"Lady Sings The Blues" Billie Holiday
"Black Peter" Grateful Dead
"Born Under a Bad Sign" Albert King. Covered by Hendrix, Clapton, Rita Coolidge
"Can't Find My Way Back Home" Blind Faith
"Cry Baby" by Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, covered by Janis
"House of the Rising Sun" unknown. 16 year old Georgia Turner was recorded by Alan Lomax in 1937. Covered by Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Animals, Mark O'Conner-a really evocative violin piece.
When your 40 feet above your last bolt, and you're shaking like a dog shittin' peach pits thinking about that 80 feet of the cheese grating you're about to get, you sho' enuff got the blues.
I'm kinda with MH2
Understand that the OP has posed a question that might be construed to simply refernce a specific type of music, yet the simple query asks so much more from me.
Yeah, I know what Blues music is when I hear it, in my body and in my soul. Not all music labeled "blues" nor associated lyrics connect with me, but some do, and do so deeply.
I thought I was feeling the Blues and it lead to placing a barrel upside my head, but I found that the Blues is putting the gun back in the drawer and living with an understanding of how selfish I am to even consider such an act.
And it's getting up in the morning, again, and heading for the same commute and job I hate, doing the same redundant tasks I hate, again and again. Knowing it will go on, and on, and on......
Or to continually battle obesity and alcoholism......diet and abstention, failing repeatedly to gluttony and debauchery, only to wake in the middle of the night to regrets, resolution, then lapsing so easily back into cyclical hope and despair....
I grew up in Chicago, so I got an impacted ass full of the urban, modern day version (whatever that means), most of it well-intentioned, earnest, and downright awful. I swear, if I have to endure another Mustang Sally as performed by a bunch of middle-aged white dudes in Hawaiian shirts, I'm liable to off myself too.
By and large, most blues I hear is utterly fuct out. But some folks can punch through and connect. I've had to pull over listening to SRV's Little Wing 'cause I got too emotional. And some is just oozing with the feeling (honest, sad blues or otherwise). Here's a funky "otherwise" that I happen to like a lot:
Speaking of Jimi Hendrix; anybody know his connection to the show Law & Order?
Mariska Hargitay, who plays Olivia Benson, is the daughter of bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay and '50s blond bombshell, Jayne Mansfield, who, as her film career waned in the early '60s did some sound studio work with Hendrix.
Don't forget to throw in all those 9ths and blues notes like the flattened third, the fourth and the augmented fourth, and of COURSE the 7th, or it just ain't blue.
And Anders - the blues is a singular word. Sheesh.
I can't bring myself to say "Mr. Carlin's wrong, f*#k him." He's too dead to reply. And he's generally right. But whites got the blues. Ga-ron-teed. Think about Jason and the brouhaha over his lost job, etc.
I'm blue because I'm having an impossible time trying to listen to these videos.
Clicking and clacking, can't get them to play.
I'm starting to feel like neebee that-a-way.
If you are black, white, red, yellow, brown, you have a right to be openly Blue.
Let us know!