achy breaky heart (1990)

Don Von Tress. country, Tennessee USA.

performed by Billy Ray Cyrus.

key: A major (blues)
mode: A B C# D E F# G#
melody: S L (TA) T d r (me) m
form: strophic with chorus and interlude
meter: duple

English function names:     tonic     dominant
Tagg (modified):            home      counterpoise (away)
Riemann:                    T         D(7)
Scale degrees:              I         V(7)
Chords:                     A         E(7)

 A                          E(7)              
|/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |
 E(7)                       A
|/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |

Who is Don Von Tress, you may well be asking. He doesn't even seem to warrant a Wikipedia page, the poor lad. He doesn't have his own website. My guess is he doing fine from the royalties of this hit song. Even The Chipmunks have recorded it (I will definitely be sparing you the details). Von Tress' story is told here, in detail. 

It's easy to bash this song, especially because it was so, so successful. It was everywhere. People get sick of it. Yet, I never listened to the whole thing (not being a country music person) until considering it for my collection, so to speak. Many would say there's not much there; you don't have to listen to the whole thing. Even though the song not my cup of tea, either, I want to speak to the positives. What works about this song?

Von Tress leans heavily on a set of tried-and-true ingredients. We've already seen several songs with this chord progression — what I've named the counterpoise inversion, as the second phrase of the progression is the inverse of the first. It's a very common pattern with songs that use only tonic and dominant, in both major and minor modalities. This was one of the first things I learned about this song: Some friends of mine were talking about cruise ship gigs and how this was one of the standards for such gigs, and one of them exclaimed, "Yeah! Same progression as the Hokey Pokey!"

The melody is structured around variations on one motif (a short melodic shape) and one rhythm (in Gordonian parlance, "du du-de du;" in Kodály, "ta ti-ti ta"). The lyrics use anaphora — "you can" in most of the verses. The song is strophic — same melody for every section, even the chorus.¹

While not a blues song, per se, the melody definitely has blue notes and slides — it's not really C or C#, it's that "neutral" blues third that is both and neither of those pitches; we could say the same thing about the seventh scale degree. We need solfege syllables for these pitches! Mə and tə, perhaps? Ridiculous, you may say, but if we go along with the idea for a moment, we can now see that the melody has six pitches — S L Tə d r mə — which matches the simplicity that we hear.²

Modern country exists at the intersection of several neighboring traditions: blues, gospel, bluegrass, country, western, rock. It certainly could be (and maybe should be) argued that these aren't really even separate styles; they're more like dialects of the same language family. In jazz, these blue notes would be supported by having both the tonic and dominant functions played as dominant seventh chords. Here the opposite tactic occurs and neither chord is played as a dominant, although an E7 chord sounds fine and is available as an open chord on the ukulele (whereas E is not).³

All of these simple, basic elements — the short, common, simple chord progression; the melodic shape; the rhythm of the lyrics; the form of the lyrics; the stereotypical country musical tropes; the repetition —somehow magically combine into a massive hit. In the same way people are still singing Santoki to their children, people are going to be singing and dancing to Achy Breaky Heart for a long, long time, even if you, personally, are sick of it. Yet it's hard to pinpoint exactly why and how Von Tress' combination of these things work so well. It reminds me how I felt about studying counterpoint — When Bach uses a sequence, it's genius, every time; but when I do, it's hackneyed. 

All of that said, I'd rather have my students write a stupid, hackneyed song, than no song. The important lesson from Achy Breaky Heart is that it just doesn't take much — a handful of tried and true ingredients — to make a song that works and works well.

---

other recordings:

Caballo Dorado, Trayectoria, MCM Mexico. A major. In Spanish.

1. Could this be the most recent strophic song to hit the charts? Previously, it was Nothing Compares to U.

2. I picked the quintessential neutral vowel to go along with the "neutral" third, but if you're thinking that is a terrible vowel to sing, I agree, but you're probably also an opera singer, ha ha. I still love you.

3. And of course in much rock music, particularly the harder more metal styles, a simple fifth is used instead and renamed the "power chord."