History of the blues

Blues is a native American music. It hasn´t got any direct European or African „father“. In other words, it is a connecting of both traditions – European and African. It is something special and different.
The word 'blue' has been associated with melancholia or depression since the Elizabethan era. The American writer, Washington Irving invented iin 1807 the term 'the blues,' as it is now defined. The earlier history of the blues is date in the 1860s.
When African and European musicians first began to sing what eventually became the blues, the slaves sang songs filled with words telling of their problems. Blacks were often pressed to work on the levee and land-clearing crews, where they were often abused and then threw away or worked to death.
Alan Lomax sayed that the blues is masculine discipline (some of the first blues songs heard by white people were sung by black singers like Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith) and not many black women were singing the blues. The Southern prisons also intervered to the blues music. They made songs about murder, prostitutes, the hot sun, and a hundred other privations. The prison worked in gangs where were many bluesmen found inspiration for their songs, and where many other blacks simply became familiar with the songs.
Following the Civil War the blues was understand like African music which has been brought by slaves. Ballads, church music and rhythmic dance tunes called jump-ups started to be a music for a singer who would be intrested in „call-and-response“ with his guitar. He would sing a line, and the guitar would answer it.
At the begining - banjo was the primary blues instrument. By the 1890s the blues songs were sung in many of the villages in the South. And by 1910, the word 'blues' was common applying to this music style.
The first blues song that was ever written down was 'Dallas Blues' - published in 1912 by Hart Wand. (That was a white violinist from Oklahoma City.) The blues form was first popularized by the black composer W.C. Handy (about 1911-14). Instrumental blues had been recorded in 1913. Mamie Smith recorded the first vocal blues song: 'Crazy Blues' - in 1920. While the blues had big popularity, jazz had it too. Popularity of jazz made possible recording the blues in the first place. And this made the invasion of blues into jazz.
American soliders brought the blues home when they were comeing home from the First World War. They didn´t learn the blues from Europeans, but from Southern white musicians who had been interested in the blues. During the twenties, the blues became a national hit. Records by blues singers like Bessie Smith and later with Billie Holiday, were solding in the millions.
During the thirties and forties, the blues spread northward because of the migration of many black people from the South. It entered into the repertory of big jazz bands. The blues also became electrified. In some Northern cities like Chicago and Detroit played Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Elmore James among others something what was basically Mississippi Delta blues. In the same time, T-Bone Walker in Houston and B.B. King in Memphis were exploring a style of guitar playing that combined jazz technique with the blues style.
Bluesmens in the cities were "discovered" by young white American and European musicians. Many of these bands like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Cream, Canned Heat, and Fleetwood Mac used blues pieces in their own music. So they brought the blues to young white musicians. And that is, how the blues came into the world.