What Is the Blues? Twelve Bars That Built Popular Music
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
Almost every song on the radio descends from the blues. Rock and roll, soul, jazz, rhythm and blues, country and much of hip-hop inherited its chord pattern, its scale or its way of singing, and the pattern is simple enough to learn in an afternoon: twelve bars, three chords, a line sung twice and answered once. What was poured into that frame, by people with the least reason to sing, is the reason it lasted.
Where it came from
The blues emerged among African Americans in the rural South, especially the Mississippi Delta, in the decades after the end of slavery, taking shape somewhere around 1890 to 1910. Its sources were the work songs and field hollers of the plantations, the call and response of the Black church, and the ballads and dance tunes that Black and white musicians in the South had traded for a century. A musician named W. C. Handy claimed to have first heard it in 1903 at a railway station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, from a man pressing a knife against guitar strings and singing about going where the Southern crossed the Dog.
Handy published the first blues sheet music in 1912, and the first blues recordings, by Mamie Smith in 1920, sold so unexpectedly well that the record companies discovered a Black audience they had ignored. By the late 1920s Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson had recorded the raw Delta style, and Bessie Smith the polished city version with jazz bands behind her.
Twelve bars, three chords
The standard blues is a cycle of twelve bars using three chords built on the first, fourth and fifth notes of the key. In the key of E those are E, A and B. The pattern runs four bars on the first chord, two on the fourth, two back on the first, then one bar each on the fifth and the fourth and two on the first, at which point it starts again. Hundreds of thousands of songs use exactly that sequence, which is why any two blues musicians who have never met can play together immediately.
The words fit the music in a matching pattern. A line is sung over the first four bars, repeated, often with a small variation, over the next four, and answered with a rhyming line over the last four. I woke up this morning, blues all around my bed; I woke up this morning, blues all around my bed; went to eat my breakfast, blues was all in my bread. The repetition gives the singer time to think of the third line, and the third line is where the point lands. The structure in outline:
- •Bars 1 to 4: home chord; first line
- •Bars 5 to 6: fourth chord, then bars 7 to 8 home; the line repeated
- •Bars 9 to 10: fifth chord then fourth chord; the answering line
- •Bars 11 to 12: home, with a turnaround leading back to the start
The blue notes
What makes the blues sound like the blues is not the chords but the notes sung and played over them. The blues scale lowers the third, the fifth and the seventh notes of the ordinary major scale, or rather bends them, so that a singer or a guitarist slides between the flattened note and the ordinary one and settles somewhere in between, a pitch that a piano cannot play. These blue notes carry a tension against the major chords beneath them that sounds, to Western ears, like longing or complaint, and the bending is where the West African roots of the music are most audible.
Guitarists imitate the voice with bent strings and with a bottleneck or knife slid along the neck, the technique Handy heard in Tutwiler. The harmonica does it with breath. Later electric players, from T-Bone Walker to B. B. King, made the sustained bent note the centre of the style, and the rock guitar solo is that idea amplified.
What grew out of it
The Great Migration carried the blues north with the millions of Black Southerners who moved to Chicago, Detroit and St Louis between the wars, and there it was electrified. Muddy Waters, arriving in Chicago from Mississippi in 1943, put a Delta song through an amplifier with a band behind it, and Chicago blues was the result. Rhythm and blues added horns and a dance beat; Chuck Berry sped it up and wrote about cars and school, and that was rock and roll. Jazz, which had grown alongside the blues in New Orleans, kept the twelve-bar form and the blue notes as a permanent part of its language.
In the 1960s British teenagers who had learned the music from imported records, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin, sold it back to white America, which had mostly ignored the originals, and the surviving Delta and Chicago musicians found themselves, in their sixties, touring the world. The debt has been acknowledged unevenly and paid worse.
The feeling, and the misunderstanding
The blues is often described as sad music, and that misses it. The lyrics are about trouble, lost love, hard work, travel, prison and drink, and the singing is about surviving them. The tone is more often wry than tragic; the third line of a verse is as likely to be a joke as a lament. Ralph Ellison wrote that the blues is an impulse to keep the painful details of a brutal experience alive in one's consciousness and to transcend it, not by consolation but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. To have the blues is to be low. To sing the blues is to do something about it.
The takeaway
The blues is a twelve-bar, three-chord form with a repeated line and an answer, sung over bent blue notes, that came out of the Black rural South around 1900 and became the foundation of jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and most popular music since. Its subject is trouble and its manner is endurance, which is why it has never gone out of date.