The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music

The word “blue” has been associated with sadness and misery since Elizabethan times, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary providing a date of 1550 for the phrase “to look blue” meaning “affected with fear, discomfort, anxiety, etc.; low‐spirited”. Somewhat surprisingly, the same august volume (third edition, revised, 1972) fails to offer us a definition of the blues as used in this new Cambridge Companion, which is a shame as it is probably the most common application of the word in contemporary everyday speech. Gospel is almost an antonym for the blues, referring to glad tidings or good news mainly derived...