Kansas City Blues

Blues is the name attached to both a musical form and a music category that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the US at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form, omnipresent in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll is identified by specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues chord progression is the most common. The blue points out that, for demonstrative purposes are sung or played flattened or continuously bent ( minor Third to major Third ) re the pitch of the major scale, are also a very important part of the sound. The blues genre relies on the blues form but has got other characteristics like express lyrics, bass lines and instruments. Blues can be subdivided into 1 or 2 subgenres starting from country to urban blues that were kind of preferred during different periods of the Twentieth century. Well known are the Delta, Piedmont, Jump and Chicago blues styles. WWII marked the change from acoustic to electrical blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, particularly white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a composite form called blues-rock evolved. The term "the blues" refers back to the "blue devils", meaning melancholy and unhappiness ; an early use of the term in this sense is found in George Colman's one-act farce Blue Devils ( 1798 ). Though the employment of the phrase in African-American music could be older, it's been attested to since 1912, when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition. In words the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood. The lyrics of early conventional blues verses probably often consisted mainly of a single line repeated 4 times ; it was only in the 1st decades of the Twentieth century that the most common current structure became standard : the so-called AAB pattern, composed from a line sung over the 4 first bars, its repetition over the next 4, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Two of the first published blues songs, "Dallas Blues" ( 1912 ) and "St. Louis Blues" ( 1914 ), were 12-bar blues featuring the AAB structure. W. C. Handy wrote that he adopted this convention to avoid the monotony of lines repeated 3 times.[19] The lines are typically sung following a pattern closer to a rhythmic talk than to a tune. Early blues often came in the form of a loose account. The vocalist claimed his or her "personal woes in a whole world of oppressive reality : a lost love, the torment of police officers, oppression at the hands of white people, [and] hard times." This melancholy has led straight to the suggestion of an Igbo origin for blues because of the reputation the Igbo had all though plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and outlook to life when they were enslaved. Though Kansas City, Missouri is understood essentially for jazz, it has additionally made a contribution to the history of and the management of the blues.

Kansas City didn't enter into blues history till the 1940s. Kansas City blues artists Pete Johnson and Huge Joe Turner recorded a kind of music called jump blues, which later provided the bedrock for rhythm and blues, and later rock and roll. Charlie Parker dabbled in the blues in the latter 1940s with his release of the hit "Now's the Time", a bebop jazz number that gave a nod to the popularity of the blues in Kansas City, by using the familiar blues pentatonic scale and blue notes. The blues scene in Kansas City produced Jay McShann, Sonny Kenner, Small Hatch and Cotton Candy and the blues was favored in little nightclubs and after-hours jam sessions. Many Kansas City musicians would finish their "paying" gigs at weddings, jazz clubs for example. And then pack up and head to the 18th and Vine-Downtown East, Kansas City district to participate in all-night parties that would often continue well into daylight. The Eighteenth & Vine jam sessions continue today at Kansas City's Musician's Foundation. The Musician's Foundation has protection from liquor laws, and has not changed its look since the 1940s. Notable Kansas City blues artists.

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