Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy
Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is a platformer video game developed by Bennett Foddy. The game was released as part of the October 2017 Humble Monthly, on October 6, 2017 where it went on to be played by over 2.7 million players. A Steam version of the game was released by Foddy on December 6, 2017; the game was released on iOS that same day. The Android version was released on April 25, 2018. Getting Over It revolves around a silent man by the name of Diogenes - who, somewhat true to his namesake, resides in a large metal cauldron - and wields a Yosemite hammer, which he can use to grip objects and move himself. Using the mouse or trackpad, the player tries to move the man's upper body and sledge hammer in order to climb a steep mountain; the game is accompanied by voice-over commentary by Bennett Foddy discussing various philosophical topics. The commentary provides quotations relating to disappointment and perseverance when significant progress is lost by the player; the game increases in difficulty.
There are no checkpoints. The game concludes when a player reaches the highest point of the map and enters space. Upon reaching the conclusion, a message asks players; when a player indicates they are not, the game provides access to a chatroom populated by other players who have completed the game. Foddy had been drawn to difficult games while growing up. Into the 1990s, video game developers in the United States and Japan began adding means to save or have checkpoints, so players would not have to return to the start on death. Foddy said, "The flavor of being sent back disappeared up to the point now where it's this boutique thing. People of a certain age still have that taste, or maybe everyone has it, but it's been written out of the design orthodoxy."More Foddy had seen a return of difficult games such as through the Dark Souls series. In August 2017, Foddy observed that while there was outcry by players over the saved game mechanism in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, which would erase the player's save file if they died, other players took to the challenge, showing renewed interest in games that were difficult by design.
He said, "whenever you see something that disproves a held design orthodoxy it's exciting because it opens up new avenues for exploration", considered Getting Over It as his exploration of this new development space. Getting Over It was aimed towards "a certain kind of person, to hurt them" and took inspiration from Sexy Hiking, a similar game released by Czech video game designer Jazzuo in 2002. Getting Over It's difficult gameplay was praised by reviewers, including PC Gamer writer Austin Wood. Rock, Shotgun listed it as one of the best PC games of 2017 and GameSpot said it might have been the "weirdest game" to come out of 2017. Polygon ranked it 36th on their list of the 50 best games of 2017. An Easter egg to Getting Over It appears in the game Just Cause 4. At a point on the game map, the player can guide the protagonist to where a cauldron and hammer are located. Activating them puts the game into a side-view mode, challenging the player to move about scattered obstacles as in Getting Over It, with Bennett Foddy narrating atop about the folly of the exercise and meta-humor of the Easter egg
Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis is a city located along the Mississippi River in southwestern Shelby County, United States. The 2017 city population was 652,236, making Memphis the largest city on the Mississippi River, second-largest city in Tennessee, as well as the 25th largest city in the United States. Greater Memphis is the 42nd largest metropolitan area in the United States, with a population of 1,348,260 in 2017; the city is the anchor of West Tennessee and the greater Mid-South region, which includes portions of neighboring Arkansas and Mississippi. Memphis is the seat of the most populous county in Tennessee; as one of the most historic and cultural cities of the southern United States, the city features a wide variety of landscapes and distinct neighborhoods. The first European explorer to visit the area of present-day Memphis was Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in 1541 with his expedition into the New World; the high bluffs protecting the location from the waters of the Mississippi would be contested between the Spanish and the English as Memphis took shape.
Modern Memphis was founded in 1819 by three prominent Americans: John Overton, James Winchester, future president Andrew Jackson. Memphis grew into one of the largest cities of the Antebellum South as a market for agricultural goods, natural resources like lumber, the American slave trade. After the American Civil War and the end of slavery, the city experienced faster growth into the 20th century as it became among the largest world markets for cotton and lumber. Home to Tennessee's largest African-American population, Memphis played a prominent role in the American civil rights movement and was the site of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1968 assassination. The city now hosts the National Civil Rights Museum—a Smithsonian affiliate institution. Since the civil rights era, Memphis has grown to become one of the nation's leading commercial centers in transportation and logistics; the city's largest employer is the multinational courier corporation FedEx, which maintains its global air hub at Memphis International Airport, making it the second-busiest cargo airport in the world.
Today, Memphis is a regional center for commerce, media and entertainment. The city has long had a prominent music scene, with historic blues clubs on Beale Street originating the unique Memphis blues sound during early 20th century; the city's music has continued to be shaped by a multi-cultural mix of influences across the blues, rock n' roll and hip-hop genres. Memphis barbecue has achieved international prominence, the city hosts the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, which attracts over 100,000 visitors to the city annually. Occupying a substantial bluff rising from the Mississippi River, the site of Memphis has been a natural location for human settlement by varying cultures over thousands of years; the area was known to be settled in the first millennium A. D. by people of the Mississippian Culture, who had a network of communities throughout the Mississippi River Valley and its tributaries. They built complexes with large earthwork ceremonial and burial mounds as expressions of their sophisticated culture.
The historic Chickasaw Indian tribe, believed to be their descendants occupied the site. French explorers led by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle and Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto encountered the Chickasaw tribe in that area in the 16th century. J. D. L. Holmes, writing in Hudson's Four Centuries of Southern Indians, notes that this site was a third strategic point in the late 18th century through which European powers could control United States encroachment and their interference with Indian matters—after Fort Nogales and Fort Confederación: "... Chickasaw Bluffs, located on the Mississippi River at the present-day location of Memphis. Spain and the United States vied for control of this site, a favorite of the Chickasaws."In 1795 the Spanish Governor-General of Louisiana, Francisco Luis Héctor de Carondelet sent his Lieutenant Governor, Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, to negotiate and secure consent from the local Chickasaw so that a Spanish fort could be erected on the bluff. Holmes notes that consent was reached despite opposition from "disappointed Americans and a pro-American faction of the Chickasaws", when the "pro-Spanish faction signed the Chickasaw Bluffs Cession and Spain provided the Chickasaws with a trading post…".
Fort San Fernando de las Barrancas remained a focal point of Spanish activity until, as Holmes summarizes: he Treaty of San Lorenzo or Pinckney's Treaty of 1795, all of the careful, diplomatic work by Spanish officials in Louisiana and West Florida, which has succeeded for a decade in controlling the Indians, was undone. The United States gained the right to navigate the Mississippi River and won control over the Yazoo Strip north of the thirty-first parallel; the Spanish dismantled the fort, shipping its iron to their locations in Arkansas. In 1796, the site became the westernmost point of the newly admitted state of Tennessee, located in what was called the Southwest United States; the area was still occupied and controlled by the Chickasaw nation. Captain Isaac Guion led an American force down the Ohio River to claim the land, arriving on July 20, 1797. By this time, the Spanish had departed; the fort's ruins went unnoticed twenty years when Memphis was laid out as a city, after the United States government paid the Chickasaw for land.
The city of Memphis was founded on May 22, 1819 by John Overton, James Winchester and Andrew Jackson. They named it after the ancient capita
Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the 29th most-populous city in the United States. It is one of two cities in Kentucky designated as first-class, the other being Lexington, the state's second-largest city. Louisville is the historical seat and, since 2003, the nominal seat of Jefferson County, located in the northern region of the state, on the border with Indiana. Louisville, named for King Louis XVI of France, was founded in 1778 by George Rogers Clark, making it one of the oldest cities west of the Appalachian Mountains. Sited beside the Falls of the Ohio, the only major obstruction to river traffic between the upper Ohio River and the Gulf of Mexico, the settlement first grew as a portage site, it was the founding city of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which grew into a 6,000-mile system across 13 states. Today, the city is known as the home of legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, the Kentucky Derby, Kentucky Fried Chicken, the University of Louisville and its Louisville Cardinals athletic teams, Louisville Slugger baseball bats, three of Kentucky's six Fortune 500 companies, being Humana, Kindred Healthcare and Yum!
Brands. Its main airport is the site of United Parcel Service's worldwide air hub. Since 2003, Louisville's borders have been the same as those of Jefferson County, after a city-county merger; the official name of this consolidated city-county government is the Louisville/Jefferson County Metro Government, abbreviated to Louisville Metro. Despite the merger and renaming, the term "Jefferson County" continues to be used in some contexts in reference to Louisville Metro including the incorporated cities outside the "balance" which make up Louisville proper; the city's total consolidated population as of the 2017 census estimate was 771,158. However, the balance total of 621,349 excludes other incorporated places and semiautonomous towns within the county and is the population listed in most sources and national rankings; the Louisville-Jefferson County, KY-IN Metropolitan Statistical Area, sometimes referred to as Kentuckiana, includes Louisville-Jefferson County and 12 surrounding counties, seven in Kentucky and five in Southern Indiana.
As of 2017, the MSA had a population of 1,293,953. The history of Louisville spans hundreds of years, has been influenced by the area's geography and location; the rapids at the Falls of the Ohio created a barrier to river travel, as a result, settlements grew up at this stopping point. The first European settlement in the vicinity of modern-day Louisville was on Corn Island in 1778 by Col. George Rogers Clark, credited as the founder of Louisville. Several landmarks in the community are named after him. Two years in 1780, the Virginia General Assembly approved the town charter of Louisville; the city was named in honor of King Louis XVI of France, whose soldiers were aiding Americans in the Revolutionary War. Early residents lived in forts to protect themselves from Indian raids, but moved out by the late 1780s. In 1803, explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark organized their expedition across America in the town of Clarksville, Indiana at the present-day Falls of the Ohio opposite Louisville, Kentucky.
The city's early growth was influenced by the fact that river boats had to be unloaded and moved downriver before reaching the falls. By 1828, the population had grown to 7,000 and Louisville became an incorporated city. Early Louisville was slaves worked in a variety of associated trades; the city was a point of escape for slaves to the north, as Indiana was a free state. During this point in the 1850s, the city was growing and vibrant, but that came with negativity, it was the center of planning, supplies and transportation for numerous campaigns in the Western Theater. By the year 1855, ethnic tension was arising. Nobody knew. On August 6, 1855 "Bloody Monday" happened. By 1861, the civil war broke out. During the Civil War, Louisville was a major stronghold of Union forces, which kept Kentucky in the Union. By the end of the war, Louisville had not been attacked, although skirmishes and battles, including the battles of Perryville and Corydon, took place nearby. After Reconstruction, returning Confederate veterans took political control of the city, leading to the jibe that Louisville joined the Confederacy after the war was over.
The first Kentucky Derby was held on May 1875, at the Louisville Jockey Club track. The Derby was shepherded by Meriwether Lewis Clark, Jr. the grandson of William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, grandnephew of the city's founder George Rogers Clark. Horse racing had a strong tradition in Kentucky, whose Inner Bluegrass Region had been a center of breeding high-quality livestock throughout the 19th century. Ten thousand spectators watched the first Derby. On March 27, 1890, the city was devastated and its downtown nearly destroyed when an F4 tornado tore through as part of the middle Mississippi Valley tornado outbreak. An estimated 74 to 120 people were killed and 200 were injured; the damage cost the city $2.5 million. In 1914, the City of Louisville passed a racially-based zoning residential zoning code, following Baltimore, a handful of cities in the Carolinas; the NAACP challenged the ordinance in two cases. Two weeks after the ordinance enacted, an African-American named Arthur Harris moved into a house on a block designated for whites.
He was found guilty. The second case was planned to create a test case. William Warley, the president of the local chapter
MusicBrainz
MusicBrainz is a project that aims to create an open data music database, similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database, a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a compact disc metadata storehouse to become a structured open online database for music. MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, the length of each track; these entries are maintained by volunteer editors. Recorded works can store information about the release date and country, the CD ID, cover art, acoustic fingerprint, free-form annotation text and other metadata; as of 21 September 2018, MusicBrainz contained information about 1.4 million artists, 2 million releases, 19 million recordings. End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.
MusicBrainz allows contributors to upload cover art images of releases to the database. Internet Archive provides the bandwidth and legal protection for hosting the images, while MusicBrainz stores metadata and provides public access through the web and via an API for third parties to use; as with other contributions, the MusicBrainz community is in charge of maintaining and reviewing the data. Cover art is provided for items on sale at Amazon.com and some other online resources, but CAA is now preferred because it gives the community more control and flexibility for managing the images. Besides collecting metadata about music, MusicBrainz allows looking up recordings by their acoustic fingerprint. A separate application, such as MusicBrainz Picard, must be used for this. In 2000, MusicBrainz started using Relatable's patented TRM for acoustic fingerprint matching; this feature allowed the database to grow quickly. However, by 2005 TRM was showing scalability issues as the number of tracks in the database had reached into the millions.
This issue was resolved in May 2006 when MusicBrainz partnered with MusicIP, replacing TRM with MusicDNS. TRMs were phased out and replaced by MusicDNS in November 2008. In October 2009 MusicIP was acquired by AmpliFIND; some time after the acquisition, the MusicDNS service began having intermittent problems. Since the future of the free identification service was uncertain, a replacement for it was sought; the Chromaprint acoustic fingerprinting algorithm, the basis for AcoustID identification service, was started in February 2010 by a long-time MusicBrainz contributor Lukáš Lalinský. While AcoustID and Chromaprint are not MusicBrainz projects, they are tied with each other and both are open source. Chromaprint works by analyzing the first two minutes of a track, detecting the strength in each of 12 pitch classes, storing these 8 times per second. Additional post-processing is applied to compress this fingerprint while retaining patterns; the AcoustID search server searches from the database of fingerprints by similarity and returns the AcoustID identifier along with MusicBrainz recording identifiers if known.
Since 2003, MusicBrainz's core data are in the public domain, additional content, including moderation data, is placed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 license. The relational database management system is PostgreSQL; the server software is covered by the GNU General Public License. The MusicBrainz client software library, libmusicbrainz, is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which allows use of the code by proprietary software products. In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit group, by its creator Robert Kaye. On 20 January 2006, the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data was the Barcelona, Spain-based Linkara in their Linkara Música service. On 28 June 2007, BBC announced that it has licensed MusicBrainz's live data feed to augment their music Web pages; the BBC online music editors will join the MusicBrainz community to contribute their knowledge to the database. On 28 July 2008, the beta of the new BBC Music site was launched, which publishes a page for each MusicBrainz artist.
Amarok – KDE audio player Banshee – multi-platform audio player Beets – automatic CLI music tagger/organiser for Unix-like systems Clementine – multi-platform audio player CDex – Microsoft Windows CD ripper Demlo – a dynamic and extensible music manager using a CLI iEatBrainz – Mac OS X deprecated foo_musicbrainz component for foobar2000 – Music Library/Audio Player Jaikoz – Java mass tag editor Max – Mac OS X CD ripper and audio transcoder Mp3tag – Windows metadata editor and music organizer MusicBrainz Picard – cross-platform album-oriented tag editor MusicBrainz Tagger – deprecated Microsoft Windows tag editor puddletag – a tag editor for PyQt under the GPLv3 Rhythmbox music player – an audio player for Unix-like systems Sound Juicer – GNOME CD ripper Zortam Mp3 Media Studio – Windows music organizer and ID3 Tag Editor. Freedb clients can access MusicBrainz data through the freedb protocol by using the MusicBrainz to FreeDB gateway service, mb2freedb. List of online music databases Making Metadata: The Case of Mus
Steel guitar
Steel guitar is a type of guitar or the method of playing the instrument. Developed in Hawaii by Joseph Kekuku in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a steel guitar is positioned horizontally; the earliest use of an electrified steel guitar was first made in the early 1930s by Bob Dunn of Milton Brown and His Brownies, a western swing band from Fort Worth, Texas. Nashville picked up the use of the steel guitar in the early days of the late 1940s and early 1950s "Honky Tonk" country & western music with a number of fine steel guitarists backing names like Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and Webb Pierce; the term steel guitar is mistakenly used to describe any metal body resophonic guitar. Steel guitar can describe: The slide technique of playing slide guitar is by using a steel bar. Resonator guitars, including round necked varieties, are suitable for this style, yet are referred to as "steel guitars", but rather referred to as a Dobro, acoustic slide guitar, or square neck resonator guitars.
Dobro is a brand name of one of the leading manufacturers of resonator guitars. A specialized instrument built for playing in steel guitar fashion; these are of several types: Lap steel guitar, which may be: Lap slide guitar, with a conventional wooden guitar box. The square-necked variety of resonator guitar. Electric lap steel guitar. Electric console steel guitar. Electric pedal steel guitar. Steel guitar refers to a method of playing on a guitar held horizontally, with the treble strings uppermost and the bass strings towards the player, using a type of slide called a steel above the fingerboard rather than fretting the strings with the fingers; this may be done with any guitar, but is most common on instruments designed and produced for this style of play with painted lines instead of frets, since the strings are much too high to be fretted. Playing a steel guitar with a steel can be quite challenging, great steel players are few and far between, because of some of the techniques involved such as slanting the bar, palm damping, thumb damping, unique styles of picking are not mastered.
The technique popularized in Hawaii. Thus, the lap steel guitar is sometimes known as the Hawaiian guitar in documents from the early 20th century, today any steel guitar is called a Hawaiian steel guitar. However, Hawaiian guitar refers to slack key guitar, played in the conventional or Spanish position, using a conventional fretted guitar in various open tunings with the strings tuned lower than usual. Steel guitar tunings tend to feature close intervals whereas slack key tunings more contain 4ths and 5ths. Dobro is a brand of resonator guitars, but the word is most used to describe bluegrass instruments of several different brands. Tunings and techniques are similar to acoustic Hawaiian steel guitar playing, but have evolved somewhat differently in the bluegrass idiom, which involves faster picking and changes than Hawaiian music does. Bottleneck guitar may have developed from Steel guitar technique, it is similar, with the exception that the guitar is held in the conventional position, a different, tubular form of slide is slipped over the middle or ring finger or pinky to accommodate this playing position.
The slide is never slanted. Common bottleneck tunings are open E chords. A steel guitar is one designed to be played in steel-guitar fashion; these have been of many types, but two dominate: Resonator guitars the square-necked variety which can be played only in steel guitar fashion. Electric instruments, starting with electric lap steel guitars and developing through the console steel guitar to the pedal steel guitar; the lap steel guitar has 6 strings and may have various tunings. The'standard' EBGDAE tuning was changed to allow'open' i.e. major chord tunings to accommodate using the straight steel bar and not require changing string gauges. A new generation of musicians use open tunings, but Hawaiian music for the last 100 years has used more complex tunings once musicians could manipulate bars to execute diagonal barrings, both forward and back. Hawaiian tunings evolved from A Major and E Major to E7, C sharp Minor, C sharp Minor 9th, F sharp Minor 9th, B11th and the popular E 13th. Jerry Byrd is credibly the originator of the C6+A7 tuning ECAGEC sharp which allows a wider ranging of chording for Hawaiian and many other forms of modern music.
It differs from a conventional or Spanish guitar in having a higher action and a neck, square in cross section. The frets, unused in steel style playing, may be replaced by markers. There are three main types: Lap slide guitars, which are acoustic instruments but may have electric pickups for amplification in addition. Resonator guitars, which are acoustic instruments but may have pickups for amplification in addition. Electric lap steel guitars, which are solid body. Early lap steel guitars were Spanish guitars modified by raising both the head nut; the string height at the head nut was raised to about half an inch by using a head nut converter or converter nut. This type of guitar is claimed to have been invented in about 1889 by Joseph Kekuku in Hawaii; some lap slide guitars, particularl
WLW
WLW, branded "Newsradio 700 WLW", is a commercial news/talk radio station serving Greater Cincinnati. Owned by iHeartMedia, the station's studios are located in Sycamore Township, its transmitter is at Mason, Ohio. One of the oldest radio stations in the United States, in the 1930s it was the only U. S. station authorized to broadcast with a power of 500,000 watts. WLW is Class A clear-channel station operating with 50,000 watts of power, the maximum allowed for AM stations under current Federal Communications Commission regulations. During daytime hours it can be heard in a four state region, with city-grade strength as far north as Columbus, as far west as the Indianapolis suburbs, as far south as Richmond, Kentucky, it provides at least secondary coverage to most of Ohio and Indiana, much of northern and central Kentucky. At night WLW can be heard across much of the eastern half of North America. WLW's programming is available online via iHeartRadio, is carried in the immediate Cincinnati area on HD Radio by sister station WKFS's HD-2 digital sub-channel, on FM at 94.5 MHz over translator W233BG.
WLW is authorized to transmit an HD digital signal on 700 AM, although it is not doing so. WLW is a primary entry point for the Emergency Alert System and is responsible for activations of the Southwest Ohio EAS plan. WLW is affiliated with ABC News Radio; the station airs a nearly locally produced talk format. Bill Cunningham hosts a weekday program, WLW is the flagship station for his Live on Sunday Night, syndicated by Premiere Networks. Other notable personalities on the station include morning host Mike McConnell, afternoon hosts Eddie Fingers and Rocky Boiman, evening host Gary Jeff Walker. WLW is the flagship radio station for the Cincinnati Reds Radio Network and a co-flagship station for the Cincinnati Bengals football team; the station broadcasts Cincinnati Bearcats and Xavier Musketeers college games. WLW was the outgrowth of an interest in radio by Powel Crosley Jr. although information about his earliest activities is limited. Crosley recounted that his introduction to radio occurred on February 22, 1921, when he took his son to the local Precision Equipment Company store to investigate purchasing a receiver.
He was shocked to find that a high-end receiver would cost $135, after assembling his own receiver from parts, he realized that commercial mass production could be done at much lower prices. Starting with individual parts moving on to complete receivers, in the 1920s the Crosley Radio Corporation was a leading manufacturer of inexpensive sets, Powel Crosley became known as "the Henry Ford of radio". Crosley was an early experimenter with making radio transmissions. Most accounts say he began in July 1921, using a 20-watt set located in an upstairs billiard table room playing a phonograph record of "Song of India", while asking local amateur radio enthusiasts to call if they heard his signals. In 1921 the Crosley Manufacturing Company was issued two radio station licenses: one for a standard amateur station, 8CR, located at 5723 Davey Avenue, Crosley's College Hill home, the other for an Experimental station, 8XAA, located at the company's Blue Rock Street factory building in Northside. There were no formal standards for radio stations making broadcasts for the general public, a variety of stations, most operating under Experimental or Amateur station licenses, conducted broadcasts on a regular schedule.
On December 1, 1921 the U. S. Department of Commerce, which regulated radio at this time, adopted the first regulation formally establishing a broadcasting station category, which set aside the wavelength of 360 meters for entertainment broadcasts, 485 meters for market and weather reports; the Precision Equipment Company was the first in Cincinnati to receive one of the new broadcasting station licenses, when its experimental station, 8XB, was relicensed as WMH on December 30, 1921. The Crosley Manufacturing Company applied for one of the new licenses, granted on March 2, 1922 for operation on the 360 meter "entertainment" wavelength, issued the randomly assigned call letters of WLW. WLW made its debut broadcast on March 23, 1922, beginning at 7:15 p.m. Station studios and transmitter were located at the Blue Rock Street building. Although the transmitter power was a modest 50 watts, station publicity boldly predicted that although "only the smaller type of sending apparatus has been employed in Cincinnati", "The equipment of the Crosley Manufacturing Company is of such great power that the concert emanating from Cincinnati will be heard as far as a distant point in Canada.
On August 7, 1922, WLW's programs were scheduled from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. while WMH's ran from 8:15 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Crosley was a fanatic about the new broadcasting technology, continually increased his station's capability; the power increased to 500 watts in September 1922, to 1,000 watts in May 1924. In 1923 Crosley bought the Precision Equipment Company, in January shut down WMH's operations. Precision held the rights to use the valuable Armstrong regeneration patent, was technically the surviving company in the merger, was subsequently renamed the Crosley Radio Company. In May 1923 the Department of Commerce set aside
Blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form, originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1870s by African Americans from roots in African musical traditions, African-American work songs and the folk music of white Americans of European heritage. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and rhymed simple narrative ballads; the blues form, ubiquitous in jazz and blues and rock and roll, is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes thirds or fifths flattened in pitch, are an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove. Blues as a genre is characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times, it was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, a longer concluding line over the last bars.
Early blues took the form of a loose narrative relating the racial discrimination and other challenges experienced by African-Americans. Many elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa; the origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals. The first appearance of the blues is dated to after the ending of slavery and the development of juke joints, it is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century; the first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience white listeners.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues rock developed, which blended blues styles with rock music. The term Blues may have come from "blue devils", meaning sadness; the phrase blue devils may have been derived from Britain in the 1600s, when the term referred to the "intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal". As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils, "it came to mean a state of agitation or depression." By the 1800s in the United States, the term blues was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase blue law, which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition. In lyrics the phrase is used to describe a depressed mood, it is in this sense of a sad state of mind that one of the earliest recorded references to "the blues" was written by Charlotte Forten aged 25, in her diary on December 14, 1862.
She was a free-born black from Pennsylvania, working as a schoolteacher in South Carolina, instructing both slaves and freedmen, wrote that she "came home with the blues" because she felt lonesome and pitied herself. She overcame her depression and noted a number of songs, such as Poor Rosy, that were popular among the slaves. Although she admitted being unable to describe the manner of singing she heard, Forten wrote that the songs "can't be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit", conditions that have inspired countless blues songs; the lyrics of early traditional blues verses often consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the so-called "AAB" pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, a longer concluding line over the last bars. Two of the first published blues songs, "Dallas Blues" and "Saint Louis Blues", were 12-bar blues with the AAB lyric structure.
W. C. Handy wrote; the lines are sung following a pattern closer to rhythmic talk than to a melody. Early blues took the form of a loose narrative. African-American singers voiced his or her "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, hard times"; this melancholy has led to the suggestion of an Igbo origin for blues because of the reputation the Igbo had throughout plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and outlook on life when they were enslaved. The lyrics relate troubles experienced within African American society. For instance Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Rising High Water Blues" tells of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927: "Backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time I said, backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time And I can't get no hearing from that Memphis girl of mine."Although the blues gained an association with misery and oppression, the lyrics could be humorous and raunchy: "Rebecca, get your big legs off of me, Rebecca, get your big legs off of m
