'The Blues' is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. The slaves added their own flair to their field holler songs. Blues music is heavily influenced by 'field holler' songs, sung by the slaves as they worked in the fields.
An estimated 30% of African slaves brought to America were Muslim. One of the first wholly American styles of music to gain traction and recognition across the world was blues music, developed in the American South by African slaves, and only a minority of them were Muslim. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove. Blue notes (or 'worried notes'), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound.
The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale, and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture. Blues is a music genre and musical form that originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s.
