The Dillards
key: F major
mode: F major/mixolydian
melody: d m f fi s l ta
form: strophic with refrain, abcb' [aba'b' is plausible]
meter: duple
English function names: tonic dominant
Tagg (modified): home counterpoise (away)
Riemann: T D or D7
Scale degrees: I V or V7
Chords: F C or C7 F
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F C7 F
|/ / |/ / |/ / |/ / :|One of the more interesting things about this song is that the chords indicate plain old major, but the melody indicates a lot more. I didn't put it up there as a mode, but blues is certainly a possibility; it wouldn't sound out of place. Do I point this out to my middle school kids? No. But for theory-minded folks, musicologically-minded folks, absolutely.
In a Western Classical sense, these are "borrowed" notes (something borrowed, something blue, am I right?), but I'd like to argue that for this style, they are diatonic. If it's the norm for this style, why not? The harmonies normally carry certain pitches and the melodies normally carry some other pitches. And there's a spectrum of "normalcy" in American folk music that stretches from European folk and classical musics into all the things that Black people and hillbillies, Natives and not, religious and not-so-much folks poured into their musicking in North America. Some songs are more like what we talk about in Western Classical theory and some songs have a lot of that and something more. Instead of saying that anything that doesn't fit the exact same things that make sense for Mozart is wrong/bad/your-favorite-negative-thing-here, we can say these aspects are the norm for this style and it happens to share some of what's normal for Mozart, but not all. And that is what it is.
other recordings:
Doc Watson, Home Sweet Home, Sugar Hill Records. D
Foghorn Stringband, Rock Island Grange, self-released. A