[2]The English Colony started 1707, this date marks when the blues was truly born. Between 1619 and 1808, millions of enslaved West Africans were brought to America by ship or wagon to be sold to plantation owners that could afford to buy a slave.[3] //**


 * //When the country blues moved to the cities and other locales, it took on various regional characteristics. Hence the St. Louis blues, the Memphis blues, the Louisiana blues, etc. Chicago bluesmen such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters were the first to electrify the blues and add drums and piano in the late 1940s. One of the best blues singers is B.B King. With his amazing guitar Lucille.[3] Jimmy Rushing has been called the greatest of all big-band blues singers and many of today's blues standards are credited to his writing skills, such as "Good Morning Blues", "Going' to Chicago", "Boogie Woogie" and many others. The song "Mr. Five-by-Five" was penned in his honor and is said to describe him as being five feet tall and five feet wide.[1] //**

//__Call and Response __//

 * //While working, the west African people used a technique called Call and Response. One slave sang one part of a song and// //the person behind him fallowed and so on and so on. The call and Response was a conversational musical.[6] Most slaves got introduced to Christianity after brought to America. They also continued to have celebration from West Africa like dancing, singing, telling jokes, and more.[3]// **


 * //Little is known about the exact origin of the music now known as the bluesNo specific year can be cited as the origin of the blues, largely because the style evolved over a long period and existed in approaching its modern form before the term blues was introduced, before the style was thoroughly documented.Ethnomusicologist .Gerhard Kubik traces the roots of many of the elements that were to develop into the blues back to the African continent, the "cradle of the blues". One important early reference to something closely resembling the blues comes from 1901, when an archaeologist in Mississippi described the songs of black workers which had lyrical themes and technical elements in common with the blues.[8]//**

=media type="custom" key="12522684" width="96" height="96" align="left"= =__//b.//**//b king//**__ __//**the king of blues**//__=


 * //Riley B. King was born on September 16, 1925, between Itta Bena and Indianola, Mississippi. His parents split up when he was a small child, and he lived for a few years with his mother in the Mississippi hills. She died when he was nine, and he was alone until his father, Albert King, found him a few years later. Working on a cotton plantation in Indianola, he earned $22.50 a week.[7] "I guess the earliest sound of blues that I can remember was in the fields while people would be picking' cotton or chopping' or something'." King noted in a 1988 Living Blues interview cited in Contemporary Musicians. "When I sing and play now I can hear those same sounds that I used to hear then as a kid."[8]//**

=__//**The edge**//__=


 * //plantation owners forbade the slaves from going near the edge of the land because the plantation owners were woried about the slave running away and meeting up with other salves to threaten the farmer to steel some tools and food and sometimes kill the farmer.[5]//**

=**__//Origins//__**=
 * //The blues draws its influences from African music, much of which was transported to the United States as part of the transatlantic slave trade. African-American slaves continued the musical traditions of their home nations and, over the generations, these musical styles became intertwined as new instrumentation and thematic content was added. Field songs and Christian gospel music also played an important part in the development of the blues as a distinct genre.The term "blues" was coined in the 1910s to refer to the earliest publications of blues music. It implies a sadness that is common among early blues compositions.[10]//**

**//__Musical Style__//**
 
 * //StyleWhile blues music exists in several variations, it is most commonly defined as using a 12-bar structure in which three groupings of four notes establish a specific tonality for the song. The blues notes that define the melody of a blues composition are the flat versions of the 3rd, 5th and 7th notes on the song's major scale. Specific rhythmic patterns also identify a song as in the blues tradition[10]//** 

=**//__Themes__//**=

**//Blues music contains lyrical content that centers around several recurring themes. Besides the general sadness that the term "the blues" has come to represent, blues music often deals with issues of death, lost love, infidelity, the oppression of workers or natural disaster. These subjects owe their roots in large part to the development of the blues by African Americans; first slaves, then freed slaves who remained in the South as an impoverished agricultural workforce. Many early blues musicians were themselves sharecroppers. Others were from sharecropping communities but found time to devote to music only due to some disability that prevented them from performing manual labor, such as blindness.[10]//**  media type="custom" key="12508622" align="left"

=//**<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 15px;">Refrences **//=


 * 1) // "A Brief History of the Blues." Jazz - All About Jazz. Web. 03 Feb. 2012. []. //
 * 2) //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">"Famous Blues Singers - Legends of the Blues." EzineArticles Submission - Submit Your Best Quality Original Articles For Massive Exposure, Ezine Publishers Get 25 Free Article Reprints. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Feb. 2012. []. //
 * 3) //Kendler, Peggy Bresnick. Roots of the Blues. Glenview, IL: Pearson/Scott Foresman, 2005. Print.//
 * 4) //Piero Scaruffi's Knowledge Base. Web. 09 Feb. 2012. [|<http://scaruffi.com/>.]//
 * 5) //[]//
 * 6) // The Blues - A History." Arapaho Internet Server. Web. 14 Feb. 2012. //
 * 7) "The Blues - A History." //Arapaho Internet Server//. Web. 21 Feb. 2012. <http://arapaho.nsuok.edu/~kracht/bluescourse/home.html>.