There is little exact information about the origin of the music known as the blues. It is not even known for certain at what point the term began to be used for this music. Yet it is clear that the term describes a feeling. The phrase "having the Blue Devils" had been used since the sixteenth century to describe depression or great sadness. Sometime after the Civil War this state of mind was described as "having the blues" and the term was probably first applied to a particular type of African American music sometime after 1900. Singing or playing the blues was seen as a means of getting rid of depression and the "blues feeling" of the musician was widely regarded as the essential element of the music (Oliver, "Blues" 37). The blues was a way of feeling that found its expression in a manner of playing, singing and writing music. The feeling that was being expressed had its origin in the horrors of African Americans' lives in the violently racist South. But the music thrived, spread, and developed in several different stylistic directions and, as writer Ralph Ellison noted, became "the closest thing to a tragic sensibility that America has ever produced" (cited by Crouch 32).
The blues probably developed in the rural area known as the Mississippi Delta and was then adapted to the style of popular vocalists such as Bessie Smith (a style known collectively as "Classic Blues"). The subsequent popularity of rural blues was then followed by the adaptation of the style to urban settings as African Americans moved in increasing numbers into the cities. The Memphis and Chicago styles of blues (as well as those of Texas, New Orleans and other areas) reflect the fact that wherever African Americans went in the twentieth century there was no shortage of the Evil, Ignorance and Stupidity, as one of Willie Dixon's songs puts it, that brought on the blue feeling (Dixon 210).
Some writers are emphatic in claiming that African Amer...