Wikipedia:Today's featured article/December 29, 2005

Bessie Smith was a very famous early blues singer

The blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on a pentatonic scale as well as 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, big band, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and country music, as well as conventional pop songs and even modern classical music. The phrase the blues is a synonym for having a fit of the blue devils, meaning low spirits, depression and sadness.

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