The music called the blues is as good an example as any of the unlikely, an evolution of African music in the southeastern American landscape, inflected by slavery and exposure to the English language, European instruments, and, perhaps, Irish, Scottish, and English ballads—the passionate melancholy of murder ballads and songs about abandoned maidens and bloody revenges. The term blue comes from an old English word for melancholy or for sadness, blue moods, blue devils, the blues, first tracked to 1555 in my etymological dictionary.
