The Blues as a Musical Genre

The blues is one of the distinctly American musical forms, an arrangement of melody and rhythm that could not have developed anywhere else in the world because it reflects the country's history as all as its particular blend of immigrants. This paper examines the blues as a musical genre, giving first some background and basic description of the blues, before examining the contributions of one of the greatest blues musicians, the guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan who left his mark forever on the blues before his untimely death in 1990.

Blues is a mixing of African-American folk and popular music, predominantly in 4/4 time. Blues lyrics tend to deal with the hardships of life and the vicissitudes of love, which is where the title of the musical form takes its name. Blues lyrics are typically cast in a three-line stanza consisting of an initial line, its repetition, and a new third line (A A B). Blues music uses a scale in which the third, fifth, and seventh notes are freely bent, or microtonally flattened in comparison with the standard major scale. The music is generally 12 bars long, falling into three phrases of four bars each (one phrase for each line of text). Each phrase of sung text is normally followed by instrumental improvisation, creating a call-and-response pattern (Patowski and Crawford, 1994, p. 11).

Blues singing, rooted in various forms of black American slave song, has a long history in the United States. It was widespread in the southern United States by the la

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sing his brother Jimmie's guitar and visiting less than fully respectable blues dives in Dallas. He developed his own style very early own, in his teens, while playing in Dallas, and that tone -- warm but with an undercurrent of brutality -- would mark his playing throughout his life. He came to maturity as a musician in venues in Dallas and Austin, forming his own band in 1976, The Triple Threat Review (Spicer, 1996). Vaughan's bands tended not to have a consistent crew, in large measure because Vaughan was himself difficult to work for (this was due in large measure in turn to Vaughan's attraction to alcohol and sometimes cocaine) as well as his chronic lack of money to pay his musicians. But Vaughan and his group secured their moment in musical history in 1982 when they won a slot at the Montreux Jazz Festival, when the band was heard by David Bowie and Jackson Browne, both of whom offered encouragement as well as practical support. Bowie asked Vaughan to play on his "Let's Dance" album and to join him on the Let's Dance tour (Spicer, 1996). Vaughan's debut album, "Texas Flood" came in 1983 and was full of the vitality of traditional blues. The album won the Grammy that year for Best Traditional Blues, and Vaughan became mark

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