1. BLUES MUSIC
Around the end of the 19th century, blues developed from spirituals, work songs and ballads in the African American communities of the "Deep South" of the United States.
Blues is a kind of rhythmic talk over a melody. The word "blues" means “melancholic” and “sad”. The first blues singers sang about their “personal problems in a difficult world: a lost love, bad police officers, oppression of black people by white people, poverty”.

2. Blues started in the countryside after slavery was abolished and in the 1920s the slaves went, during the Great Migration, from the plantations in the south to the big cities of the United States. After World War II and in the 1950s, new styles of electric blues music became popular in cities like Chicago, Memphis, Detroit and St. Louis.

3. The first kind of blues was called “acoustic”, because it used the acoustic guitar. Only later it was called “electric blues” when it started using new instruments, like the electric guitar and the bass guitar (famous for the distorsion effect and the solos), as well as the drum and the harmonica. The most famous blues artists were guitarists.