Radio Blues

The blues is a music genre that originated between 1860 and 1900. The music style emerged in the music that the slaves in Africa in the south of the United States played. Other Music genres that contributed to the origin of the blues are religious songs like Gospel and negrospirituals. A typical variant of the Blues are Cajun music. The Slaves made these songs alone, together, with instrument or without instrument because it was the only way for them to express and soften their misery. Because they used a lot of melancholic tones this music received the name Blues. The slaves used some slang words that the guards didn’t understand, this way they could abuse the guards without them knowing it. Rock ‘n Roll originated from the blues and because of this new genre blues lost a lot of popularity. In the 60’s and 70’s this music genre again a lot of popularity because of the famous rock musicians like Eric Clapton, The Rolling stones and Led Zeppelin started to play blues songs again. All the different jazz music style are strongly influenced by the blues. Typical for songs of this genre is that it always follows a fixed schema of 12 sizes per verse, the so called ‘twelve bar blues’. The instruments used in this music style are mostly acoustical instruments like a guitar, saxophone, piano and harmonica. The most famous blues artists are B.B. King, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. Ray Charles was a famous artist with ‘Hit The Road Jack’ as his most famous song. Subgenres that originated form blues are: - Bluesrock - Rhythm and blues - Boogiewoogie - Elektric blues - …. There also emerged different fusion genres out of the blues like: - Rock ‘n Roll - Rock - Jazz - Pop - Soul