Leadbelly
key: F major
mode: F major/ionian — F G A Bb C D E F
melody: Tdrmfs
form: ABAC [alternately, AA’AB]
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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C7
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F
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C7 F
|/ / |/ / |A classic, American song and partner-stealing dance. Lots of lyrics have been made up for this one — just compare the Pete Seeger version and the Elizabeth Mitchell one (recordings at the end of the post). You should definitely make up your own, too. This can be sung, of course, like all songs, in any major key you like, but F is always a good key for singing with the under-11 set.
F and C are also nice and easy to start with on ukulele, especially if you use a 3-finger F chord — then all you have to do is lift and place the same two fingers. I personally do not usually use a 3-finger F, but for the pedagogical reasons I mentioned, I like to start this way.
This year, I am trying something new. I am giving my students a set of songs with the same chord functions, but in different keys, that they can choose from, instead of us all doing the same song at the same time. I am also only using “true dominant” — dominant 7, in the Western Classical sense.1 I'll let you know how it goes.
Because I teach in a country other than my native one, I try to cover a few different systems of chord nomenclature. There may be a few of you out there who are thinking, "What is she talking about?" Back when I was an American exchange student in Germany taking music theory classes, I was quite surprised to learn that the theory I was learning back home was not the only theory there was! I was so lost, listening and listening for numbers, and not hearing them. I chanced upon an English-German music dictionary in the library and lo-and-behold, I found out Germans mainly use (what I now know are) Riemannian terms for chord functions, not scale degrees. Sometimes they do use scale degrees, but not exclusively and not as often as they use things like "Dominantdersubdominantparalele."
More recently I have incorporated theorist Philip Tagg's ideas into my teaching, because having some plain English words to support the usual "tonic," "dominant," and "I" or "V" help make things a bit clearer. What I like about Tagg's terminology (with my mods) is that different chord types can fill the roles of home and away and it helps clarify the roles that tonic, dominant, subdominant, etc., can play. It helps, for instance, in differentiating between dominant-the-chord-function and dominant-the-flavor in jazz and blues. If there's a dominant in the home position, then we are dealing with dominant-the-flavor.
This song illustrates Tagg’s “counterpoise kickback” concept. Tagg suggests that a song with few harmonies doesn’t provide a sense of “dominant” in the classical sense; the chord that is not the tonic becomes simply “another place to be,” which he calls the counterpoise. Because I presently work with students whose first language is not English, I prefer "away" to counterpoise. I love fancy words and will use them with EAL folks, but I feel this situation requires a good old Anglo-Saxon word pair — home/away — to balance the Greco-Roman abstractness of tonic/dominant. I don't usually talk about the formal ideas like "counterpoise kickback" with my students, but I will put them here, because I think it's interesting to see how often songs fall into these patterns.
This song starts off like a shuttle — another Tagg term to describe oscillating evenly between two chords — between tonic and counterpoise. A shuttle, however, wouldn’t end on the tonic at the end of a phrase. In order to end the phrase on the tonic, the duration of the counterpoise is halved in order to finish the phrase on the tonic. (Tagg, Everyday Harmony, 334-335) This structure is very common when the away chord is a dominant.
I am also this year simplifying terminology. I felt at first that the students needed to know what terms are actually used here in the Czech Republic, which, like Germany is Riemannian theory. But since the class is in English, I was using those terms, too. I concluded that we needed to reduce the amount of information because a) it’s a middle school general music class, b) most of whom do not have English as a first language, and c) we see each other once a week for 45 minutes. I decided that since most people do also use the Roman numeral scale degrees (even if it’s not the primary system), I’d go with that and the plain-language modified Tagg terms.
Next up, a couple more tonic-dominant songs in F, then more pedagogical matters.
some other recordings:
Charlie Hope, Sing As We Go, Little Maple Leaf. D
Raffi, Raffi Radio, Rounder Records. E
Pete Seeger, Song and Play Time, Smithsonian Folkways. G.
Elizabeth Mitchell, You Are My Sunshine, Bandcamp. Bb.
I have arranged this song in a flex-band trio format, available at Sheet Music Direct: C instruments (flute, recorder, oboe, violin, mallets) Viola Bb instruments (goes over the break) Bb instruments alternate arrangement (does not go over the break) Eb instruments (goes over the break) Eb instruments alternate arrangement (does not go over the break) F instruments Bass clef instruments Complete set (including percussion)
…when I am doing songs with tonic and dominant in the home and away functions. I am also going over tonic-subdominant and tonic-subtonic pairings. Future posts!