Noun

Wikipedia

Singular blues

Plural uncountable

blues (uncountable)

1. Plural form of blue.
2. (informal) A feeling of sadness or depression.
   • 1883: Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

     If we had been allowed to sit idle we should all have fallen into the blues...

3. (singular or plural) (informal) One's particular life experience, particularly including the hardships one has faced.

   Your blues is just like mine.

   Your blues are just like mine.

4. A musical form, African-American in origin, generally featuring an eight-bar or twelve-bar structure and using the blues scale.

   Many great blues musicians came from the Mississippi Delta region.

   A large portion of modern popular music is influenced by the blues.

5. (music, always singular) A musical composition following blues forms.

   My next number is a blues in G.

6. A uniform made principally of a blue fabric.

   The marched in their dress blues.

Derived terms

• baby blues
• blue note
• blues-rock

• blues scale
• bluesy

• cry the blues
• delta blues
• eight-bar blues
• twelve-bar blues

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre created within the African-American communities in the Deep South of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form which is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues and rock and roll is characterized by the use of specific chord progressions — the twelve-bar blues chord progressions being the most frequently encountered — and the blue note that for expressive purposes are sung or played flattened or gradually bent in relation to the pitch of the major scale.

The blues genre is based on the blues form but possesses other characteristics such as specific lyrics, bass lines and instruments. Blues can be subdivided in several subgenres ranging from country to urban blues that were more or less popular during different periods of the 20th century. Best known are the Delta, Piedmont, Jump and Chicago blues styles. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues rock evolved.

The term "the blues" refers to the "the blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness; an early use of the term in this sense is found in George Colman's one-act farce Blue Devils (1798). Though the use of the phrase in African American music may be older, it has been attested to since 1912, when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition. In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood.