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There are a number of different ideas as to what the blues really are: a
scale structure, a note out of tune or out of key, a chord structure; a
philosophy? The blues is a form of Afro-American origin in which a modal
melody has been harmonized with Western tonal chords. In
other words, we had to fit it into our musical system somehow. But, the
problem was that the blues weren\'t sung according to the European ideas
of even tempered pitch, but with a much freer use of bent pitches and
otherwise emotionally inflected vocal sounds. These
\'bent\'pitches are known as \'blue notes\'.
The \'blue notes\' or blue tonalities are one of the defining
characteristics of the blues. Tanner\'s opinion is that these tonalities
resulted from the West Africans\' search for comparative tones not
included in their pentatonic scale. He claims that the West African
scale has neither the third or seventh tone nor the flat third or flat
seventh. \"Because of this, in the attempt to imitate either of these
tones the pitch was sounded approximately midway between [the minor AND
major third, fifth, or seventh], causing what is called a blue
tonality.\" When the copyists attempted to write down the
music, they came up with the so-called \"blues scale,\" in which the
third, the seventh, and sometimes the fifth scale-degrees were lowered a
half step, producing a scale resembling the minor scale.
There are many nuances of melody and rhythm in the blues that are
difficult, if not impossible to write in conventional notation. But the blue notes are not really minor notes in a major context. In
practice they may come almost anywhere.
Before the field cry, with its bending of notes, it had not occurred to
musicians to explore the area of the blue tonalities on their
instruments. The early blues singers would sing these \"bent\"
notes, microtonal shadings, or \"blue\" notes, and the early
instrumentalists attempted to duplicate them. By the
mid-twenties, instrumental blues were common, and \"playing the blues\"
for the instrumentalist could mean extemporizing a melody within a blues
chord sequence. Brass, reed, and string instrumentalists, in particular,
were able to produce many of the vocal sounds of the blues singers.
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