section_path: Early development/Blues/African genesis
section_name: African genesis
paragraph_text: African genesis
  
  Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre, which originated in African-American communities of primarily the Deep South of the United States at the end of the 19th century from their spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants and rhymed simple narrative ballads.
  
  The African use of pentatonic scales contributed to the development of blue notes in blues and jazz. As Kubik explains:
  
  Many of the rural blues of the Deep South are stylistically an extension and merger of basically two broad accompanied song-style traditions in the west central Sudanic belt: