rockin’ pneumonia (1957)
Huey "Piano" Smith. rock'n'roll/rhythm & blues, New Orleans LA USA.
key: C blues
mode: C D Eb F F# G Bb
melody: S L TA d r (ri) m
form: strophic with refrain
meter: duple
English function names: tonic dominant
Tagg (modified): home counterpoise (away)
Riemann: T7 D7
Scale degrees: I7 V7
Chords: C7 G7 C7
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G7 C7
|/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |The blues. Possibly the most important musical development in the past 150 years. It has certainly become the predominant sound-world of music making today. In terms of form, this is a less-discussed 8-bar blues, as opposed to the usually-taught 12. But isn’t that what rock ’n’ roll was supposed to be? Straight to the point. Short and punchy.
In the blues, we have a situation where the notes of the melody are not fully represented in the harmonies — in fact, they clash, but in a way that somehow sounds right. So have a C major chord with a flat seventh degree, like what classical music calls a dominant chord, except it’s clearly the tonic — when naming the chord we still say “C dominant” or "C seven" anyway. In the blues scale, there is no E natural for the C major chord; there is no B natural for the G major chord with the flat seventh degree, this time functioning more like a "true" dominant in the original sense.
Blues is another instance where using chord nomenclature from classical music starts to go horribly wrong.1 Part of the issue is that there is only so much you can fight centuries of habit. These names were already available and so people just used them, even though “dominant” stopped meaning what it was originally supposed to mean — the chord built on the fifth scale degree that signals the return to the tonic (even though in this song G7 retains that function). This is why the Tagg terms have become necessary and useful.2 Much in the same way that we use “octave” — which, yes, way, way back in Greek antiquity was separated by eight (uneven) steps — even though we now separate the octave into twelve (equal) steps (dodecatave is a bit unwieldy, so…). Think about the last four months of the year and how the numbers have changed, but not the name. Old habits die hard.
In modern times, it has become important to separate “dominant, the chord function” from “dominant, the chord flavor.” I wish it were easier and Tagg’s new terminology helps a lot, but has not spread to the point of standardization. It’s not that traditional Euroclassical concepts of harmonic function need to be thrown out — they actually still have good use in musics that have roots in both European and African musics (basically, most “popular” styles that have come out of the Americas since colonialism and slavery), but they most definitely need to be enhanced and modified, just as they have been throughout its history. We do not analyze Josquin like we analyze Bach, we do not analyze Philip Glass like we analyze Mahler. But as each composer pushed the boundaries of what was considered musically acceptable in Classical music, the theory expanded to include those examples. While there are definitely conservative strongholds in some areas of academia who feel music that is not purely from the Euroclassical tradition is not worth studying, for every one of those there are progressive strongholds expanding the canon. In this case, more is more.
Now. All that said, the melody to this song has a lot of slides and more speech-like pitches (as we heard in Life During Wartime, for example), which is a hallmark of the blues style. I hear this song as using something closer to E natural — which is not a blue note — when C7 is in play. There, too, is now extensive research promoting the concept of a "neutral" or "blues" third scale degree, that resides between a minor third (in this case Eb) and a major third (in this case E natural).3 This place of residence is not microtonal in the avant-garde classical sense, where there is a tradition of extending the concept of equal-temperament to finer degrees (¼ tone, ⅙ tone and others).4 This is a more fluid sense of tuning, influenced by just intonation — again, via practice and not theory; it's not a fixed pitch, either. Most importantly, I want to argue that this blues third, the minor third, AND the major third could — okay, fine: should! — all be considered diatonic to blues, because they all show up all the time in the melody and harmony. Some of the instruments typically used in the blues and blues-based musics (jazz, rock, and their offshoots) are fixed pitch, equal temperament (piano, guitar when not using a slide), and some of the instruments have the ability to move around in the pitch spectrum (the voice, wind instruments to enough of an extent, guitar with a slide, bowed instruments). The aesthetic values of the blues require the ability to move around pitches for expressive purposes, or at least, in the case of instruments like the piano, to fake it till you make it.
If I'm arguing that the blues third scale degree is diatonic, why isn't it up there in my fancy-shmancy chart? Well, there are reasons. There's no solfege syllable for it and I'm not sure there should be. Moo? Moe? Not worth the battle. There's also no symbol for it in notation, which I actually think would be helpful, particularly for transcriptions. There are microtonal symbols, but again, using the symbol for a quarter tone sharp or flat is not really in the spirit of the music, nor is it really accurate, because we are not looking for that kind of precision. Anthony Braxton has a symbol that he uses for music that can be read by any instrument, a star, meaning the player can choose whether they play it sharp, flat, or natural as makes sense to the instrument and the player. We could use a symbol with that kind of simplicity for blue notes.
other recordings:
Johnny Rivers, L.A. Reggae, Capitol. C blues.
Phoebe Snow, Phoebe Snow Live, Verve. D blues.
Lonnie Mack, Memphis Wham!, Ace Records. F blues.
Dr. John, The Brightest Smile in Town, Modern Harmonic. G blues.
Rod Bernard & Clifton Chenier, Boogie in Black and White, Jin Records. Bb blues.
We have seen this already in songs that use I and vii, such Shimke Khazer and Knight Rider.
As an added bonus, they work rather well when analyzing Classical music, old and new.
Many musicians use microtonal to mean anything outside 12-tone equal temperament, but that centers Western Classical Music as the standard against which everything else is measured. I prefer to use microtonal only to refer to music within the tradition of Western Classical Music that uses pitches outside (or between, as it were) 12-tone equal temperament. What to use instead? Yes, that’s a toughy. I usually talk about tuning systems; many musics use tuning systems other than 12-ET. Blues is something that is both in and outside of Western Classical Music, so we are combing ideas from in and out of the tradition. That said, as I explain in the main text, it doesn’t make sense to think of it as microtonal, even if some of the blue notes happen to precisely be a ¼ or ⅙ tone.