Blues musician John Lee Hooker at the Long Beach Blues Festival, 1997
7 August 2023
Blue can refer to the color or it can also refer to a state of sadness. That latter sense is probably a reference to the medieval theory of medical humors, in particular to melancholy, which has a black or dark blue color. While we have a good idea of the general outline of the word’s etymology, there are a number of uncertainties and gaps in our knowledge of blue’s history and development.
Blue comes from a proto-Germanic root (there are cognates in most of the Germanic languages). The Germanic root was also borrowed into post-classical/medieval Latin as blavus, and that Latin word, along with its descendent in Anglo-Norman (the dialect of French spoken by the Norman conquerors of England) and Continental Old French, would influence and reinforce later English usage. But the meaning of this proto-Germanic root was probably quite different from that of our present-day word.
We can see this difference in Old English, which like proto-Germanic, did not have a separate word, at least not one in common use, for the color blue, having only six basic color terms (for white, black, red, yellow, green, and gray). We have two words in Old English that come from this root. One, blæwen, referred to the color blue as we know it, but it was an uncommon word, only a few instances appear in the extant corpus. The second, bleo, is much more common, but it is used only twice in the corpus to mean blue or purple (glossing the Latin blavus and fucus). Its usual meaning was the more general color/hue or form/shape (and these two senses often cannot be disambiguated, giving bleo an even more general sense of aspect/appearance).
It is the Normans who really introduced blue into the English language. We see the Anglo-Norman and Continental Old French bleu, meaning the color we know today as blue, starting in the thirteenth century. But both Anglo-Norman and the Old French words have an older sense, recorded in the early twelfth century, meaning tawny/golden/fair. This sense may represent a different, perhaps Celtic, root.
The early use of the Middle English blo reflects a lighter shade. It is recorded in the early thirteenth century in the sense of gray or ashen. But this sense is rare and early. The more common use blo was to refer to a hue that was a dark blue, almost black, or a purplish blue, like a bruise. This sense survives today in the northern English dialectal and the Scots blae. We can see this dark blue/purple sense the Scottish legal text Leges quatuor burgorum. This macaronic, Latin-English text was penned sometime before 1200; the Scottish text shown here is a nineteenth-century recension of a number of unspecified older manuscripts:
De querela de blaa et blodi
Si quis verberando fecerit aliquem blaa et blodi ipse quie fuerit blaa et blodi prius debet exaudiri sive prius venerit aut non ad querimoniam faciendam Et si uterque fuerit blaa et blodi qui prius accusaverit prius exaudietur.
Of playnte of hym þat is mayd blaa and blody
If ony man strykis anoþir quhar thruch he is mayd blaa and blody he þat is mayd blaa and blody sal first be herde quheþir he cumys fyrst to plenge or nocht And gif þat bathe be blaa and blody he þat first plengeis hym sal first be herde
(Regarding a complaint of one who is made blue and bloody
If any man strikes another whereby he is made blue and bloody, he that is made blue and bloody shall first be heard whether he comes first to complain or not. And if they both be blue and bloody, he that first complains shall first be heard.)
Use of blue to refer to the lighter shades appears by the early fourteenth century. We see it in the Middle English romance of Sir Tristrem. The poem is found in the Auchinleck manuscript, which was copied c. 1330, but the poem may have been composed as early as the late thirteenth century:
Þe king, a welp he brouȝt
Bifor Tristrem þe trewe;
What colour he was wrouȝt
Now ichil ȝou schewe.
Silke nas non so soft,
He was rede, grene & blewe.
Þai þat him seiȝen oft
Of him hadde gamen & glewe,
Ywis.
His name was Peticrewe,
Of him was michel priis.(The king brought a whelp before Tristrem the true. What color he was made of I will now tell you. Silk was never so soft, he was red, green, and blue. In fact, they that saw him often had joy and glee. His name was Peticrewe, of him there was great distinction.)
The sense of blue referring to sadness or depression seems to be a development from this sense of a dark, almost black, shade of blue and is a metaphor for melancholy, or black bile, the humor that was thought to be the cause of sadness and teres blewe. This sense was in place by the late fourteenth century. Geoffrey Chaucer uses it in the opening of his poem The Complaint of Mars, about the love between the planets Mars and Venus. The speaker is repeating words they heard spoken by a bird on St. Valentine’s Day that warn illicit lovers to run before daybreak exposes them to jealous eyes, but the bird says not to worry, because the sadness of their parting will soon be assuaged:
Gladeth, ye foules, of the morowe gray.
Lo, Venus, riysen among yon rowes rede,
And floures fressh, honoureth ye this day;
For when the sunne uprist then wol ye sprede,
But ye lovers, that lye in any drede,
Fleeth, lest wikked tonges you espye.
Lo, yond the sunne, the candel of jelosye!Wyth teres blewe and with a wounded herte
Taketh your leve, and with Seint John to borowe
Apeseth sumwhat of your sorowes smerte.
Tyme cometh eft that cese shal your sorowe;
The glade nyght ys worth an hevy morowe—
Seynt Valentyne, a foul thus herde I synge
Upon this day er sonne gan up-sprynge.(Be glad, you fowls of the gray morning.
Lo, Venus rises among yon red rays,
And fresh flowers honor you this day;
For when the sun rises, then you will spread out.
But you lovers that lie in any danger,
Flee, lest you espy any wicked tongues.
Lo, yonder the sun, the candle of jealousy.With tears blue and with a wounded heart
Take your leave, and with Saint John your guarantor,
Sooth somewhat your sorrow’s pain.
Time comes again that will cease your sorrow;
The glad night is worth a sad morning—
Saint Valentine’s Day—thus a fowl I heard sing
Upon this day before the sun springs up.)
Use of the phrase the blues to refer to a state of unhappiness dates to the mid eighteenth century. We see this phrase in an 11 July 1741 letter by actor and playwright David Garrick:
The Town is exceeding hot & Sultry & I am far from being quite well, tho not troubled wth ye Blews as I have been, I design taking a Country Jaunt or two for a few Days when Our Engines are finish’d, for I found great Benefits from ye last I took.
And several centuries later, the blues would become the name of the musical genre. The musical style, usually reflecting melancholic themes, arose out of African-American folk music. The earliest tunes bearing the title blues appear in 1912, Memphis Blues and Dallas Blues, and the name of the genre appears in newspapers by 1915, although undoubtedly the name was in use on Black oral use well before these dates. From the Chicago Tribune of 11 July 1915, an article on the musical genre that refers to a husband, the “Worm,” who at the insistence of his wife reluctantly dances to a blues melody only to discover that he loves it:
The Worm had turned—turned to fox trotting. And the “blues” had done it. The “jazz” had put pep into the legs that had scrambled too long for the 5:15.
What mattered to him now the sly smiles of contempt that his friends had uncorked when he essayed the foxy trot a month before: what mattered it whose shins he kicked?
That was what “blue” music had done for him.
That is what “blue” music is doing for everybody—taking away what its name implies, the blues. In a few months it has become the predominant motif in cabaret offerings; its wailing syncopation is heard in every gin mill where dancing holds sway.
That’s it, from medieval colors and medical theory to Black music on the far side of the ocean.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. bleu, adj. and n.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Complaint of Mars.” The Riverside Chaucer, third edition, Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, lines 1–14, 643–44.
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. blæwen, adj., blæ-hæwen, adj., bleo, n., blae, adj.
Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, 1937, Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), s.v. bla, adj., bla, n., blae, n.
Garrick, David. Letter to Peter Garrick (11 July 1741). The Letters of David Garrick, vol.1, David M. Little, George M. Karhrl, and Phoebe deK. Wilson, eds. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1963, 26.
“Leges Quatuor Burgorum” (before 1200). The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, vol. 1 of 11. Edinburgh, 1844, 349. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Latin text is from before 1200. The Scottish text is an nineteenth-century recension of a number Middle English Dictionary, 2019. s.v. bleu, adj., blo, adj.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2013, s.v. blue, adj. and n., blues, n.; second edition, 1989, blae, n.
Sir Tristrem (MS c. 1330, composed before 1300?), lines 2400–2404. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Adv MS 19.2.1 (Auchinleck manuscript), fol. 294va. https://auchinleck.nls.uk/mss/tristrem.html
Photo credit: Mashiro Sumori, 1997. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.