To be blue refers to a mood of being sad or depressed. The blues in music and poetry are reinterpretations of this mood by musicians and writers into an art form. Baldwin and Hooker are right when they declare that the blues are universal in that the mood or the emotion of melancholy is something that humans everywhere, regardless or class or race, feel many times in their everyday lives. When one is sad, he can be described as being filled with the blues. The type of American music that blues singers have come to label as the blues may be hard for most people to imitate in actual singing or performance, however. This is because the blues genre is credited to have had its roots among he African-Americans and thus has a distinctive sound that is native to the people but hard to imitate for others. The blues music is their unique musical interpretation of the melancholy mood.
Latter musicians, inspired by what they hear, have stamped their respective personalities and identities to the genre so that blues music as it was known originally known have evolved into the modern popular and rock and roll music that exist today. These evolved musical styles are also called the blues but they don’t really sound as much as the original predecessor representatives of the genre. Nevertheless, if one doesn’t simply restrict the definition and sound of the blues music to the African-American blues, every culture or people could create their own brand of blues music. All it takes is for the music to spring from a need to interpret raw melancholy into music. Then one has created blues music.
And if one only wants to listen to blues music, it would not sound strange to the ear because the blues, being universal, would reveal itself to the human listener. The normal person who understands loneliness would identify with the words in a blues song and get lost in the sad melodies.
