The blues is an American art form. Originally, blues were primarily sung, with one of theobjectives being to tell a story as vividly as possible. To tell stories, blues singers usedsimple repeated phrases charged with a variety of expressive devices. The ability to tell thestory from one’s perspective came to represent blues performance practice in particular,and jazz improvisation in general. The familiar saying that “your solo should tell a story”takes on a completely different meaning when we consider whence it came and howintricate life’s stories can really be. Early blues practitioners were unconstrained by theform of the blues as the duration of improvised lyrics often influenced the length of