Word: music
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...starting point we might consider the essential musical structure of most of the music we call the Blues. In its basic form it has a three chord structure in a 1, 4, 5 progression. It usually has 12 bars though this can be varied to 8, 16 or any multiple of 4. It is usually in 4/4 time but it can be fitted to other rhythm patterns as well. There is a Blues chromatism or Blues scale which has African origins and differs from the West European scale. In order to play the correct Blues notes it is necessary...
...played naturally or flatted. Thus if you're playing in the Key of E in the chord of E the third scale note is G and the seventh is D. Another Blues note is the fifth scale degree (B in the Key of E). These notes give the music the distinctive Blues sound. Out of this basic framework black musicans have created over the years the remarkable body of material that one chooses to lump under the term "Blues...
...such contemporary supergroups as Cream, who have done Johnson's "Four Until Late," and "Crossroads" and James' "I'm So Glad." This Blues style reached its peak of popularity in the 1920's and 30's. Though many of the Blues men of this era are dead, their music was revived in the late fifties and early fifties during the folk music area, being copied by people like Tom Rush, John Hammond, John Fahey, Dave Van Ronk, Eric von Schmitt and even a singer named Bob Dylan. Few of these names, however, mean very much to the current Blues revival...
...Blues style began to lose its importance just before W.W.II as the blacks and their new Blues moved from Mississippi to Chicago in search of a better life. In Chicago they found a new, but not necessarily better, life. Life became industrialized, mechanized and electrified--and so did the music. In Chicago, Blues was played in bars and clubs and it was impossible to hear the music of unamplified instruments above the din of the people at the bar, of the cars in the streets, and of the elevated trains overhead. The result was that Blues became amplified. Guitars were...
...This music is raw, rude and visceral and is delivered with relentless power. Yet in its own way it reflects the hard, fast, brutal realities of the modern urban ghetto which produced it. This music reached its peak in the late fifties and early sixties when Bluesmen like Elmore James, Sonny Boy Wiliamson, The Muddy Waters Band, B. B. King and others sold thousands of records in the black ghettos of the North and dusty darktowns of the South. Depits its success in black communiites, it was considered too raw, earthy and sexual for the white teenage audience...