Re: Defining blues

[Mike Curtis <wd6ehr@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> This reminds me of a question I have:
> I know there are blues riffs and blues scales, and I know blues music
> when I hear it, but how would a music student/theorist DEFINE 'blues'.
> When reading sheet music to a blues piece, can you/how do you recognize
> it as 'bluesy'?

The "stock" answer is that it uses 12 bars and I-IV-V chords.  However, 
there are artists (like Robert Cray) who are definitely blues, but write 
and perform many songs using other formats.

There are also many tunes usually considered jazz that use a 12 bar 
format.  These could also be considered a form of blues.  I've heard many 
blues tunes performed as jazz, but that's true of all forms of music; 
pop, classical, and even country-western!

Lyrical content can be a determining factor.  While sometime morose, 
blues is often tongue in cheek about negative things in life.  It is 
almost universally "plain-folks-down-to-earth", and deep, convoluted 
blues lyrics are as scarce as hens teeth.

Bent notes are used in most blues tunes.  The third is important in 
blues, being somewhere between a major and minor, and not on a stock 
keyboard instrument, etc.

It can be difficult to define what blues is.  Maybe it's easier to define 
what blues ain't :-)


 -- mike
wd6ehr@xxxxxxxxxx