What are blues?

The first answer is a great text book answer. You need to know what that is all about.

Here is a little more ... you can't understand blues music if you've never heard it.

If you've heard it, but have never needed healing, then you will still not understand it.

Blues - like all music - is about the life and times of the people who sing it. Heaven, hell, sex, violence, God, the devil, hoodoo magic, good people making bad choices, good people hung up on bad relationships. and all manner of hard times.

Most of all ... blues is about healing. Many people think the blues is supposed to make you feel sad. Well that ain't so. We all feel sad. It's part of being human, and when you have the blues, it is because you KNOW what hard times is like, and KNOW what feeling sad is all about! Blues music is a journey. A journey that takes you through those hard times. Helps a person understand those sad feelings, and helps them heal from it.

It reminds us that even though we often take the journey alone, we ALL must take it. Thus, we are never truly alone in knowing that ALL people get the blues.

Blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on the use of the blue notes and a repetitive pattern that most often follows a twelve-bar structure. It emerged in African-American communities of the United States from spirituals and praise songs,[2] field hollers,[3] shouts and chants,[4] and rhymed English and Scots-Irish narrative ballads[citation needed]. The use of blue notes and the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics are indicative of the blues' West African pedigree. The blues influenced later American and Western popular music, as it became part of the genres of jazz, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, rock, hip-hop, and pop songs.

Here is a link to Allmusic.com
This is a great site that breaks down the history and the types of blues with sound sampling.

Also go here for the site of PBS series The Blues.
http://www.pbs.org/theblues

"a good man feelin bad".

" IT'S A PAIN YOU CAN'T LIVE WITH ,IT'S A WOMAN YOU CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT" Gary Moore ( Story of the Blues ) and Muddy Waters Said " THE BLUES HAD A BABY AND THEY NAMED IT ROCK AND ROLL"

I agree 100% with the first answer. In fact I was going to put the same answer in there.

Not being able to pay your bills = the Blues.
Not being able to put food on the table = the Blues.
Not being treated like an equal man/woman in society = the Blues
Having a good woman leave you for someone else...you KNOW = the Blues.