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Blues and Rock and Roll

In: Film and Music

Submitted By alynnhunt
Words 931
Pages 4
The Rock and Roll Blues In B.B King’s song “Every Day I have the blues” the song is introduced with the twelve-bar blues chord progression. The song uses a guitar as its main solo instrument, and in some of the live versions that are out there a drum accompanies the song as a steady rhythm in the background. This is known as a backbeat that generally occurs on the first and third beats of a four-beat measure. B.B King uses guitar improvisation in between each of the vocal verses to lead him into his next verse. Another twelve-bar improvisation is located between the verses. “Every day I Have the Blues” features bent notes that are achieved by literally bending the string on the guitar with excess finger pressure. “Good Golly Miss Molly” by Little Richard starts off with the same twelve-bar chord progression that was developed for the Blues. Instead of a guitar as the main solo instrument Little Richard uses a piano as his primary instrument. The guitars serve in accompaniment to the piano and a stead backbeat made by a drum is featured. The tempo of “Good Golly Miss Molly” is much faster than that of “Every Day I have the Blues”. The volume of the voices and instruments are much louder and the piano is played throughout all the singing instead of being used as an improvisation to lead into the next verse. The blues was primarily a vocal genre that developed with in the African American slave culture in the southern United States. The singers of the blues often focused on the hardships of life. Blues can be viewed as United States Folk music. The blues was known for its use of a repeating chord progression called a twelve-bar blue and instrumental improvisation. Singers like Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, and Memphis Minnie were the brave souls that tackled the idea of the blues first. Robert Johnson was a guitarist and singer from Mississippi and generally

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