Introduction

This free course, Discovering music: the blues, will introduce you to a musical tradition with roots in the nineteenth century but is still relevant to making music today. You will learn about how the lyrics of blues songs reflect the social environment in which they were created, and about the musical techniques that underpin the structures of blues songs. You do not need to play an instrument, to sing or have any prior musical knowledge to be able to complete this course.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course A111 Discovering the arts and humanities.