you get the blues

When you think of the blues, you think about misfortune, betrayal and regret. You lose your job, you get the blues. Your mate falls out of love with you, you get the blues. Your dog dies, you get the blues.

The blues grew up in the Mississippi Delta just upriver from New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. Blues and jazz have always influenced each other, and they still interact in countless ways today.

Unlike jazz, the blues didn't spread out significantly from the South to the Midwest until the 1930s and '40s. Once the Delta blues made their way up the Mississippi to urban areas, the music evolved into electrified Chicago blues, other regional blues styles, and various jazz-blues hybrids. A decade or so later the blues gave birth to rhythm 'n blues and rock 'n roll.
The blues was mutating according to the changing social and artistic landscape. The 32 beats of white pop music, the dramatic emphasis of gospel singers, the heavy rhythm of jump blues, the tight brassy riffs of swing orchestras, the witty attitude of minstrel shows, all had a role in making blues music more malleable and entertaining.

Transplanted in the dancehalls, the juke joints and the vaudeville theaters, blues music became energetic and exuberant. Form (arrangement, rhythm and vocal style) began to prevail over content (message and emotion). While the lyrics were still repeating the traditional themes of segregation, the music was largely abandoning its original traits.

Rhythm and blues, is the African American music that originated in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a heavy, insistent beat" was becoming more popular.

The term has subsequently had a number of shifts in meaning. In the early 1950s and beyond, the term rhythm and blues was frequently applied to blues records.

Starting in the 1950s, after this style of music contributed to the development of rock and roll, the term "R&B" became used to refer to music styles that developed from and incorporated electric blues, as well as gospel and soul music.

By the 1970s, rhythm and blues was used as a blanket term for soul and funk.
In the 1980s, a newer style of rhythm and blues developed, becoming known as contemporary rhythm and blues.

Today there are many different shades of the blues. Forms include:

• Traditional county blues - A general term that describes the rural blues of the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont and other rural locales;
  
• Jump blues - A danceable amalgam of swing and blues and a precursor to R&B. Jump blues was pioneered by Louis Jordan;
• Boogie-woogie - A piano-based blues popularized by Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, and derived from barrelhouse and ragtime;
• Chicago blues - Delta blues electrified;
• Cool blues- A sophisticated piano-based form that owes much to jazz;
• West Coast blues - Popularized mainly by Texas musicians who moved to California. West Coast blues is heavily influenced by the swing beat.
  
• The Texas blues, Memphis blues, and St. Louis blues consist of a wide variety of subgenres. Louisiana blues is characterized by a swampy guitar or harmonica sound with lots of echo, while Kansas City blues is jazz oriented - think Count Basie. There is also the British blues, a rock-blues hybrid pioneered by John Mayall, Peter Green and Eric Clapton. New Orleans blues is largely piano-based, with the exception of some talented guitarists such as Guitar Slim and Snooks Eaglin. And most people are familiar with blues rock.

Chicago blues

During the industrial boom of the post-war era, Chicago became the main destination of black emigration. In 1946 the black ghetto, the South Side, became the second black city in the USA (after New York's ghetto, Harlem). The South Side was the place where the musical styles of the South met the musical instruments of the North. Chicago's blues style was not only faster and more turbulent than the Southern styles: it also adopted the horns and the electric guitar. Eventually, a new term was coined for this aggressive kind of blues music: "rhythm'n'blues". Its birth date is disputed. In 1946 Muddy Waters cut the first records of Chicago's electric blues. In 1947 Billboard's writer Jerry Wexler coined the term "rhythm and blues" for Chicago's electric blues. In 1949 the Billboard chart for "race" records was renamed "rhythm and blues". The first major rhythm'n'blues festival was held in Los Angeles in 1950 (the "Blues & Rhythm Jubilee"), as important as the Carnegie Hall concert of 1938 that launched boogie woogie nationwide.

Texas blues

Texas blues is a subgenre of the blues. It has had various style variations but typically has been played with more swing than other blues styles.

Texas blues differs from styles such as Chicago blues in its use of instruments and sounds, especially the heavy use of the guitar. Musicians such as Stevie Ray Vaughan contributed by using various types of guitar sounds like southern slide guitar and different melodies of blues and jazz. Texas blues also relies on guitar solos or "licks" as bridges in songs.

In the early nineteen-sixties, the urban bluesmen were "discovered" by young white American and European musicians. Many of these blues-based bands like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Cream, Canned Heat, and Fleetwood Mac, brought the blues to young white audiences, something the black blues artists had been unable to do in America except through the purloined white cross-over covers of black rhythm and blues songs. Since the sixties, rock has undergone several blues revivals. Some rock guitarists, such as Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, and Eddie Van Halen have used the blues as a foundation for offshoot styles.

While the originators like John Lee Hooker, Albert Collins and B.B. King--and their heirs Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, and later Eric Clapton and the late Roy Buchanan, among many others, continued to make fantastic music in the blues tradition. The latest generation of blues players like Robert Cray and the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, among others, as well as gracing the blues tradition with their incredible technicality, have drawn a new generation listeners to the blues. -