Where did the term blues come from?

Answer 1

I may be completely wrong, but i looked the word "blue" in a dictionary, it says "feeling of sadness" i can relate that definition to the fact that the slaves taken from Africa were the ones who kinda created and gave birth to this genre when they chanted their songs. And most of those songs talked about being slaves and having a miserable life. So... i think that's got a lot to do with it.

Answer 2

"tang" refers to the sharp spines on the fish's tail, and blue is of course its main coloring.

Answer 3

In the navy, when a boat lost its captain, blue flags would be hung above the deck. When returning to land a blue banner would be stretched out across the length of the boat.

Answer 4

I am looking for the same thing. So far, this is what I've found: Not only did I read this on the internet, but I saw an old African American woman from south Mississippi explaining the same thing on a documentary. She said that back in those days they would say that there were spirits they called the blue devils that could make bad things happen or make people unhappy. When someone was down and out or sad or upset, they would say : "Oooo, he got a case of the blue devils," or "the blue devils must've got a hold of him!" In reading on the internet, I found that in the late 1700's and early 1800's when people were coming to America from England, some people believed that there were "low" spirits that came over on the boats with the people from England. These spirits were believed to be able to cause problems for people and make them feel bad. Washington Irving in 1807 wrote of a man "under the influence of a whole legion of the blues," and a young U. S. Grant wrote in 1846, "I came back to my tent and to drive away the Blues, I took up (read) some of your old letters. So over time, people began to use the term "blues" or "blue devils" to explain or describe the same thing that we still call "having the blues" today. African Americans put their blues to music, singing songs about oppresion, sadness, lost loved ones, etc. etc. So that's how the word supposedly evolved. And they called their music the blues, because they sang songs about their problems and feelings, the blues.

Also, a main characteristic of Blues Music is the use of the 'blue notes', which is a flattening of the 3rd, 7th and 5th scale degrees. I don't know scales or exactly what that means, but apparently the way they tune their guitars flattens some of the notes making them sound different, and they call those notes the blue notes since that's what they use to play blues music.

Now, as for why they believed that spirits came over from England to make people upset, I have no clue. And as for why they decided to call these things the blue devils, I have absolutely no idea. Did someone claim to be able to see some of these spirits and they looked blue? Maybe, but I haven't found any documentation or history addressing that yet.

So that's it. Hope that helped. From now on when you're having a bad day or upset about something, when your friends ask you whats wrong, just tell them that the blue devils got a hold of you.

Or the history blues is music sang by afro Americans not slaves because they sang spirituals and worksongs it was not until they were freed that they sang the blues.

Answer 5

According to my father, a music lover who was born and raised in the 1930s in the deep south, "The Blues" symbolized the eyes of the oppressor. In other words, the music emanated from struggle,degradation, pain and loss that began in slavery and continued through reconstruction and the Jim Crow era. The music was an organic response to "Mister Charley", (the white establishment) whose blue eyes were synonymous with suffering for many African-Americans for a long time.

Answer 6

it was called the blues as when your sad you feel blue and all of the Blues song are about miserable lives of slaves.