The Blues

The Blues is a music genre also known as a uniquely American art form.The main influences of the Blues music genre were the economic structures of the USA that kept African Americans for majority locked in illiteracy and poverty, especially in the dusty corners of the Deep South of the United States. It was the endless struggle that helped shape much of the Early blues tradition. The blues style was developed from African American roots and traditions.
Blues incorporated work songs, spirituals, shouts also known as Arhoolie, African American folk music, field hollers, chants and rhymed simple narrative ballads.
Unlike other forms of music the blues were only recorded by memory and passed down through generations from live acts/performances.
The blues became a way for African Americans to express their feelings and experiences of a wide range of audiences that also understood the struggles.
The early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative which on numerous occasions related to the challenges and experiences of African Americans such as racial

Then these artists moved on from the shows in the South to the permanent Vaudeville theatres of New york, where their songs were written specifically for a broader audience by professional black song writers such as William Handy who was based in Memphis who composed and simply published several of the early classics such as Memphis Blues which was originally written in 1909 for a political campaign but was only published in 1912, St Louis Blues (1914), Loveless love (1921), Harlem blues (1923). The twelve-bar structure that eventually became the standard was an invention of these urban songwriters: the original blues music was largely free