Down to the river I go to watch the muddy waters while crying about mankind, about the injustice all around – especially that done to social minorities like the Afro-Americans, who are responsible for one of the greatest things that has ever been invented – the blues –, which is the origin of all modern music, also of the stoner and the doom metal genres. Even Black Sabbath started as a blues rock band called Earth before they renamed and invented a new revolutionary music: heavy metal. Stoner and doom evolved from that late 60s and early 70s times, deeply influenced by the blues and its trademarks. Both sub-genres would never have existed, they would not be imaginable at all without the diminished fourth, the blue or worried notes – the tones of the devil! If you really love doom and stoner to the bones and start digging those bluesy grooves and guitar slides then you can claim like Antonio Maggio did back in 1908: "I got the blues"!
To get to know a bit more about this amazing music genre, find here a great summery about what blues is and where it comes from; I could not tell like this: "Blues is a genre and musical form originated by African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the end of the 19th century. The genre developed from roots in African-American work songs and European-American folk music. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm 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 (or "worried notes"), usually thirds or fifths flattened in pitch, are also 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. (...) 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, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the troubles experienced in African-American society. (...) The term blues may have come from "blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness; an early use of the term in this sense is in George Colman's one-act farce Blue Devils (1798). The phrase blue devils may also 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, and "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 prohibit 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 often used to describe a depressed mood. Some sources state that the term blues is related to "blue notes", the flatted, often microtonal notes used in blues, but the Oxford English Dictionary claims that the term blues came first and led to the naming of "blue notes". (...) The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908: Antonio Maggio's "I Got the Blues" is the first published song to use the word blues. Like jazz, rock and roll, heavy metal music, (...) blues has been accused of being the "devil's music" and of inciting violence and other poor behavior. In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable, especially as white audiences began listening to the blues during the 1920s. In the early twentieth century, W.C. Handy was the first to popularize blues-influenced music among non-black Americans." (source: Wikipedia)
Find here a list of few essential blues musicians to get the doom and stoner origins: ... in progress
