Hill, Ian
Description
Encyclopedia about blues music. The blues is a blending of African and European traditional music characterized by its melancholy (or blue) notes expressing suffering and deprivation. Songs are typically structured in three-line verses, with the third line summing up, or rephrasing, the sentiment expressed in the first two. Beginning in the nineteenth century, blues music developed throughout the southern United States from slave work songs and field hollers. Later, southern prisoners in jail and on chain gangs added songs of murder, death row, and their treatment at the hands of the wardens. In 1839 one of the earliest known references to slave music that would evolve into the blues was documented on a Georgia rice plantation by an English traveler.
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