If you look up Blues in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians you get several pages describing the history of Blues music in the south. The original music had to do with the expression of those feelings of abuse and destitution common to the Black Experience in the south. To play the blues you had to feel the blues, it was not only a measure of expression, but one of experience. Feeling blue, however, as expressed in the music, was more than just the emotional state of depression. Feeling blue today is a casual expression, depressed, sad, down, melancholy or hypochondria (the original definition) or The English Malady are all expressions of an emotional state or state of mind; these states can be brought about by chemical imbalance or general moodiness, or an event that triggers a memory. In Cannonball Adderly’s description of the song “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” he talks about dealing with adversity, “Sometimes we are not prepared to deal with adversity.” Adversity implies something acting on one from the outside environment, it can be people, society, weather, God (or perceptions of God), poverty, prejudice, hatred…. The Blues were originally a musical expression of these hardships; if you didn’t experience it you couldn’t play the blues. Because most of the people playing Blues were uneducated and illiterate simple patterns and scales developed that allowed musicians to improvise music and lyrics easily: twelve bar progressions of tonic, sub-dominant and dominant, and a six tone Blues Scale–pentatonic minor–as well as a repeated lyric line that gave a performer time to improvise new lines while repeating old ones.
There were many practitioners of The Blues, and it is still common for rock or Jazz players to improvise over a twelve bar progression when they meet. One of the most famous practitioners of The Blues, in the Rock world are ZZ Top, who made regular use of twelve bar, but this is a transformed twelve bar, the music having as much to do with the traditional blues as with the more modern concerns, the traditional rock subject of alcohol, sex and drugs–for instance their song “Thunderbird” on the Fandango album. But on their Deguelo album they did a cover of a Robert Johnson song which was originally recorded in 1936 as “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom”, and during the many covers of it became shortened to “Dust My Broom.” The BB King version sound downright happy, while the Muddy Waters version is much more faithful to the original, and the Johnny Winter version gives a very nice slide guitar display. The words seem to change a bit, and the ZZ Top studio version seems almost refined compared to the live versions which always carry a unique energy since no performance is ever exactly the same. This song shows the power of the blues to cross generations of musicians and influence all modern music.