In this example, F is the subdominant.

Note that much of the time, every chord is played in the dominant
seventh (7th) form. Frequently, the last chord is the dominant (V or in this case C) turnaround making the
transition to the beginning of the next progression.

The lyrics generally end on the last beat of the tenth bar or the first beat of the eleventh bar, and the final
two bars are given to the instrumentalist as a break; the harmony of this two-bar break, the turnaround,
can be extremely complex, sometimes consisting of single notes that defy analysis in terms of chords.
The final beat, however, is almost always strongly grounded in the dominant seventh (V7), to provide
tension for the next verse. Musicians sometimes refer to twelve-bar blues as "B-flat" blues because it is
the traditional pitch of the tenor sax, trumpet/cornet, clarinet and trombone.

Melodically, blues music is marked by the use of the flatted third, fifth and seventh (the so-called blue or
bent notes) of the associated major scale. While the twelve-bar harmonic progression had been
intermittently used for centuries, the revolutionary aspect of blues was the frequent use of the flatted
fourth, flatted seventh, and even flatted fifth in the melody, together with crushingplaying directly
adjacent notes at the same time, i.e., diminished secondand slidingsimilar to using grace notes.
Where a classical musician will generally play a grace note distinctly, a blues singer or harmonica player
will glissando; a pianist or guitarist might crush the two notes and then release the grace note. Blues
harmonies also use the subdominant major-minor seventh and the tonic major-minor seventh in place of
the tonic. Blues is occasionally played in a minor key. The scale differs little from the traditional minor,
except for the occasional use of a flatted fifth in the tonic, often crushed by the singer or lead instrument
with the perfect fifth in the harmony. Janis Joplin's rendition of "Ball and Chain", accompanied by Big
Brother and the Holding Company, provides an example of this technique. Also, minor-key blues is most
often structured in sixteen bars rather than twelvee.g., "St. James Infirmary Blues" and Trixie Smith's
"My Man Rocks Me"and was often influenced by evangelical religious music.

Blues shuffles are also typical of the style. Their use reinforces the rhythm and call-and-response trance,
the groove. Their simplest version commonly used in many postwar electric blues, rock-and-rolls, or early
bebops is a basic three-note riff on the bass strings of the guitar. Played in time with the bass and the
drums, this technique, similar to the walking bass, produces the groove feel characteristic of the blues.
The last bar of the chord progression is usually accompanied by a turnaround making the transition to the
beginning next progression. Shuffle rhythm is often vocalized as "dow, da dow, da dow, da" or "dump, da
dump, da dump, da" as it consists of uneven eight notes. On a guitar this may be done as a simple steady
bass or may add to that stepwise quarter note motion from the fifth to the seventh of the chord and back.
An example is provided by the following tablature for the first four bars of a blues progression in E:

E7 A7 E7 E7
E |-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
B |-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
G |-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
D |-------------------|2--2-4--4-2--2-4--4|-------------------|-------------------|
A |2--2-4--4-2--2-4--4|0--0-0--0-0--0-0--0|2--2-4--4-2--2-4--4|2--2-4--4-2--2-4--4|
E |0--0-0--0-0--0-0--0|-------------------|0--0-0--0-0--0-0--0|0--0-0--0-0--0-0--0|

Origins

Blues has evolved from the spare music of poor black laborers into a wide variety of complex styles and
subgenres, spawning regional variations across the United States and, later, Europe, Africa and
elsewhere. What is now considered "blues" as well as modern "country music" arose at approximately the
same time and place during the nineteenth century in the southern United States. Recorded blues and
country can be found from as far back as the 1920s, when the popular record industry developed and
created marketing categories called "race music" and "hillbilly music" to sell music by and for blacks and
whites, respectively. At the time, there was no clear musical division between "blues" and "country,"
except for the race of the performer, and even that sometimes was documented incorrectly by record
companies. While blues emerged from the culture of African-Americans, blues musicians have since
emerged world-wide. Studies have situated the origin of "black" spiritual music inside slaves' exposure to

16