Source+One

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 * Facts:**


 * Humble Beginnings:**

1. Blues has had a history of its own, it has also had a profound influence upon other types of popular music in the 20th century.

2. When popular blues began to be published in 1912 and performed by trained musicians, it was perceived as a new type of ragtime tune with a novel three-line verse form and the exotic element of blue notes.

3. When popular blues began to be published in 1912 and performed by trained musicians, it was perceived as a new type of ragtime tune with a novel three-line verse form and the exotic element of blue notes.


 * Country/Folk:**

4. In the years before World War I, southern Anglo-American folk musicians began performing blues learned from black musicians.

5. Beginning in 1927 the Mississippi singer and guitarist Jimmie Rodgers popularized a distinct type of blues by combining folk blues learned from black artists with a yodeling refrain derived from both black field hollers and German/Swiss yodeling that had been popularized on the vaudeville stage.


 * Rock'nRoll:**

6. In the 1950s blues-influenced country music combined with black rhythm and blues to produce a new form of music that came to be known as rock and roll.

7. The blues form and blues instrumental techniques were very prominent in most rock-and-roll styles through the 1960s and have continued to be important factors in this music's development up to the present.

8. Blues gave rock and roll not only an important verse form but also its basic instrumentation and instrumental technique as well as a frankness in dealing with themes of love and sex that proved attractive to an adolescent audience.

9. Over the years blues has given to varieties of country music, such as western swing and honky-tonk, not only the blues form but the qualities of improvisation and greater realism as well.


 * Gospel:**

10. Blues could even be said to have influenced gospel music. Thomas A. Dorsey, generally considered the "father of gospel music," was a former blues pianist and songwriter.

11. By the early 1930s he was composing gospel songs using blue notes and showing a greater individualism and worldliness in the themes.

12. While gospel has seldom utilized the blues verse form, it has shown blues influence through its use of blues tonality and emphasis on the individual.


 * Blues Today:**

13. Most Americans today are probably more familiar with blues-influenced music than they are with blues itself.

14. Blues is still a thriving form of music, existing in a variety of styles.

15. Blues can be heard today in forms close to the earliest folk blues, showing that it is still in touch with its roots, and within modern jazz and rock and roll, showing the enormous impact is has had over the last century.