Young blues artists today are exploring all aspects of the blues, from classic delta to more rock-oriented blues, artists born after 1970 like , Shemekia Copeland, Johnny Lang, Corey Harris, John Mayer, Susan Tedeschi, and North Mississippi Allstars developing their own styles. Cover of the original sheet music of the two piano version of Rhapsody in Blue Blues musical styles, forms (12-bar blues), melodies, and the blues scale have influenced many other genres of music, such as rock and roll, jazz, and popular music. Prominent jazz, folk or rock performers, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Red Hot Chili Peppers have performed significant blues recordings.
The blues scale is often used in popular songs like Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night", blues ballads like "Since I Fell for You" and "Please Send Me Someone to Love", and even in orchestral works such as George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Concerto in F". The blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music and informs many modal frames, especially the ladder of thirds used in rock music (e.g.
, in "A Hard Day's Night"). Blues forms are used in the theme to the televised , teen idol Fabian's hit, "Turn Me Loose", country music star Jimmie Rodgers' music, and guitarist/vocalist Tracy Chapman's hit "Give Me One Reason". Blues is sometimes danced as a type of swing dance, with no fixed patterns and a focus on connection, sensuality, body contact, and improvisation.
Most blues dance moves are inspired by traditional blues dancing. Although blues dancing is usually done to blues music, it can be done to any slow tempo 4/4 music. R B music can be traced back to spirituals and blues.
Musically, spirituals were a descendant of New England choral traditions, and in particular of Isaac Watts's hymns, mixed with African rhythms and call-and-response forms. Spirituals or religious chants in the African-American community are much better documented than the "low-down" blues. Spiritual singing developed because African-American communities could gather for mass or worship gatherings, which were called camp meetings.
Early country bluesmen such as Skip James, Charley Patton, Georgia Tom Dorsey played country and urban blues and had influences from spiritual singing. Dorsey helped to popularize Gospel music. Gospel music developed in the 1930s, with the Golden Gate Quartet.
In the 1950s, soul music by Sam Cooke, Ray Charles and James Brown used gospel and blues music elements. In the 1960s and 1970s, gospel and blues were these merged in soul blues music. Funk music of the 1970s was influenced by soul; funk can be seen as an antecedent of hip-hop and contemporary R B.
Duke Ellington straddled the big band and bebop genres. Though Ellington was a jazz artist, he used the blues form extensively. Before World War II, the boundaries between blues and jazz were less clear.
Usually jazz had harmonic structures stemming from brass bands, whereas blues had blues forms such as the 12-bar blues. However, the jump blues of the 1940s mixed both styles. After WWII, blues had a substantial influence on jazz.
Bebop classics, such as Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time", used the blues form with the pentatonic scale and blue notes. Bebop marked a major shift in the role of jazz, from a popular style of music for dancing, to a "high-art," less-accessible, cerebral "musician's music". The audience for both blues and jazz split, and the border between blues and jazz became the more defined.
Artists straddling the boundary between jazz and blues are categorized into the jazz-blues sub-genre. The blues' twelve-bar structure and the blues scale was a major influence on rock-and-roll music. Rock-and-roll has been called "blues with a back beat".
Rockabillies were also said to be twelve-bar blues played with a bluegrass beat. Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog", with its unmodified twelve-bar structure (in both harmony and lyrics) and a melody centered on flatted third of the tonic (and flatted seventh of the subdominant), is a blues song transformed into a rock-and-roll song. Many early rock-and-roll songs are based on blues: "That's All Right Mama", "Johnny B.
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