Blues is an African-American music that transverses a wide range of emotions and musical styles. “Feeling blue” is expressed in songs whose verses lament injustice or express longing for a better life and lost loves, jobs, and money. But blues is also a raucous dance music that celebrates pleasure and success. Central to the idea of blues performance is the concept that, by performing or listening to the blues, one is able to overcome sadness and lose the blues.

In determining the origin of a term such as this, there will always be disputes. This is no exception. Some research indicates that the term "blue" was used in the late 1300's in reference to feeling depressed, sad, or hopeless. "Blues" was in use in the mid 1700's. Other research would indicate that the term "blues" can be traced back to the term blue devils. Blue devils where hallucinations, which were said to accompany delirium tremens (alcohol (ethanol) withdrawl). One of the many sypmtoms of DT is sadness or depression. The term was adopted by American jazz by 1895 to refer to a style of music portraying a particular malaise or expression of sadness or grief.

Blues is a vocal and instrumental musical form which evolved from African American spirituals, shouts, work songs and chants and has its earliest stylistic roots in West Africa. Blues has been a major influence on later American and Western popular music, finding expression in ragtime, jazz, big bands, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and country music, as well as conventional pop songs and even modern classical music. Early forms of the blues evolved in and around the Mississippi Delta in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, using simple instruments such as acoustic guitar, piano, and harmonica, also known as the "blues harp." Songs had many different forms of structure, although the twelve-, eight-bar, or four-bar structure based on tonic, subdominant and dominant chords became predominant. Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the lowered third and dominant seventh (so-called blue notes) of the associated major scale. The use of blue notes, as well as the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics, are indicative of the blues' West African pedigree. The blues scale frequently is found in non-blues musical forms, such as popular songs like Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night," blues ballads like "Since I Fell for You' and "Please Send Me Someone to Love," and even orchestral works like George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F. Indeed, the blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music. What is now recognizable as the standard 12-bar blues form with A A1 B form is documented from oral history and sheet music as appearing in African-American communities throughout the region along the lower Mississippi River during the decade of 1900s (and performed by white bands in New Orleans at least since 1908). One of these early sites of blues evolution was along Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. Lyrically, verses of early blues songs consist usually of a single line of four-bars repeated twice, with a third rhyming line, such as: Woke up this morning with the blues all in my bed Yes, I woke up this morning with the blues all in my bed Fixed my breakfast, the blues was all in my bread In addition to the conventional 12-bar blues, there are many blues in 8-bar form, such as "How Long Blues" and even 16-bars, as in Ray Charles's instrumental, "Sweet 16 Bars." Blues frequently takes the form of a loose narrative, often with the singer reciting his or her many misfortunes. Many of the oldest blues records contain gritty, realistic lyrics, in contrast to much of the music being recorded at the time. One of the more extreme examples, Down In The Alley by Memphis Minnie, is about a prostitute having sex with men in an alley. Music such as this was called "gut-bucket" blues. The term refers to chitterlings, a soul food dish prepared from pig intestines, then associated with slavery, deprivation and hard times. Gut-bucket blues and the rowdy juke-joint venues where it often was played, earned the blues an unsavory reputation. Proper, church-going people shunned it, and preachers railed against it as sinful. And because it often treated the hardships and injustices of life, the blues gained an association in some quarters with misery and oppression. But the blues was about more than hard times; it could be humorous and raunchy as well. Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me, Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me, It may be sending you baby, but it's worrying the hell out of me. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, W.C. Handy took the blues across the tracks and made it respectable, even "high-toned." The formally trained musician, composer and arranger was a key popularizer of the blues. Known as the "Father of the Blues," Handy was one of the first to transcribe and then orchestrate blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers. Extremely prolific over his long life, Handy's signature work was the "St. Louis Blues".

In the movie Crossroads staring Ralph Macchio, a drama about a classical guitarist who seeks to discover himself on a journey with an old Delta Blues musician. There is a scene which best depicts what the blues actually are. In this scene the Old Bluesman defines to Macchio (whose girlfriend just abandoned him) the blues, he describes that there is nothing that can match the pain and sadness a man feels when his woman leaves him. That at that time you can play the blues through your soul, with true sadness and pain. A woman, sadness and pain,...thats the blues.

The blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on a pentatonic scale and a characteristic twelve-bar chord progression. The form evolved in the United States in the communities of former African slaves from spirituals, praise songs, field hollers, shouts, and chants. The use of blue notes and the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics are indicative of the blues' West African pedigree. The blues has been a major influence on later American and Western popular music, finding expression in ragtime, jazz, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and country music, as well as conventional pop songs. The phrase the blues is a synonym for having a fit of the blue devils, meaning low spirits, depression and sadness. An early reference to this can be found in George Colman's farce Blue devils, a farce in one act (1798). Later during the 19th century, the phrase was used as a euphemism for delirium tremens and the police. Though usage of the phrase in African American music may be older, it has been attested to since 1912 in Memphis, Tennessee with W. C. Handy's "Memphis Blues". In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood Origins There are few characteristics common to all blues, because the genre takes its shape from the peculiarities of individual performances. However, some characteristics have been present since before the creation of the modern blues and are common to most styles of African American music. The earliest blues-like music was a "functional expression, rendered in a call-and-response style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure." This pre-blues music was adapted from slave field shouts and hollers, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content".The blues, as it is now known, can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and the West African call-and-response tradition, transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar. Many blues elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa. Sylviane Diouf has pointed to several specific traits—such as the use of melisma and a wavy, nasal intonation—that suggest a connection between the music of West and Central Africa and blues. Ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik may have been the first to contend that certain elements of the blues have roots in the Islamic music of West and Central Africa. Stringed instruments (which were favored by slaves from Muslim regions of Africa…), were generally allowed because slave owners considered them akin to European instruments like the violin. So slaves who managed to cobble together a banjo or other instrument…could play more widely in public. This solo-oriented slave music featured elements of an Arabic-Islamic song style that had been imprinted by centuries of Islam's presence in West Africa, says Gerhard Kubik, an ethnomusicology professor at the University of Mainz in Germany who has written the most comprehensive book on Africa's connection to blues music (Africa and the Blues). Lyrics Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often with the singer voicing his or her "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, hard times" More on this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blues