The Blues

This VSI provides a brief history of the blues genre's main movements and most influential artists and gives a sense of the breadth of the blues field. Beginning with the music's roots in African and African-American styles, European folk music, and popular forms such as minstrelsy and ragtime, it traces how blues evolved over the course of the twentieth century as both a discrete genre and a basic ingredient in virtually all American pop styles from jazz to hip-hop.