Blue Note - Origins and Meaning

Origins and Meaning

The existence of the blue note within African-American music ultimately derives from the fact that the equal temperament utilised in western diatonic harmony is an artifice or compromise originally employed in the eighteenth century to address the problems posed in the creation of keyboard instruments. Equal temperament was an artificial 'straightening out' of a tendency for the natural harmonic series (musical intervals as they exist in nature) to go off at a tangent, meaning that higher intervals and octaves in their natural form are of a different pitch than the lower intervals and octaves. This made it difficult to create keyboard instruments which were 'coherent'. Hence the blue note is an attempt to correct this artifice by playing a note that is closer to the interval as it exists in the natural harmonic series. Country blues, in particular, features wide variations from the diatonic pitches with emotive blue-notes. Blue notes are often seen as akin to relative pitches found in traditional African work songs.

Like the blues in general, the blue notes can mean many things. One quality that they all have in common, however, is that they are flatter than one would expect, classically speaking. But this flatness may take several forms. On the one hand, it may be a microtonal affair of a quarter-tone or so. Here one may speak of neutral intervals, neither major nor minor. On the other hand, the flattening may be by a full semitone--as it must be, of course, on keyboard instruments. It may involve a glide, either upward or downward. Again, this may be a microtonal, almost imperceptible affair, or it may be a slur between notes a semitone apart, so that there is actually not one blue note but two. A blue note may even be marked by a microtonal shake of a kind common in Oriental music .
The degrees of the mode treated in this way are, in order of frequency, the third, seventh, fifth, and sixth. —Peter van der Merwe (1989),

The blue notes are usually said to be the flattened third, flattened fifth, and flattened seventh scale degrees. The flatted fifth is also known as the sharpened fourth. Though the blues scale has "an inherent minor tonality, it is commonly 'forced' over major-key chord changes, resulting in a distinctively dissonant conflict of tonalities". A similar conflict occurs between the notes of the minor scale and the minor blues scale, as heard in songs such as "Why Don't You Do Right?."

In the case of the flattened third over the root (or the flattened seventh over the dominant), the resulting chord is a neutral mixed third chord.

Blue notes are used in many blues songs, in jazz, and in conventional popular songs with a "blue" feeling, such as Harold Arlen's "Stormy Weather." Blue notes are also prevalent in English folk music. Bent or "blue notes", called in Ireland "long notes", play a vital part in Irish music.