A story of laments.
The
“blues”
is undeniably linked to a long musical lament.
The word has also entered into one of our common expressions:
“to have the blues”
, which we use when we have
“the blues”
.
But how did this musical style name come about?
"dark thoughts"
According to the Trésor de la langue française, the
blues
is “a musical theme of black American origin whose harmonic framework is widely used by jazz musicians”.
Appeared in 1927, the name would come from a slang expression used by the American allies during the Great War.
He would correspond to what the soldiers called
"cockroach"
.
“Blues”
would have appeared from the abbreviated form of the phrase
blue devils
, literally
“blue demons”
, where
“dark ideas”
would come from .
The music was so named because of the melancholic mood conveyed by the harmonic framework.
The name appears in 1912, in Memphis, Tennessee, specifies the thesaurus.
Ask God for liberation
This musical theme would have had its beginnings in the fields of plantations.
The slaves were then not authorized to sing anything other than songs borrowed from the Christian liturgy.
To ask God for their release, they composed melodies, colored with African and European sounds.
After their liberation, the slaves continued to sing in the streets, accompanying religious festivals, carnivals, military parades... Little by little, the
blues
became one of the lungs of American culture.
You only have to walk through the streets of New Orleans to see that the
blues
has lost none of its popularity... And you can still hear this melancholy grain, a tangible sign of its identity and its origins.