stoia, common stock of schemes.pdf

The Common Stock of Schemes in Early Blues and Country Music

nicholas stoia

Early blues and country musicians from the racially separated ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘hillbilly’’ record series sharea common stock of schemes—preexisting harmonic grounds and melodic structures that are commonresources for the creation of songs. There are five types: 1) a harmonic progression supporting onediscant; 2) a harmonic progression primarily associated with a small number of specific discants, butwhich also supports original discants; 3) a harmonic progression primarily supporting original dis-cants; 4) a melodic structure with general requirements for the harmony; and 5) a melodic structurefor which there is little shared conception of the harmony.

Keywords: blues, country music, common stock, scheme, text, rhythm, meter, harmony, discant tune,‘‘race’’ and ‘‘hillbilly’’ record series

Record companies and popular music promoters havelong presented American music in the context ofa racial divide. From the early 1920s through the early

1940s, record companies separated music of the AmericanSouth into two distinct categories: the ‘‘race’’ series, aimed ata black audience, and the ‘‘hillbilly’’ series, aimed at a whiteaudience. These series were the precursors to the also raciallyseparated Rhythm & Blues and Country & Western charts.1

But the music of the two populations displays inextricableinterpenetration on some of the deepest levels. In his bookBlacks, Whites and Blues, Tony Russell uses the phrase ‘‘commonstock’’ to describe the storehouse of songs common to both blackand white musicians. ‘‘The great quality of the common stock,’’he writes, ‘‘was adaptability; its great power, assimilation; it wasneither black nor white, but a hundred shades of grey.’’2 Russell’sgroup of songs certainly reveals considerable musical sharingbetween blacks and whites, but only when the notion of thecommon stock expands to include schemes—preexisting har-monic grounds and melodic structures that are common re-sources for the creation of songs—does it become apparent howintertwined the two traditions are. In this study I aim to dem-onstrate through comparative analysis of these shared schemesthe extensive interpenetration of black and white musical tra-ditions in early blues and country music.

Blues and country schemes are musical frameworks thatperformers and composers consider public resources for makingnew songs and pieces, and which carry certain predeterminedconstraints and allowances with respect to the interaction ofrhythm, harmony, and melody. As shared resources for thecreation of new music, blues and country schemes are not unlikethe European ground basses from the Renaissance and later

periods. Just as musicians of the more distant past used groundsto generate new pieces, American musicians have used schemesto generate new songs. Musicians both past and present haverelied upon grounds and schemes to set new words, to conveyfeelings and ideas, and to record new events.3 Like schemataexamined in schema theory, early blues and country schemes arestock material employed by composers and recognized by bothmusicians and listeners. But whereas schema theory en-compasses schemata ranging widely in scope—from those at thehighest level of structure constituting full-movement forms tothose at the lowest levels, such as cadences and motives,4 andincluding mid-level schemata that ‘‘can freely overlap or beembedded one within the other’’5—the schemes I describe heregenerate discrete sections of musical form, eight to sixteen barslong, that most frequently correspond, on a one-to-one basis, tothe verses of a song. In early blues and country music, schemestypically generate, through multiple statements, strophic songs.

Expanding the notion of the common stock to includeschemes in turn requires a reexamination of what constitutesblues and country schemes and recognition that there are dif-ferent types. Scholars have given considerable attention to themusical subtleties of the European grounds; John Ward, forexample, describes harmonic patterns like the passamezzo anticoand the passamezzo moderno that support many discant tunes,6

harmonic patterns like the folia associated with one main discanttune,7 and a ‘‘tune type,’’ the rogero, harmonized with differentbasses.8 (I follow Ward in using the term ‘‘discant,’’ or ‘‘discanttune,’’ for the principal melodic material, carried in the mainupper voice, that combines with a harmonic ground, and in

My sincere thanks to Mark Anson-Cartwright, Stephen Blum, PoundieBurstein, Joseph Straus, Philip Rupprecht, Spectrum’s Associate EditorMark Spicer, Editorial Assistant Drew Nobile, and the two anonymousreaders for their helpful feedback at various stages of this project. Many ofthe recordings discussed in this article are accessible at such player-friendlysites as YouTube.

1 Winkler (1979, 31).2 Russell (2001, 166).

3 Gombosi (1944; 1946), Ward (1967, 56 n. 11; 1994, 313, 322–23), and vander Merwe (1989, 198–204) draw links between blues and country schemesand older European ground basses (particularly the passamezzo moderno),and suggest that the practice of composing melodies over ground basses hasa long-established history in American music.

4 Gjerdingen (1986, 25).5 Ibid. (27–29).6 Ward (1967, 47–48, 50–56, 85–86).7 Ward (1953, 415).8 Ward (1967, 70–71).

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applying the term to such melodies in the American vernacularrepertoire.)9 A similar and perhaps more extensive variety oftypes applies to blues and country schemes, which displaya diversity in the consistency of their musical componentscomparable to that found in the bass-discant relationships of theold grounds. But scholars typically identify the Americanschemes simply by length in bars and harmonic progression,an approach suggesting that musicians fix upon—or perceiveas characteristic and defining—these two components for everyscheme.10 If we consider only these two attributes, we misrep-resent the nature of many schemes and risk overlooking somealtogether. In addition to identifying the common stock ofschemes, this article is an attempt to identify black and whitemusicians’ shared conception of how to realize those schemes,a conception of each scheme’s constraints and allowances withrespect to rhythm, harmony, and melody.

I propose that the musical components that performers regardas fixed and stable vary from scheme to scheme. The length inbars, alternation of strong and weak bars, and meter tend to beamong the most consistent components; after those particularaspects of the rhythmic structure, either the harmony or melodymay be more consistent. Based on whether the harmony ormelody is primary, and the extent to which musicians associateharmonically defined schemes with particular discants andmelodically defined schemes with particular harmonizations, Isuggest five types of scheme: 1) a harmonic progression supportingone discant; 2) a harmonic progression primarily associated witha small number of specific discants, but which also supportsoriginal discants; 3) a harmonic progression primarily supportingoriginal discants; 4) a melodic structure with general requirementsfor the harmony; and 5) a melodic structure for which there is littleshared conception of the harmony. One difficulty in classifyingschemes of the first three types lies in determining where to drawthe line between variation of existing melodic material andthe creation of original melodic material, a challenge of workingwith repertoire transmitted orally and through recordings ratherthan through notation. Nevertheless, acknowledging such ambi-guities and placing a scheme somewhere between two categoriestells us much about musicians’ conception of a scheme.

Example 1 lists the schemes under discussion by type, lengthin bars, and, where appropriate, harmonic progression; no har-monic progression is shown for schemes in which the melodicstructure is primary.11 In most cases, a scheme carries the name

of the most well-known song that it generated—the ‘‘Frankie andJohnny’’ scheme, for example, is named after the song of the samename, even though the scheme also generated songs with differ-ent subjects and titles, such as ‘‘Boll Weevil Blues’’ and ‘‘TheBattleship of Maine.’’ In the case of the standard twelve-bar bluesand the passamezzo moderno, the schemes are not named aftersongs—both generated too many for any one song to stand out asarchetypal—but instead carry the standard names with which theyhave long been identified.12 In early blues and country music, thethree primary harmonies—the major tonic, subdominant, anddominant—are the main building blocks for progressions, andthey alone make up the progressions of many of the most produc-tive schemes, like those in Example 1.13 My concern here is withroot progressions regardless of inversion; blues and country musi-cians, especially string players, are often unconcerned with bassmotion, much like the Spanish Baroque guitarists that ThomasChristensen discusses in connection with the five-course guitar.14

The schemes first widely documented on early blues andcountry music recordings represent a highly productive source ofcreation in American vernacular repertoire. Like the Europeanground basses of the Renaissance and later periods, they exhibita wide range of productivity; some generate legions of songswhile others generate rather few. Schemes that generate few arestill of interest, both for their own musical value and for how theyfit into the corpus of schemes as a whole. While I hesitate to drawa precise line between a scheme on the one hand and a song thatmany musicians have ‘‘covered’’ on the other, it seems reasonableto expect that a scheme generates multiple distinct songs, asdefined by the generation of different lyrics and—especially in thecase of instrumentals—significantly different titles, and I adhereto that distinction here. After all, blues and country schemes are,first and foremost, vehicles for the sung words.

This is primarily a study of early, commercially recorded bluesand country music from the ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘hillbilly’’ record series. Icite a relatively small number of gospel recordings—also part ofthe ‘‘race’’ series—in connection with the passamezzo modernobecause of that scheme’s immense productivity in that genre.15

9 Ward uses the term in connection with the standard twelve-bar blues (1994,322–23) and discusses American vernacular musicians’ creation of discantsover the passamezzo moderno (1994, 305, 313). Blum (2004) applies theterm to melodic structures that combine with rhythmic-harmonic cycles,including the passamezzo moderno, in musical idioms of the Black Atlan-tic. In the present study, in the vast majority of instances the ‘‘discant tune’’is the melody sung by the lead vocalist; in a sample of close to three hundredrecordings, I include only four instrumentals.

10 For example, Oliver (2009, 24, 163) and van der Merwe (2004, 446–47;1989, 198–99, 203–04).

11 In most schemes, the vocal line comes to a close in the penultimate bar,typically during a motion from V to I, and this represents the point of

cadential arrival. What follows is post-cadential material, during whichthere may be various alternations of the tonic and dominant replacing thesimple tonic prolongations shown in Example 1. This section of a schemefits William Caplin’s description of a section that has a ‘‘postcadential func-tion, which embraces the music that follows the cadential arrival (andappears prior to a new beginning)’’ (2004, 56).

12 The standard sixteen-bar blues likewise carries a general title rather than thename of a song, although the title has less currency than ‘‘standard twelve-bar blues.’’

13 Especially in jazz and urban blues styles, musicians frequently elaborate theharmonic progressions shown in Example 1 with both diatonic andchromatic substitutions. Walter Everett (2004, §16–18) describes bluesmusicians’ customary use of only major chords in the accompaniment, incontrast with frequent minor-pentatonic melodic material.

14 Christensen (1992). I note two examples of melodic bass motion inconnection with the ‘‘Sitting on Top of the World’’ scheme, more fortheir rhythmic importance than for their linear meaning.

15 I follow Gombosi (1946, 388–89), van der Merwe (1989, 198–202; 2004,103, 445–46), and Blum (2004) in identifying the scheme in American

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Also included are several non-commercial recordings from theArchive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress, tworadio broadcasts, and a few recordings made in the mid- to late-1940s by Leadbelly and Bill Broonzy, both of whom recordedearlier for ‘‘race’’ labels, and by Woody Guthrie, who recordedearlier ‘‘hillbilly’’ records. There was a considerable amount ofAfrican-American music recorded before the 1920s, but, asHoward Rye writes, ‘‘That the OKeh recordings of MamieSmith [1920] launched the ‘Race Record,’ marketed primarilyto African Americans, is beyond dispute.’’16

Example 2 divides the sample for this study between ‘‘race’’and ‘‘hillbilly’’ recordings (or, in the case of non-commercialrecordings, between the two populations), but also shows howthe common stock of schemes generated the majority of these,despite the division of the market along racial lines. The examplereveals something of the extent to which the two populationsrelied upon the same foundational musical resources. Included

Scheme Type Length in Bars Couplet Forms Harmonic Progression

Trouble in Mind 1 8 AB I V I IVI V I I

Railroad Bill 1 12 ABr; ABrpI I I I

I I IV IVI V I I

How Long 2 8 AB; ABr I I IV IVI V I I

Frankie and Johnny 2 12 ABr; ABrp(=CD)

I I I IIV IV IV I

V V I I

Key to the Highway 1 or 2(?) 8 AB I V IV IVI V I I

Standard Twelve-Bar Blues 3 12

AAB;ABr(=CD); ABB;AB/AB

I I I IIV IV I IV V I I

Common Variant of Standard Twelve-Bar Blues

3 12AAB; ABr(=CD); ABB

I IV I IIV IV I IV IV I I

Creole Belle 3 8 AB IV IV I IV V I I

Standard Sixteen-Bar Blues 3 16 AAAB; ABBB

I I I IIV IV I IIV IV I IV V I I

Passamezzo Moderno 3 8 or 16

8-bar: AB16-bar: AB/CD; ABr/ABr; ABr/CDr

I IV I VI IV I/V I(see Ex. 33)

Alabama Bound 2 or 3(?) 8 AB; ABr I I IV IVV V I I

Sitting on Top of the World 4 9 ABr (melody primary)

Whitehouse Blues 4 12 ABr; ABrp (melody primary)

John Henry 5 10 AB+ B (melody primary)

Reuben 5 8 ABrp; AB (melody primary)

example 1. List of schemes cited.

vernacular music as the ‘‘passamezzo moderno’’; I often refer to it simply as‘‘passamezzo.’’

16 Rye (2001, 331). The most authoritative discographies on ‘‘race’’ and‘‘hillbilly’’ records are, respectively, Dixon, Godrich, and Rye’s Blues and

Gospel Records, 1890–1943, and Russell’s Country Music Records: A

Discography, 1921–1942. In explaining why their listings end where theydo, the compilers of both discographies cite the changes in style andperformance, as well as in recording and issuance, that followed theSecond World War (Dixon, Godrich, and Rye [1997, viii–ix]; Russell[2004, 7]). Some schemes, especially the standard twelve-bar blues and thepassamezzo, continued to generate songs in later genres; see Headlam(1997) for later realizations of ‘‘Sitting on Top of the World.’’

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are several schemes falling outside of the common stock; thesedemonstrate by comparison that most schemes, including themost productive, belong to the common stock.17

I occasionally use the term ‘‘strain’’ where it helps to distin-guish between a song’s primary, recurring musical material—its principal strain—and its secondary, contrasting strain (orstrains). Most of the recordings in the sample are strophic songs;some songs generated by schemes of the third type, especially,and by the standard twelve-bar blues scheme, in particular, arestrophic in that the harmonic pattern repeats from verse to versewhile the melody varies, somewhat like strophic variations.Unless otherwise noted, the musical examples represent the firstverse of a song, and, in the case of songs with secondary,

contrasting strains, illustrate the scheme that generates thesong’s principal strain. As with many other studies of Americanvernacular music, the transcriptions in this article involve someapproximation; like David Evans, I consider standard musicalnotation sufficient for my purposes, and find that while it is ‘‘byno means completely accurate as a means of descriptive nota-tion . . . it is still quite useful for indicating note sequences andrhythms for simple comparative analysis.’’18 All of the musicalexamples are transposed to C to facilitate comparison.

The next sections of this article consider two analyticalissues—text, and metrical hierarchy and rhythm—necessary forthe theoretical discussion of many of the schemes; I brieflydiscuss harmonic function and dissonance treatment wherethese issues arise, but, in general, I follow theories proposed inan earlier article, in which I discuss these topics in detail.19

Recordings by Black Musicians Recordings by White Musicians

Common Stock of SchemesTrouble in Mind

Hackberry

Railroad Bill*; Furry Lewis,

Little Harvey -

How Long Frankie and Johnny

ssie Smith,

-O-

Standard Twelve-Bar Blues

Big Maceo

Lucious Curtis & Willie Ford,

Lemon Jeffer

Willie McTell and Kate McTell, phis Jug

Key to the Highway

Bea

Common Variant of Standard Twelve-Bar Blues

Bli

Part

Roy Acuff & His Crazy

Frank

Ball Blues,

Creole Belle

Wash

Gene Autrey

Standard Sixteen-Bar Blues

example 2. The common stock of schemes.

17 It is outside of the scope of this article to explore in great detail issues ofauthorship and ownership in American vernacular music, but exploringmusicians’ extensive reliance on the common stock points to theproblematic nature of attribution in this repertoire. Neal (2009, 108–93)presents an illustrative case study demonstrating the complex racial, social,legal, and financial issues involved in assigning authorship and gainingcopyright to a traditional song.

18 Evans (1982, 15).19 Stoia (2010). See also the discussions of the minor-pentatonic derived blues

trichord [025] and its behavior under transposition in Everett (2001, 55–58,and 2004, §16–18) and Biamonte (2010).



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Following is the main section of the article, proposing five typesof scheme and exploring the differences in musical practice thatmusicians associate with them. I discuss one representativescheme each for the first, second, fourth, and fifth types, andgive special consideration to the two most productive schemes inthe common stock, the standard twelve-bar blues and the pas-samezzo, both third types. Finally, I return briefly to the com-mon stock of schemes.

analytical issues

i. text

This section considers the stanzaic forms found in theschemes under discussion, lyric formulas and their correspon-dence to caesuras, and offers some clarification of terminologywith respect to text and form. The rhyming AB couplet is the

‘‘essential stanzaic structure of the blues.’’20 There are manyvariations as a result of line repetition—for example AAAB,AABB, etc.—and the well-known AAB, twelve-bar stanzaicform is only the most common variation. Singers frequently adda refrain to an AB couplet, represented as ABr.21 Here I use‘‘refrain’’ to mean a line of text repeated as part of each verse; I donot refer to higher-level refrains such as repeated verses. Therhyming AB couplet, with or without refrain, is also the essentialstanzaic structure of early country music.

Wherever possible I parse the text into rhyming AB couplets,with or without refrain, and I enclose transcriptions of lyrics inasterisks where I am quite unsure of them. Example 1 indicatesthe couplet forms in the sample under consideration; many ofthe stanzaic forms described here reappear elsewhere in the

Passamezzo ModernoAlphabetical Four(g); (g);

(g); Leadbelly, (r), ;

Charley Patton, ,

Man Rosetta Th

(g),

are Thee Well,

,lee, n

; Bill Cox & ClifVernon Dalhart,

ury Me Under the Weeping Willow

Hackber

,

Fate of Talmadge Osborne.Offshoot with IV in position 13 (or positions 5 & 13)

(g); ; (g).

The Hi ;Blues.

Alabama BoundAshley & Foster,

-De-

Sitting on Top of the World

8-Bar Offshoot:

Whitehouse Blues Reuben

John Henry*; Evans

amson Brothers & Curry, My Hand.

O-

Wade Mainer & Sons of the

*Library of Congress/non-commercial recording

(c) Scheme used as contrasting strain(g) Gospel recording(r) Radio broadcast(w/a) White accompanist(s)

example 2. [Continued]

20 Taft (2006, 11). I follow most blues scholars in identifying the two lines ofa rhyming couplet as A and B, even though this labeling does not clearlyindicate that A and B rhyme.

21 Ibid. (12–16).



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study with musical settings, and readers may wish to refer aheadto the examples cited. (In order to reflect the general arrange-ment of this study, the examples are, by and large, grouped byscheme.) All of the schemes under discussion support rhymingAB couplets. Most realizations of the standard twelve-bar bluesand its common variant take the prevailing AAB form (seeExample 3);22 fewer take the form ABB. Perhaps the mostunusual form is ABA.23

Many schemes support one rhyming couplet with refrain(ABr) per stanza; this is the typical stanzaic form for the threetwelve-bar ‘‘ballad’’ schemes: ‘‘Frankie and Johnny’’ (Example 8),‘‘Railroad Bill,’’ and ‘‘Whitehouse Blues.’’ The ballad schemessometimes have rhyming couplets followed by a response(ABrp), which is, unlike a refrain, different from one verse toanother; in some realizations of the ‘‘Frankie and Johnny’’scheme (not shown in Example 8), the response is itself, in eachcase, a short rhyming couplet, or ABrp(¼CD), using the abbre-viation rp(¼CD) to show that the response itself is a separaterhyming couplet.

Many realizations of the standard twelve-bar blues have tworhyming couplets per stanza, the second functioning as a refrain,or ABr(¼CD) (Example 10[c]). Some have a repeated coupletin a single stanza, or AB/AB (Example 5, strophe 2). Otherstanzaic forms with two couplets per verse include AB/CD(Example 28), ABr/ABr (Example 31), and ABr/CDr, whichcombine with the passamezzo.24 The ten-bar ‘‘John Henry’’

scheme supports rhyming AB couplets in which the second halfof B is repeated (ABþ½B) (Example 37).

There are countless lines and half lines in the repertoire thatare traditional and formulaic. As Michael Taft observes, ‘‘therewas a traditional storehouse of lyrical material on which singersdrew in constructing their songs,’’25 and Evans writes that ‘‘[t]heBlues are not . . . totally individualistic, for while in their firstperson delivery they purport to express the sentiments andfeelings of the singer, many of their verses are, in fact, traditionaland known to thousands of blues singers and members of theiraudiences.’’26 Evans and Taft focus on black musicians, butmany songs by white musicians conform to the themes ex-pressed in the most frequently recurring blues formulas that Taftidentifies;27 Frank Hutchison’s ‘‘Cannon Ball Blues,’’ to take justone example, is fundamentally a love lyric, but its supplementarythemes are movement, travel, and anxiety caused by change.

Especially in the standard twelve-bar blues, singers frequentlydivide each line of the couplet in two with a caesura, as Ida Coxdoes in ‘‘Ida Cox’s Lawdy, Lawdy Blues’’ (Example 3), creatinghalf lines; the caesuras typically fall toward the end of bars 1, 5,and 9. When singers use formulas from the ‘‘storehouse,’’ theytypically correspond to the two half lines, so that each line con-tains two formulas. ‘‘The formula,’’ writes Taft, ‘‘because it isa predication (one complete thought), always remains within theconfines of one blues line. In a majority of cases, there are twoformulas for each line, corresponding roughly to the two halflines of the stanzaic structure.’’ Thus, the three lines of texttypically subdivide into six half lines. The formulas carrying therhyme are ‘‘r-formulas,’’ occurring in the second half line of eachline, and the others are ‘‘x-formulas,’’28 as in the following typ-ical blues couplet:

example 3. Ida Cox, ‘‘Ida Cox’s Lawdy, Lawdy Blues’’ (1923). (Standard twelve-bar blues scheme, Type 3.)

22 The strong and weak pairs of bars and instrumental responses shown inExample 3 are discussed below in the sections on ‘‘Metrical Hierarchy andRhythm’’ and ‘‘Five Types of Scheme.’’

23 Taft (2006, 13).24 In such cases, two couplets combining with one statement of a scheme

constitute a verse. Occasionally, but far less often, two statements ofa scheme combining with one couplet constitute a verse; such groupingsare most common in realizations of the ‘‘Creole Belle’’ scheme (e.g., UncleDave Macon’s ‘‘Last Night When My Willie Came Home’’ and SkipJames’s ‘‘Drunken Spree’’) and the ‘‘Alabama Bound’’ scheme (Ashley &

Foster’s ‘‘East Virginia Blues’’ and Ephraim Woodie & the HenpeckedHusbands’ ‘‘Last Gold Dollar’’).

25 Taft (2006, 25).26 Evans (1982, 48).27 Taft (2006, 109–96).28 Ibid. (35–36).



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I walked from Dallas; I walked to Wichita FallsAfter I lost my sugar, I wasn’t going to walk at all(Blind Lemon Jefferson, ‘‘Long Lonesome Blues’’)29

Taft represents the formulas of this couplet as follows:

x–––––r–––––x–––––r–––––

Lines with only one or as many as three lyric formulas stilltypically have one musical caesura dividing the line in two. The‘‘x-position’’ and ‘‘r-position’’ may also contain non-formulaictext.30

The texts are not independent poems, but exist in the contextof musical performance.31 I refer to the sung words as texts, butin many performance contexts—such as the stage, house party, orjuke joint—there were typically no written sources from whichthe performers worked. And even in cases where singers wrotedown their words before performance—this was most commonin the recording studio, where no audience was present32—theydid not regard them as poems independent of music. Consid-ering text in the context of music often leads to equating lines oftext with spans of music. There is much precedence for this inblues analysis. Evans, for example, describing the standardtwelve-bar blues, writes that the ‘‘twelve bars are divided intothree sections or ‘lines’ of four bars each.’’33

One danger in using ‘‘line’’ this way is that it can lead toconfusion about whether the term refers to a line of text ora section of musical form. For example, in the context of thestandard twelve-bar blues, ‘‘line one’’ might refer to either thefirst line of text, which usually comes to a close on the downbeatof bar 3, or the first section of the scheme, which spans bars 1–4.When used in the latter sense, the term ‘‘line’’ may includereference to rhythm, harmony, and melody. Here, in order toavoid confusion, I reserve the term ‘‘line’’ for a line of text, withor without its corresponding melodic material, and use termssuch as ‘‘four-bar group’’ to describe sections of form.

Texts often display little consistency in the number of syl-lables from one verse to another. Taft observes that ‘‘the blues arerather free of metrical constraints,’’34 and that ‘‘the number ofbars in a blues song does not correspond in any way to thenumber of vocal syllables singers used in their stanzas.’’35 Butsome schemes do display consistency in the placement of ac-cented syllables in certain strong metric positions, as discussed inthe following section.

ii. metrical hierarchy and rhythm

This section considers meter and hypermeter as they apply tothe schemes under discussion, placement of accented syllablesand areas of heightened rhythmic activity, rhythmic displace-ment through syncopation and anticipation, and typical forms ofextension, expansion, and elision. I follow the theory of metricalhierarchy posited by Lerdahl and Jackendoff, in which the firstand third beats of a bar of quadruple meter are stronger than thesecond and fourth, and the first beat is stronger than the third.36

I also follow their analogous expansion of this pattern to highermetrical levels, which have ‘‘a metrical organization whichin principle is no different from that of a measure.’’37 Thishypermetrical organization includes ‘‘both the recurrence ofequal-sized measure groups and a definite pattern of alternationbetween strong and weak measures.’’38 Such an alternation ofstrong and weak bars characterizes all of the schemes underdiscussion here, as does the alternation of strong and weak pairsof bars—with a qualification reserved for the one nine-barscheme discussed below.

The meter in most schemes is consistent on the level of the‘‘tactus’’—‘‘the level of beats that is conducted and with whichone most naturally coordinates foot-tapping and dancesteps’’39—but may be in either simple or compound meter; inother words, musicians realize many schemes with four beats perbar, for example, in both 4/4 and 12/8.40 Some of the schemesunder discussion consistently have four beats per bar, othersconsistently have two, and still others have both duple- andquadruple-meter realizations. For the sake of simplicity, I confinethe current discussion to quadruple meter, with the expectationthat the reader will, where necessary, easily convert the ideas to theanalogous positions of duple meter in which the second beat isthe second-strongest metric position within the bar, analogous tothe third beat in quadruple-meter. Quadruple meter is the mostpervasive in the repertoire, and all schemes under discussion herehave four beats per bar unless otherwise noted.41

29 Ibid. (35). In general, Taft shows just the simplified couplet, omitting thefrequent line repetitions.

30 Ibid. (40).31 Evans (1982, 14).32 Taft (2006, 291).33 Evans (1982, 22). Other recent studies that equate lines of text with sections

of musical form include Muir (2010, 204–05), Oliver (2009, 24), andHeadlam (1997, 63–64).

34 Taft (2006, 35).35 Ibid. (10).

36 Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983, 18–21).37 Schachter (1999, 82).38 Rothstein (1989, 12).39 Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983, 71).40 This flexibility at smaller metrical levels conforms to Lerdahl and

Jackendoff’s notion that the subdivision of the tactus ‘‘can be relativelyfree, whereas the alternation between strong and weak beats of the tactusis relatively fixed,’’ and that the tactus may be ‘‘divided into threes at onepoint and twos at another, as long as particular beats of the tactus are evenlysubdivided’’ (Ibid. [72]), although here I apply the concept to schemesrather than to individual pieces.

41 Schemes with both duple and quadruple realizations include ‘‘AlabamaBound,’’ ‘‘Creole Belle,’’ the standard sixteen-bar blues, the passamezzo,and ‘‘John Henry.’’ In making the transcriptions, I have generally taken thesmallest regular pulse as the subdivision of the main beat, but ascribingmeter to a recording with no notated source often involves a certain amountof subjectivity, and other listeners might come to different conclusions forsome songs. The main differences would arise over whether a song is bettertranscribed in duple or quadruple meter; to facilitate comparison, I leantoward quadruple meter when in doubt.



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Within this study I draw a distinction between the terms‘‘strong and weak beats’’ on the one hand, and ‘‘accented andunaccented beats’’ on the other. Many theorists, not inappro-priately, use the terms interchangeably—William Caplin, forexample, writes that the ‘‘differentiation of [metrical] events isconventionally designated by a variety of metaphorical pairs ofterms, such as accent-unaccent, strong-weak, upbeat-downbeat,and arsis-thesis,’’42 and elsewhere defines metrical organizationas ‘‘the more-or-less regularly alternating succession of accentedand unaccented beats (also termed strong and weak beats) at oneor more levels of musical structure.’’43 But here I use ‘‘strong’’and ‘‘weak’’ to refer to the strengths and weaknesses inherent inthe metrical hierarchy—the metrical emphases that ‘‘arise out ofthe temporal position alone’’44—and ‘‘accented’’ and ‘‘unac-cented’’ to refer to the emphasis of a strong beat by the performerduring the course of performance. More specifically, I wish toreserve the term ‘‘accent’’ for the emphasis in the vocal line of thefirst or third beat (or both) because the presence or lack of suchaccents has important rhythmic implications for some schemes.

The texts of the songs have stressed and unstressed syllables;the stressed syllables coincide most often with downbeats,a coincidence which, together with the downbeat’s inherentstrength, creates an accent. In a bar of quadruple meter, the nextmost common place for a stressed syllable to fall is the third beat,which, together with that beat’s inherent strength, also createsan accent. Within each scheme, the downbeat is, more oftenthan not, accented, but the third beat is left unaccented oftenenough that it often stands out when it is accented. In certainschemes, these accented third beats have important implicationsfor the rhythmic structure, because they may create areas ofheightened rhythmic activity. In the opening stanza from the

Mississippi Sheiks’ ‘‘Sitting on Top of the World’’ (see Exam-ple 4), the stressed syllables with the strongest metric placementare ‘‘sum-,’’ ‘‘fall,’’ ‘‘find,’’ the last ‘‘all,’’ ‘‘gone,’’ ‘‘wor-,’’ ‘‘sit-,’’‘‘top,’’ and ‘‘world.’’ All of these stressed syllables except for ‘‘top’’fall on downbeats, creating accents on the downbeats of bars1–8. The third beats of the first six bars are unaccented, but thestressed syllable ‘‘top’’ falls on the third beat of bar 7, creating anaccent and an area of heightened rhythmic activity from thedownbeat of bar 7 to the downbeat of bar 8.

Stressed syllables may also fall on the second and fourth beatsof a bar of quadruple meter, but when the third beat is accentedit overshadows the emphasis created by the stressed syllables onthe weaker beats. When the third beat is unaccented, anemphasized fourth beat sounds like a pickup to the followingdownbeat (as in bars 1–6 of Example 4), whereas an emphasizedsecond beat sounds connected to the previous downbeat.45 Inboth cases, the conspicuous absence of an accent on the strongerthird beat throws into relief the connection of the weaker secondand fourth beats to the nearest downbeat.

One of the most pervasive characteristics of rhythm in earlyblues and country music, and in American folk and popularmusic generally, is the displacement of accents—and other(rhythmic) events—through syncopation and anticipation.David Temperley’s remarks about syncopation in rock musicapply equally well to the earlier genres examined here, uponwhich much rock music is based. Temperley argues that suchsyncopations are so commonplace in the repertoire that listenersquite naturally perceive them in terms of their un-syncopatednormalizations:

[I]n the internal representation we form when listening to rockmusic, we are understanding the metric grid and the stress patternas coinciding. We retain, on principal, the assumption that stressed

Strong Bar Weak Bar

Beats: 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4bar 1 bar 2

Was all the summer and all the fall Just trying to

bar 3 bar 4find my little all and all But now

bar 5 bar 6gone; I worry;

bar 7 bar 8sitting on top of the world

bar 9Central area of

rhythmic activity

example 4. Mississippi Sheiks, ‘‘Sitting on Top of the World’’ (1930): rhythmic activity of the vocal line.

42 Caplin (1980, 78).43 Caplin (1983, 1).44 Schachter (1999, 81).

45 These descriptions of the fourth and second beats correspond, respectively,to Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s ‘‘upbeat’’ and ‘‘afterbeat’’ (1983, 28).



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syllables should occur on strong beats, but we understand certainsyllables as ‘belonging’ on beats other than the ones they fall on.’’46

Temperley offers a quite useful ‘‘Syncopation Shift Rule’’ fornormalizing syncopated rhythms:

In inferring the deep structure of a melody from the surface struc-ture, any event may be shifted forward by one beat at a low metricallevel.47

Rhythmic normalization is an especially useful theory for thisrepertoire, in which displacement is one of the chief attributes,because it reveals the underlying rhythmic structure inferred bythe listener. As William Rothstein, who coined the term‘‘rhythmic normalization,’’ observes:

[I]f a musical passage can be rhythmically normalized, there arises atleast the possibility of hearing the given, displaced version in terms of

its normalization—or, more precisely, hearing it as a transformation

of that normalization—even if the latter is not literally present any-where in the music. The normalization, in other words, may beinferred from the given passage, which is then understood as a dis-placed version of it.48

In the most common type of displacement, the onset ofa stressed syllable falls just before the stronger metric positionfrom which it is displaced. This happens most often on thesmallest or near-smallest metric level. In ‘‘Ida Cox’s Lawdy,Lawdy Blues’’ (Example 3), taking the dotted quarter as thebeat, Cox displaces the words ‘‘trying’’ (which she sings as onesyllable), ‘‘quit,’’ and ‘‘me,’’ from the first, third, and fourth beatsof bar 9; ‘‘don’t’’ and ‘‘know’’ from the third and fourth beats ofbar 10; and ‘‘how’’ from the downbeat of bar 11, placing theminstead on the eighth notes before those beats. A normalizationof the rhythm of the melody and text would place these syllableson the beat. Examples that show the rhythmic structure of thetext, such as Example 4, normalize the displacements; in theMississippi Sheiks’ ‘‘Sitting on Top of the World,’’ the syllables‘‘wor-’’ and ‘‘world’’ anticipate the downbeats of bars 6 and 8,respectively, but Example 4 shows a normalized rhythm inwhich they fall on the downbeats, creating accents, despite thesurface displacements.

With its abundance of displacement of stressed syllables,American vernacular music presents some text settings the likesof which one is hard pressed to find in the ‘‘cultivated tradition,’’to use H. Wiley Hitchcock’s term.49 The first two strophes ofMississippi Matilda’s ‘‘Hard Working Woman’’ offer good ex-amples (see Example 5).50 In the first strophe, most notably, she

places the second syllable of ‘‘woman’’ (bars 1 and 5), the word‘‘the’’ (bars 2 and 6), and the third syllable of ‘‘dissatisfied’’ (bar10) in stronger metric positions than the nearby stressed sylla-bles. In the second strophe, she does the same with the secondsyllable of ‘‘baby’’ (bars 1 and 5) and the word ‘‘and’’ (bar 6). Thelistener understands all of these displacements in terms of theirinferred normalization. At the end of the second strophe, withthe colloquial ‘‘a-way,’’ she adds the unstressed syllable ‘‘a-’’ onthe second beat in order to push the stressed syllable ‘‘way’’ intoan anticipatory position relative to the following downbeat, sothat the listener may infer its normalized position on thatdownbeat. Without the extra syllable, ‘‘way’’ would sound out ofplace, falling literally on the last beat of the bar, rather thananticipating the stronger downbeat.51

In early blues and country music, greater or lesser use ofsyncopation is a surface discrepancy indicating style differences,and, while style differences are often quite revealing with respectto genre, we should avoid allowing them to overshadow commonfoundational musical resources like schemes. As Leonard B.Meyer observes, ‘‘At times, surface disparities obscure the pres-ence of a shared schema,’’52 and schemata ‘‘are useful constants interms of which style differences, between contemporaries andover time, can be observed, identified, and classified.’’53

Although meter and length in bars are among the mostconsistent components of schemes, musicians frequentlylengthen bars and groups of bars through extension andexpansion, and abbreviate them through elision, to use Caplin’sterminology.54 Caplin describes extension as ‘‘adding on’’ andexpansion as ‘‘internal lengthening.’’ Three realizations of theeight-bar ‘‘Creole Belle’’ scheme demonstrate some of the mostcommon kinds of extension, expansion, and elision in the rep-ertoire (see Example 6): Lil Johnson’s ‘‘Bucket’s Got a Hole InIt’’ is, in its expression of meter and length in bars, a straightfor-ward and typical realization of the eight-bar scheme (Example6[a]); Leadbelly’s ‘‘Midnight Special’’ consistently abbreviatesthe scheme to seven bars through elision, with bar 7 containingboth the close of the vocal line, on the downbeat, and the pickupto the following strophe, which in typical realizations falls in bar8 (Example 6[b]); Washboard Sam’s ‘‘Bucket’s Got a Hole In It’’lengthens most of the strophes through extension of bar 8 bytwo beats (Example 6[c]). Some of Leadbelly’s strophes, like the

46 Temperley (1999, 22). Conversely, Allan Moore (2012, 64–69) observesthat syncopations and anticipations in popular song cannot properly be saidto ‘‘belong’’ on the beat, and that ‘‘popular song cannot be imagined with thesyncopation ‘taken out.’’’

47 Ibid. (26).48 Rothstein (1990, 88).49 Hitchcock (2000).50 With respect to the irregular meter in ‘‘Hard Working Woman,’’ I take the

harmonic rhythm and vocal phrasing as strong indicators of the bar line. Asin many songs generated by the standard twelve-bar blues, the melody of‘‘Hard Working Woman’’ varies in successive statements of the scheme, and

the song is strophic in that the harmonic pattern repeats. As with compa-rable techniques described by Spicer with respect to later vernacular genres,this melodic variation from strophe to strophe provides ‘‘a sense of constantvariety within an otherwise highly repetitive structure’’ (2004, 57).

51 The frequency of such settings perhaps throws into doubt at least some ofHalle and Lerdahl’s observations concerning text setting (1993, 7–8), whichseem to disregard many American vernacular genres that account fora considerable portion of text setting in the English language. What theauthors label as ‘‘unacceptable settings’’—those in which unstressed syllablesfall in strong metric positions and stressed syllables fall in weak metricpositions—are not uncommon in these genres.

52 Meyer (1989, 54).53 Ibid. (51).54 Caplin (1998, 20, 254).



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second one transcribed here, also contain an expansion of bar 6by two beats, to accommodate ‘‘ever-loving.’’ Washboard Sam’sextension and Leadbelly’s expansion ‘‘function as insertions andare clearly heard as ‘extra.’’’ Leadbelly’s elision creates ‘‘a morecontinuous succession of events by fusing the end of one span tothe beginning of the next.’’ To infer, respectively, ‘‘organic’’eight-and-a-half-bar and seven- (or seven-and-a-half-) bar‘‘units here would be to misconstrue the passage altogether,’’as Carl Schachter would say.55 In order to avoid veering awayfrom the main points of this study, I do not note every instanceof extension, expansion, and elision in the songs cited.56 Themain exception to consistency of length in bars is the passamez-zo, which has an eight-bar form and a sixteen-bar form, theformer realized in quadruple meter and the latter in both qua-druple and duple meter.

five types of scheme

Scholars often describe blues and country schemes simply bytheir length in bars and harmonic progression, an approach

suggesting that musicians regard these as the defining attributesfor every scheme. In reality, however, the components musiciansregard as characteristic and defining vary from scheme toscheme. Based upon that variation I propose five types:

� Type 1. A harmonic progression that musicians associatewith one specific discant.

� Type 2. A harmonic progression associated primarily witha small number of specific discants, but which musicians alsouse to support original discants.

� Type 3. A harmonic progression primarily supporting orig-inal discants.

� Type 4. A melodic structure with certain general require-ments for the harmony.

� Type 5. A melodic structure for which musicians have littleshared conception of the harmony.

These five classifications fall into two broad categories: one(including the first, second, and third types) in which the har-monic structure is most consistent and the discant displays morevariation and substitution; and another (including the fourthand fifth types) in which the melodic structure is most consistentand the harmony displays more variance and substitution.Schemes defined more by their harmonic profile display moreconsistency in their harmonic rhythm but less in the placementof accented syllables and areas of heightened rhythmic activity in

example 5. Mississippi Matilda, ‘‘Hard Working Woman’’ (1936). (Standard twelve-bar blues scheme, Type 3.)

55 Schachter (1999, 102).56 Neal, discussing more recent country music, describes comparable

manipulation of an ‘‘underlying prototype’’ (2007, 55–57). Everett (2009,138–40) lists numerous ways in which rock musicians expand upon thestandard twelve-bar blues scheme.



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the melodic line; those defined more by their melodic profiledisplay less consistency in their harmonic rhythm and progres-sion but more in the placement of accented syllables and areas ofheightened rhythmic activity in the melodic structure. In bothcases, the more consistent component often informs the choicesfor substitution in the less consistent.

i. type 1

Some schemes with a more consistent harmonic profilesupport one discant tune, as does the eight-bar ‘‘Troublein Mind’’ scheme (see Example 7), and thus are ‘‘doubly

predetermined,’’ like the folia according to Gombosi andWard.57 Examples 7(a) and 7(b) show two realizations of the‘‘Trouble in Mind’’ discant, and Example 7(c) shows the har-monic structure. The two melodies are quite similar—the mostsignificant difference between them is simply the concludingregister. The scheme demonstrates a relationship between text,meter, and harmony common to some eight-bar schemes: the

example 6. Typical forms of extension, expansion, and elision.

57 Ward (1953, 415). Hudson (1973) distinguishes between an earlier formand a later form of the folia, the latter of which is discussed by Ward.Another scheme of this type is the twelve-bar, cut-time ‘‘Railroad Bill’’scheme, examples of which are cited in Example 2.



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A line ends on the downbeat of bar 4, in a weak metric positionrelative to the B line, which covers a shorter span and ends ina stronger metric position on the downbeat of bar 7. That the Aline concludes with a non-tonic harmony and the B line with thetonic reinforces this weak–strong, or inconclusive–conclusiverelationship between the two four-bar groups of the scheme.58

ii. type 2

The second type of scheme is a harmonic progression thatmusicians associate primarily with a small number of specificdiscants, but which they also use to support original discants.Perhaps the most productive scheme of this type—and probablythe most productive ‘‘ballad’’ scheme of the common stock—is‘‘Frankie and Johnny’’ (see Example 8).59 Singers most oftenassociate the twelve-bar harmonic progression with the ‘‘Fran-kie’’ discant; the discant usually combines with lyrics aboutFrankie’s shooting and killing of Johnny (or Albert) (Example8[a]) or, to a somewhat lesser extent, the Boll Weevil infestationat the turn of the twentieth century (Example 8[b]), or aboutStack O’Lee, who shot and killed fellow gambler Billy Lyons(Example 8[c]). The ‘‘Frankie’’ discant is characterized by risingand falling arpeggiations of the tonic in bars 1–4 and of thesubdominant in bars 5–7, and by the descent to 5̂ on the

downbeat of bar 8, at the end of the rhyming couplet. Theharmony informs choices for substitution, notably over the dom-inant on the downbeat of bar 9, where each realization shownhere has a different member of the triad. Singers also use thescheme to support original discants, with lyrics about Frankie(Example 8[d]) or Stack O’Lee (Example 8[e]), or aboutanother subject (Example 8[f]).60

In the ‘‘Frankie and Johnny’’ scheme there is a strong con-nection between the harmonic rhythm and the rhythm of thecouplet and refrain. Unlike the standard twelve-bar blues, inwhich the three lines of text most typically end in the strongbars 3, 7, and 11, respectively, the first two lines of the ‘‘Frankieand Johnny’’ scheme are longer, ending, respectively, in the weakbars 4 and 8. In the standard twelve-bar blues, the subdominantharmony—which in this repertoire usually functions as the lowerdominant, resolving to the tonic, rather than as a pre-domi-nant61—begins on the downbeat of the strong bar 5 and resolvesto the tonic on the downbeat of the strong bar 7; but in the‘‘Frankie and Johnny’’ scheme the subdominant lasts throughbar 7 and does not resolve to the tonic until the downbeat ofthe weak bar 8, where the second line of the couplet ends.62

In the refrain—‘‘He was her man, he done her wrong’’—the

example 7. ‘‘Trouble in Mind’’ scheme (Type 1): (a) Bertha ‘‘Chippie’’ Hill, ‘‘Trouble In Mind’’ (1926); (b) Hackberry Ramblers, ‘‘Fais PasÇa,’’ (1938)*; (c) harmonic progression.

58 Other eight-bar schemes with a similar relationship between the text,meter, and harmony include ‘‘Key to the Highway,’’ ‘‘How Long,’’ and,depending on the discant, ‘‘Alabama Bound.’’ In the ‘‘Trouble in Mind’’scheme, the melody comes into play as well, concluding on 4̂ in bar 4 and on1̂ in bar 7.

59 Another scheme of this type, though not apparently a member of thecommon stock, is the eight-bar ‘‘How Long’’ scheme, examples of whichare cited in Example 2. Bowers and Westcott depict the ‘‘How Long’’scheme as a ground, describing Jimmy Yancey’s realizations as ‘‘fixed setsof variations draped upon a simple eight-bar succession of descendingharmonies much like baroque divisions over a ground’’ (1992, 189).

60 Further examples of the ‘‘Frankie’’ discant include Gene Autry’s ‘‘Frankieand Johnny,’’ Charlie Poole with the North Carolina Ramblers’ ‘‘LeavingHome,’’ and Finious ‘‘Flatfoot’’ Rockmore’s ‘‘Boll Weevil,’’ among manyothers. Further examples with original discants include Fruit Jar Guzzlers’‘‘Stack-O-Lee’’ and Woody Guthrie’s ‘‘Stackolee’’ and ‘‘Gambling Man.’’

61 Other studies that draw a distinction between subdominant and pre-dominant function include Harrison (1995, 186–87) and Rothstein(2006, 258). Temperley (2011, §3.3) demonstrates that in rock music,‘‘IV is the most common ‘pre-tonic’ harmony by a considerable margin,’’and Spicer (2008, 323) observes that ‘‘in mode-based rock, root motion bydescending fourth often supersedes traditional root motion by descendingfifth.’’

62 Van der Merwe (2004, 446–47) and Muir (2010, 203–07) also note thislink between the harmonic rhythm and the text.



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example 8. ‘‘Frankie and Johnny’’ scheme (Type 2): (a) Jimmie Rodgers, ‘‘Frankie and Johnny’’ (1929); (b) W.A. Lindsey & Alvin Condor,‘‘Boll Weevil’’ (1928); (c) Ma Rainey, ‘‘Stack O’Lee Blues’’ (1925); (d) Charley Patton, ‘‘Frankie and Albert’’ (1929); (e) Mississippi JohnHurt, ‘‘Stack O’Lee Blues’’ (1928); (f) Henry Thomas, ‘‘Bob McKinney’’ (1927); (g) Red Patterson’s Piedmont Log Rollers, ‘‘The Battleship of

Maine’’ (1927); (h) harmonic progression.



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accented words ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘wrong’’ coincide, respectively, withthe shift to the dominant on the downbeat of bar 9 and theresolution to the tonic on the downbeat of bar 11. In the refrainof the Boll Weevil text—‘‘You’ll have no home, you’ll have nohome’’—the accented ‘‘home’’ and ‘‘home’’ correspond in thesame way to V and I. In the refrain of the Stack O’Lee text—‘‘That bad man, O, cruel Stack O’Lee’’—the additional syllablesafter the accented ‘‘bad’’ and ‘‘Stack’’ account for the rhythmafter the downbeats of bars 9 and 11. (Ma Rainey’s ‘‘Stack O’LeeBlues’’ is exceptional for not mentioning Billy Lyons, and for itsrefrain, which is borrowed from the ‘‘Frankie’’ text; MississippiJohn Hurt’s ‘‘Stack O’Lee Blues’’ has the more typical ‘‘StackO’Lee’’ refrain.) Original discants also adhere to this rhythmicstructure.

In Red Patterson’s Piedmont Log Rollers’ ‘‘The Battleship ofMaine’’ (Example 8[g]) the melody somewhat resembles the‘‘Frankie’’ discant in its rhythm and contour through the firsteight bars, but the refrain—‘‘I’m fighting about that Battleshipof Maine’’—with its three downbeat accents (‘‘fight,’’ ‘‘Bat-,’’and ‘‘Maine,’’ on the downbeats of bars 9, 10, and 11, respec-tively), and with its generally higher degree of rhythmic activity,differs substantially from the ‘‘Frankie,’’ ‘‘Boll Weevil,’’ and‘‘Stack O’Lee’’ refrains, and thus the melody is perhaps bestclassified as a separate discant tune.

Rather than using this scheme as a resource for the expressionof issues close to daily life, as they do the standard twelve-bar

blues scheme, singers use the ‘‘Frankie and Johnny’’ schememostly as a resource for creating ballads and recording historicalevents. As Peter C. Muir observes, ‘‘The blues ballad is external’’because it ‘‘celebrates particular events or tells a story with nodirect relationship to the singer, and consequently it is usuallysung in the third person,’’ whereas a standard twelve-bar bluessong ‘‘is internal’’ and ‘‘is typically sung in the first person.’’63

The rhyming AB couplet with refrain, as mentioned above, isthe standard stanzaic form for the twelve-bar ‘‘ballad’’schemes—‘‘Railroad Bill,’’ ‘‘Frankie and Johnny,’’ and ‘‘White-house Blues’’—in all three of which the two lines of the coupletend in the weak bars 4 and 8, and the refrain ends in the strongbar 11. This similarity in poetic form and vocal rhythm partlyexplains why some ballad texts unassociated with a particularharmonic progression are found with multiple ballad schemes:musicians associate the rhythm of the ABr poetic form with allthree ballad schemes, and choose from among them when set-ting a text with that rhythm. The ‘‘Stack O’Lee’’ and ‘‘Delia’’texts, for example, each combine with both the ‘‘Frankie andJohnny’’ and ‘‘Railroad Bill’’ schemes.64


63 Muir (2010, 206).64 Examples of the ‘‘Stack O’Lee’’ text with the ‘‘Frankie’’ scheme include Ma

Rainey’s ‘‘Stack O’Lee Blues’’ and Mississippi John Hurt’s ‘‘Stack O’LeeBlues,’’ among others. Examples of the text with the ‘‘Railroad Bill’’ schemeinclude Long ‘‘Cleve’’ Reed & Little Harvey Hull’s ‘‘Original Stack O’Lee



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It is not always clear whether a scheme is best classified asa first or second type. This ambiguity results from the difficultyin pinpointing a line between melodic variation and originality.In the eight-bar ‘‘Key to the Highway’’ scheme, for example (seeExample 9), clearly the harmonic progression is most consistent,and singers associate the scheme with the ‘‘Key to the Highway’’text, as do Bill Broonzy (Example 9[a]) and Jazz Gillum

(Example 9[b]) in their songs of the same name. To my ear,Broonzy’s and Gillum’s melodies are two versions of the same‘‘Key to the Highway’’ discant, the biggest difference being theconcluding register and the lead up to it in bar 6, though thissuggestion is admittedly quite debatable. But, even assumingthat Broonzy and Gillum are working from the same melodicstructure, are other discants such as Broonzy’s ‘‘Mississippi RiverBlues’’ (Example 9[c]) and William Brown’s ‘‘East St. LouisBlues’’ (Example 9[d]) originals or still other versions of the‘‘Key to the Highway’’ discant, varied to a greater degree thanthe ‘‘Trouble in Mind’’ discant? I lean toward the latter; thesimilarities—the 3̂–2̂ or 1̂–7̂ descent in bars 1–2, the descentto the root or fifth of IV in bars 3–4, the tonic arpeggiation inbar 5, and the placement of the caesuras—are perhaps enough to

example 9. ‘‘Key to the Highway’’ scheme (Type 1 or 2?): (a) Bill Broonzy, ‘‘Key to the Highway’’ (1941); (b) Jazz Gillum,‘‘Key to the Highway’’ (1940); (c) Bill Broonzy, ‘‘Mississippi River Blues’’ (1934); (d) William Brown, ‘‘East St. Louis Blues’’ (1942);

(e) harmonic progression.

Blues’’ and Furry Lewis’s ‘‘Billy Lyons and Stack O’Lee.’’ Examples of the‘‘Delia’’ text with the ‘‘Frankie’’ scheme include Reese Du Pree’s ‘‘One MoreRounder Gone.’’ Examples of the ‘‘Delia’’ text with the ‘‘Railroad Bill’’scheme include Blind Willie McTell’s ‘‘Delia.’’ Van der Merwe refers tothis text-rhythm as ‘‘ballad metre’’ (2004, 447); Cohen observes that theABr stanzaic form ‘‘appeared in many blues ballads from the turn of thecentury or earlier’’ (2000, 404).



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justify considering them varied versions of the same tune,though clearly this is more open to argument than is the casewith ‘‘Trouble in Mind.’’ Determining where to draw the linebetween variation of existing melodic material and the creationof original melodic material is one of the difficulties of workingwith a repertoire transmitted orally and through recordingsrather than through notation. Still, placing the scheme some-where between the first and second types and acknowledging theambiguity tells us something about musicians’ conception andtreatment of it as a preexisting musical framework: the scheme islike a first type in that singers fix upon some rhythmic andmelodic restrictions for the discant, but like a second in thatthey allow for a wider range of rhythmic and melodic variation.65

iii. type 3

Singers use the third type of scheme primarily to supportoriginal discants; thus, a scheme of this type often generatescountless discants. The most well-known and productivescheme of this type—perhaps the most productive of any typein the common stock, and possibly in American music—is thestandard twelve-bar blues. Because it has generated so muchmusic I give it special attention here. This discussion of thestandard twelve-bar blues includes the most common variant,in which either or both subdominant substitutions, in bars 2 and10, may be present.66

As discussed above, the most typical poetic structure isa rhyming AB couplet in which A repeats, to create an AABstanzaic form. Although there are many variants in the rhythmof the melodic structure, in the most conventional realization thethree lines of text begin (disregarding pickups) on the downbeatsof bars 1, 5, and 9, and end on the downbeats of bars 3, 7, and11, respectively. Quite often, there are instrumental responses inbars 3–4, 7–8, and 11–12 (Example 3). This pattern reinforcesa sense of hypermeter on the level of pairs of bars, in which thelines of text occupy the strong pairs and the instrumentalresponses (if there are any) the weak pairs.67

As Example 10 shows, when combining the scheme with theAB couplet and refrain (ABr) singers normally confine thecouplet to the first four bars and sing the refrain twice (Example10[a]).68 Singers frequently vary the ‘‘repetition’’ so much it

might be considered an independent line (Example 10[b]);many such realizations have more rhythmic activity in bar 7 thanusual, as in Papa Too Sweet’s ‘‘(Honey) It’s Tight Like That,’’ andthe singer varies the ‘‘repetition’’ to finish on a stronger metricposition on the downbeat of bar 11. Often the refrain itself isa rhyming couplet, meaning that every stanza has two couplets,the first in bars 1–4, the second in bars 5–12; the first and secondlines of the refrain couplet typically end on the downbeats of bars7 and 11, respectively (Example 10[c]). Realizations of thestandard twelve-bar blues in which a rhyming couplet rhythmi-cally fills out the first four bars represent the most commondeparture from the typical rhythmic organization.69

In this repertoire, the subdominant and dominant harmoniescreate large-scale harmonic dissonance with the tonic and a com-pulsion to resolve to it. In schemes in which the harmony isprimary, non-tonic harmonies often fall in stronger metric posi-tions relative to their resolution (Example 1);70 in the standardtwelve-bar blues, the placement of IV and V at the beginnings ofstrong pairs of bars emphasizes those non-tonic, contextuallydissonant harmonies. Such placement of non-tonic harmoniesis similar to instances that Carl Schachter cites in which ‘‘leadingtones are strongly accented relative to their resolution’’ and inwhich ‘‘it is precisely from the conflict between accent and tonalstability that the rhythmic effect of the excerpts comes.’’71 In themost common variant of the twelve-bar blues, the first two four-bar groups both contain IV resolving to I, but the second givesgreater emphasis to the harmonic dissonance through placementin a stronger metric position. When IV substitutes in bar 10, theprogression V–IV–I emphasizes the cadence by approaching thefinal tonic from both its upper and lower dominants and accel-erating the harmonic rhythm. The insertion of the subdominantbetween the dominant and the final tonic fails to dispel thetension created by the dominant, which resolves only with thearrival of the tonic. Walter Everett interprets IV in the V–IV–Iprogression as either embellishing I contrapuntally or effectivelyprolonging the V chord as a kind of ‘‘harmonized’’ passing sev-enth, suggesting that the cadence is fundamentally authentic.72

Gerhard Kubik argues that the dominant is ‘‘‘pulled’ toward thesubdominant,’’ suggesting that the cadence is fundamentallyplagal, with V functioning as the upper neighbor to IV.73 Two

65 Other realizations of the ‘‘Key to the Highway’’ scheme are listed inExample 2; they also display much conformity to the rhythmic profileand melodic contours mentioned, but their divergences furthercomplicate categorization of the scheme.

66 Other schemes of this type include the eight-bar ‘‘Creole Belle’’ scheme and thestandard sixteen-bar blues scheme; examples of both are cited in Example 2.

67 Discussions of call and response patterns in the twelve-bar blues includeEvans (1982, 22–23) and Kubik (1999, 41). Muir (2010, 203–07) arguesthat the standard twelve-bar scheme grew out of the ‘‘Frankie and Johnny’’blues ballad, and that musicians shortened the length of the subdominant toaccommodate vocal calls and instrumental responses of equal length, coin-ciding with alternating pairs of bars.

68 Examples 10 and 11 show subdominant substitutions below the treble staffin bars 2 and 10.

69 Examples of text treatment similar to that in Papa Too Sweet’s ‘‘(Honey)It’s Tight Like That,’’ with a varied ‘‘repetition’’ of the refrain, includeCharley Patton’s ‘‘Going to Move to Alabama’’ and the HackberryRamblers’ ‘‘J’ai Pres Parley.’’ Further examples with two rhyming coupletsper strophe include Bill Broonzy’s ‘‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’’ and the CarterFamily’s ‘‘Jealous Hearted Me,’’ among others. Such realizations thatrhythmically fill out bars 1–4 in the vocal line correspond to Dauer’s‘‘Caldonia-Type’’ (1979, 34).

70 Such schemes include ‘‘Frankie and Johnny,’’ ‘‘Creole Belle,’’ the standardsixteen-bar blues, ‘‘Alabama Bound,’’ and many realizations of the passa-mezzo. The frequent substitution of III� in bars 5–6 of the ‘‘Railroad Bill’’scheme achieves similar effect.

71 Schachter (1999, 41).72 Everett (2008, 154; 2001, 61–62).73 Kubik (1999, 126).



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further considerations support the view of an underlying authen-tic progression: in the ending V–IV–I–I, V falls in the strongermetric position; and V–V–I–I is a very frequent ending for manytwelve-bar schemes, while IV–IV–I–I is not, suggesting that IV,not V, is a substitution.74

The scheme does support distinctive, recurring discants, suchas the ‘‘Hesitation’’ discant (Example 10[c]) and those discanttunes shown in Example 11, ‘‘Corrina’’ (Example 11[a]),‘‘Screech Owl’’ (Example 11[b]), and ‘‘Kokomo’’ (Example11[c]),75 but more often singers create original discants over the

example 10. Standard twelve-bar blues scheme (Type 3) with ABr stanzaic form: (a) Bill Broonzy, ‘‘Good Time Tonight’’ (1938); (b) PapaToo Sweet, ‘‘(Honey) It’s Tight Like That’’ (1928); (c) Charlie Poole with the North Carolina Ramblers, ‘‘If the River Was Whiskey’’ (1930);

(d) harmonic progression.

74 The ‘‘Frankie and Johnny’’ scheme also occasionally has a subdominantsubstitution in bar 10, and the standard sixteen-bar blues scheme some-times has IV in bar 14.

75 Another example of the ‘‘Hesitation’’ discant is Leadbelly’s ‘‘HesitationBlues.’’ Further examples of the ‘‘Corrina’’ discant include Bob Wills &His Texas Playboys’ ‘‘Corrine Corrina’’ and Too Bad Boys’ ‘‘Corrine



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ground. Frequently, they draw from a storehouse of descendingmelodic fragments that are formulaic like the text. This collec-tion of fragments is similar to the ‘‘traditional storehouse oflyrical material’’ that is ‘‘known to thousands of blues singers.’’Leo Treitler compares the formulaic construction of blues tothat of medieval chant melodies, noting its ‘‘parallels with certain

kinds of medieval performance models.’’76 Blues singers, like thesingers of medieval chant, often call on ‘‘specific formulaic unitsof melody at appropriate points, all of these having emergedfrom the practice itself, and all as native and natural to thesingers as their mother tongues.’’77 Although blues singers do

example 11. Standard twelve-bar blues scheme (Type 3) with some recurring discants: (a) James ‘‘Boodle It’’ Wiggins, ‘‘Corinne CorinnaBlues’’ (1929); (b) Blind Blake, ‘‘Georgia Bound’’ (1929); (c) Robert Johnson, ‘‘Sweet Home Chicago’’ (1936); (d) harmonic progression.

Corrina Blues.’’ Other examples of the ‘‘Screech Owl’’ discant include MaRainey’s ‘‘Screech Owl Blues’’ and Robert Johnson’s ‘‘From Four Till Late.’’Other examples of the ‘‘Kokomo’’ discant include Scrapper Blackwell’s‘‘Kokomo Blues’’ and Kokomo Arnold’s ‘‘Old Original Kokomo Blues.’’

76 Treitler (2003, xiii).77 Ibid. (131). Gjerdingen (2007, 6) describes the comparable reliance of

galant composers on ‘‘a particular repertory of stock musical phrasesemployed in conventional sequences,’’ and observes that their ‘‘frame ofreference was the musical experience of their entire lives’’ (15).



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create distinctive discants, melodic individuality seems lessa concern in blues than in many other genres.78 The remainingexamples of the standard twelve-bar blues in this section aretranscriptions of recordings from the ‘‘race’’ series, which providemore unequivocal illustrations of discants built completely frommelodic fragments from the ‘‘storehouse.’’79

Example 12 shows a sizable, though probably not exhaustive,collection of the most conventional descending melodic frag-ments. Most commonly, the members of the tonic triad con-stitute the focal points of the descending fragments—they arethe highest and lowest degrees of the descending contour, andthe least likely to be skipped in the descent—and there arefrequent passing tones between the tonic degrees. Singers oftenemploy the tonic fragments during changes to IV and V, and therelative stability of the members of the tonic triad in the melodymay change depending on the supporting harmony: 5̂ and 3̂ aredissonant over IV, in which context they assume the tendency toresolve down to 1̂ over subdominant or tonic harmony, the lattercreating a stronger resolution; 5̂ over IV also frequently resolvesto 3̂ over I. Over V, 3̂ and 1̂ are dissonant, in which context theyassume the tendency to resolve to 1̂ over tonic harmony; theyalso often resolve down to 5̂ over V.80 3̂ is less likely to be a ‘‘bluethird,’’ whether minor or neutral, where it is the goal of thedescent, as in the final notes of Example 12(a), (d), (h), (k), and

(m).81 In subsequent examples showing the use of these melodicfragments, above the staff showing the vocal line, open note-heads represent stable and closed noteheads unstable degrees.

The formulaic descending fragments usually coincide withTaft’s half lines, so that there are six short descents withina typical realization in which the three lines of text occupy thestrong pairs of bars. Many singers cobble together melodiesentirely from descents within the tonic triad. Ida Cox, forexample, constructs the entire first strophe of ‘‘Lonesome Blues’’(see Example 13)—allowing for brief pickups—with six des-cents from 5̂ to 1̂ (Example 12[b]). This realization is a clearexample of a singer using tonic melodic fragments duringchanges of harmony; the metrically emphasized dissonancesbetween the tonic fragments and the non-tonic harmonies in thestrong pairs of bars 5–6 and 9–10 resolve, respectively, with theonset of the weak pairs 7–8 and 11–12, and much of the effectderives from the strong metric placement of dissonance relativeto its harmonic and melodic resolution.82

In many realizations, singers differentiate line three melodi-cally to musically reflect the AAB poetic structure, often bysinging descents between different tonic degrees in either one orboth of the half lines. In ‘‘Moon Going Down’’ (see Example 14),for example, Charley Patton sings descents from 3̂ to 1̂ (Example

example 12. Storehouse of formulaic descending melodic fragments.

78 Taft, too, notes the conservativeness of blues singers with respect to theirstanzaic constructions (2006, 16).

79 Examples of recordings from the ‘‘hillbilly’’ series in which singers drawfrom the ‘‘storehouse’’ of melodic fragments include W. Lee O’Daniel &His Hillbilly Boys’ ‘‘Dirty Hangover Blues,’’ Tom Ashley’s ‘‘Haunted RoadBlues,’’ Carlisle & Ball,’s ‘‘Guitar Blues,’’ Tom Darby & Jimmie Tarlton’s‘‘Sweet Sarah Blues,’’ and Cliff Carlisle’s ‘‘Ash Can Blues’’ (second verseforward), among others.

80 I discuss in detail in an earlier article the resolution of tonic degrees in themelody over non-tonic harmony in the accompaniment in early blues andcountry music (Stoia [2010, §10–14]). Other discussions of dissonancetreatment and the relationship between melody and harmony in vernaculargenres include Temperley (2007), Stephenson (2002, 74–82), and Moore(1995, 188–90).

81 A neutral third is an interval between a major and minor third. I indicateboth minor and neutral thirds with flats in the examples (above the staff inExample 12, to allow for realizations in which the third is major), both forthe sake of simplicity and because doing so conforms to the notion that‘‘blues musicians think in terms of pitch areas’’ and ‘‘may conceptualizeadjacent frequency values as one and the same toneme’’ (Kubik [2008, 20]).

82 Other twelve-bar blues realizations with discants containing six descentsfrom 5̂ to 1̂ include Ida Cox’s ‘‘’Fore Day Creep’’ and W. Lee O’Daniel &His Hillbilly Boys’ ‘‘Dirty Hangover Blues,’’ among others. Realizationswith six descents from 3̂ to 1̂ include Ida Cox’s ‘‘Blues Ain’t Nothin’ ElseBut’’ and Charley Patton’s ‘‘Screamin’ and Hollerin’ Blues,’’ among others.Ward alludes to blues singers’ reliance on descending melodic fragmentsthat create dissonance with the harmonic progression, describing highlyformulaic ‘‘descant[s]’’ that ‘‘coexist’’ with the chordal pattern, and whichrely on 5̂ and 3̂ as ‘‘platform pitches’’ before descending to 1̂ (1994, 322).



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12[f]) and from 3̂ to 3̂ (Example 12[h]) in line one (I underlinea scale degree when it lies an octave or more below the degree onwhich the fragment begins), repeats this melodic structure in linetwo, and then sings descents from 3̂ to 5̂ (Example 12[g]) andfrom 3̂ to 1̂ (Example 12[i]) in line three.

In other realizations, singers differentiate line three bytransposing a melodic fragment to the dominant in the first halfline. (These are transpositions of melodic fragments from the‘‘storehouse,’’ not necessarily from earlier in the same song.) In‘‘Down in Texas Blues’’ (see Example 15), Jesse ‘‘Babyface’’Thomas sings descents from 5̂ to 1̂ in lines one and two, and inthe second half line of line three (bar 10), but sings a descentfrom 7̂ to 5̂—a transposition to the dominant of Example12(f)—in the first half line of line three, in bar 9.83

Singers also distinguish line three by singing a fragmenttransposed to the dominant in the first half line and a contrast-ing tonic fragment in the second. In ‘‘Mean Black Cat Blues’’(see Example 16), Charley Patton sings descents from 5̂ to 1̂ andfrom 5̂ to 3̂ (Example 12[d]) in line one, repeats this material in

line two, and then sings a descent from 7̂ to 5̂ followed bya descent from 5̂ to 1̂ (Example 12[e]) in line three.84

Still another way of differentiating line three is to sing onlyone descent, in the second half line. In ‘‘Graveyard DreamBlues’’ (see Example 17), Ida Cox sings descents from 5̂ to 1̂ inthe first two lines; in line three, she prolongs 5̂ for the first halfline before singing a final descent from 5̂ to 1̂ in the last halfline.85

As mentioned, these melodic constructions reflect the AABpoetic structure. But while the second line matches the firsttextually and melodically, the metrically highlighted disso-nance between the subdominant harmony and the tonicmelodic fragments (bars 5–6) imparts a different emotionalemphasis to the second line, and reflects its emotional func-tion, which is to underscore and stress the content of the firstline through repetition.

Transposition of the descending melodic fragments over thesubdominant harmony is less common, perhaps because the

example 13. Ida Cox, ‘‘Lonesome Blues’’ (1925). (Standard twelve-bar blues scheme, Type 3.)

83 Realizations with similarly constructed discants include RamblingThomas’s ‘‘Ground Hog Blues,’’ Blind Lemon Jefferson’s ‘‘Match BoxBlues,’’ and Memphis Jug Band’s ‘‘Stonewall Blues.’’

84 Patton accompanies himself heterophonically in the strong pairs of bars,leaving the harmonic changes implied or assumed, so in Example 16 I showthose harmonies in parentheses.

85 Songs with similar constructions include Robert Lee McCoy’s ‘‘ProwlingNight Hawk’’ and Lucille Bogan’s ‘‘Pay Roll Blues,’’ among others.



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melodic reflection of the poetic form is lost. More often, singerscreate more distinctive melodic material over the subdominant(and often elsewhere in the realization, too), as in ‘‘BamalongBlues’’ by Andrew and Jim Baxter (see Example 18), where themelodic material over the subdominant (and dominant) is closeto a transposition of the opening material over the tonic.86

Examples 12(m), (n), and (o), are octave transpositionsof Examples 12(a), (b), and (c), respectively, but I retainthem as distinct registral fragments. In lines one and two of‘‘Mr. Johnson’s Blues No. 2’’ (see Example 19), LonnieJohnson sings the octave descent from Example 12(l), and inthe first half of line three he sings a transposition to thedominant of 12(f); he finishes with the descent from 12(n),which is convenient to have as a distinct fragment that reflectsits registral relationship to 12(l).

I was conservative in selecting examples of melodies composedof the formulaic descending melodic fragments; countless othersare also composed of these fragments if allowances are made forfeatures such as small upward motions that interrupt the descent,as in Ida Cox’s ‘‘Mojo Hand Blues’’ (see Example 20). I did not

include many such examples—though there are several cited inthe notes—because it is not within the scope of this study toitemize the many melodic gestures that precede, interrupt, andfollow an underlying melodic descent; what I mostly allowed forhere were short pickups leading up to the highest note of thefragment. There are also many examples of melodies made ofthese fragments for which I could find only one example, andwhich are perhaps unique. I excluded most of these simply tofocus on those constructions that were popular and productivewith multiple singers.

A final example of a singer drawing material from the‘‘storehouse’’ is ‘‘Revenue Man Blues’’ (see Example 21), thediscant of which—if one allows for details like ascending pick-ups and other relatively brief ascending melodic gestures—Charley Patton composes entirely with various descents betweenmembers of the tonic triad.87 Example 22 gives a graphicsummary of the melodic fragments used in ‘‘Revenue ManBlues,’’ with labels in the columns on the right identifyingthe fragments from Example 12 and the A and B lines of therhyming couplets; the bar line separates the fragments, and theharmonic changes are indicated below the staff. What is perhapsmost notable in this formulaic method of melodic compositionis that Patton seems slightly more restrictive with his choices for

example 14. Charley Patton, ‘‘Moon Going Down’’ (1930). (Standard twelve-bar blues scheme, Type 3.)

86 Other realizations with both distinctive melodic material and transpositionof the mode over the subdominant include Carlisle & Ball’s ‘‘I Want a GoodWoman’’ and Homer Callahan’s ‘‘Rattle Snake Daddy,’’ among manyothers. Jim Baxter sings an AAA stanza in the opening strophe of‘‘Bamalong Blues’’ (Example 18); the subsequent three are AAB stanzas,one non-rhyming.

87 As in ‘‘Hard Working Woman’’ (Example 5), the melody of ‘‘Revenue ManBlues’’ varies in successive statements of the scheme.



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melodic fragments in the second half of each line, those thatcoincide with the r-formulas of the text. With respect to text,Taft observes that ‘‘[o]nce blues singers chose a particular rhymesound in the first line in the couplet, their options in the secondline became channeled toward a particular subset of r-formulasin the matching line.’’88 I believe that similar considerations mayinform the choice of melodic formulas in the second half of theB line: in the second half of every A line, including repetitions,Patton uses the fragment that descends from 3̂ to 3̂ (Example12[h]), and, with the exception of the first strophe, in the secondhalf of every B line he uses a descent that ends on 1̂. Patton mayfeel compelled to choose a closing formula for the B line thatdescends to the lower and more stable 1̂, as if to answer, or‘‘rhyme,’’ the imperfect melodic closure of A with perfectmelodic closure in B, creating something comparable to an ante-cedent–consequent construction. Further research may revealthat the choice of a closing melodic formula in the A line re-stricts the choices for the closing melodic formula in the B line.

Comparable to the standard twelve-bar blues with respect toits productivity in the common stock is the passamezzo moder-no. Because of my focus on blues and country music rather thangospel, the genre on ‘‘race’’ records for which the scheme wasmost productive, the majority of musical examples in this

discussion are transcriptions of recordings from the ‘‘hillbilly’’series, though the scheme was enormously productive in both.

Otto Gombosi was the first to propose that the standardtwelve-bar blues derived from the passamezzo moderno, sug-gesting similarities between blues schemes and Europeangrounds. According to Gombosi, American musicians took theolder pattern’s second half and redistributed the harmonies sothat the first tonic lasted for four bars and the following harmo-nies for two bars each, thus creating the standard twelve-barblues progression.89 Peter van der Merwe argues that Americanmusicians arrived at the harmonic pattern, if not the harmonicrhythm, of the standard twelve-bar blues scheme by eliminatingthe first IV and V chords from the passamezzo moderno.90 JohnWard argues that the twelve-bar blues is, like the passamezzomoderno, ‘‘both ground and chordal pattern, something to berealized, like a basso continuo part,’’ and that while the bluesscheme lacks a bipartite formal division, it nonetheless ‘‘retainsthe I IV I V progression’’ of the older ground.91 I agree that thestandard twelve-bar blues scheme is a ground bass, but disagreethat it derives directly from the passamezzo; considering theschemes as primarily vehicles for the text, it seems difficult toreconcile the three-part formal division of the twelve-bar blues

example 15. Jesse ‘‘Babyface’’ Thomas, ‘‘Down in Texas Blues’’ (1929). (Standard twelve-bar blues scheme, Type 3.)

88 Taft (2006, 39).

89 Gombosi (1946, 388–89).90 Van der Merwe (1989, 202–03).91 Ward (1994, 322).



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with the two-part, periodic division of the passamezzo, despitethe similarities in the order of the presentation of the threeprimary harmonies. Gombosi himself says that ‘‘[t]hree-linestanzas are rather uncommon and I am at a loss to connect thisfeature with any historic precedent. It seems to me that theproblem could be approached with a much better promise ofsuccess from the literary side.’’92 What seems to drive the argu-ments of all three authors is the similarity in the succession ofchords when taken out of rhythmic context, a similarity that is,in any case, quite common in the repertoire under discussion;93

Richard Hudson, discussing different forms that have the sameorder of harmonies, describes a ‘‘chord row’’ that is—somewhatlike the I–IV–I–V progression in much American vernacularrepertoire—‘‘an abstract succession of chords that acts withinthe Italian dance style to define modality,’’ and which, by itself,‘‘was not a special characteristic of the form [the folia], since thesame progression appeared during the course of over a centuryand a half also in other forms.’’94

Ward, discussing mostly notated European instrumentalmusic, distinguishes between a sixteen-bar form (the quadro

pavan or ‘‘Gregory Walker’’) and an eight-bar form (the ‘‘Buf-fons’’) of the passamezzo moderno; he writes: ‘‘The quadropavan is a two-strain pattern of sixteen bars and a ripresa ofeight; the buffons is a single-strain pattern of eight bars, some-times compressed to four. In other words, the buffons . . . isa cut-time form of the passamezzo without ripresa.’’95 By‘‘cut-time,’’ Ward apparently means half of sixteen bars ratherthan a strict requirement of simple duple meter, because heincludes examples of compound duple, simple quadruple, andeven triple meter. There is a similar distinction here betweeneight- and sixteen-bar forms, but one related more to the text:the eight-bar form supports one rhyming couplet (AB) per verse(see Examples 23–27), whereas the sixteen-bar form supportstwo rhyming couplets per verse (AB/CD), but with no requiredripresa (see Examples 28–30). In both cases, each rhyming linecorresponds to four bars of music. Sometimes, the sixteen-barform supports two rhyming couplets with refrains, in which caseeach line of the couplet roughly corresponds to two bars and therefrains correspond to four. The couplets in each half of sucha verse may be the same or different, creating, respectively, ABr/ABr (see Example 31) or ABr/CDr poetic forms.96 Example 32

example 16. Charley Patton, ‘‘Mean Black Cat Blues’’ (1929). (Standard twelve-bar blues scheme, Type 3.)

92 Gombosi (1946, 387).93 Other schemes beginning with a I–IV–I–V progression, in various

harmonic rhythms, include ‘‘Railroad Bill,’’ ‘‘How Long,’’ ‘‘Frankie andJohnny,’’ ‘‘Sitting on Top of the World,’’ and ‘‘Whitehouse Blues.’’

94 Hudson (1973, 99, 118).

95 Ward (1994, 291). Blum (2004) similarly observes that ‘‘Gregory Walker’’ isproperly applied only to the sixteen-bar form.

96 The A and B lines of Leadbelly’s ‘‘The Titanic’’ (Example 31) both roughlycorrespond to two bars if one considers ‘‘midnight on the scene,’’ from the



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example 17. Ida Cox, ‘‘Graveyard Dream Blues’’ (June 1923). (Standard twelve-bar blues scheme, Type 3.)

example 18. Andrew and Jim Baxter, ‘‘Bamalong Blues’’ (1927). (Standard twelve-bar blues scheme, Type 3.)



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gives a summary of the sample under discussion by length inbars, poetic form, and the patterns of harmonic distributiondiscussed below. The meter is somewhat more flexible for thepassamezzo than for many other schemes, with simple and com-pound, duple and quadruple realizations; the meter is indicatedbut not emphasized in Example 32.97

In his 1944 study of Stephen Foster’s use of the passamezzomoderno, Gombosi describes how Foster maintains the order ofharmonies but shifts their positions within the bars, resulting insix eight-bar patterns, which are reproduced in Example 33 asPatterns 1–6. (All of the patterns in Example 33 are illustratedin eight bars, but many coincide with the sixteen-bar form.)Gombosi calls Pattern 1 (Example 23) the ‘‘basic pattern’’because of its even distribution of harmonies, with the exceptionof bar 7.98 Most of Gombosi’s patterns also occur in the reper-toire under discussion, and Pattern 3 (Examples 24 and 31) isone of the most productive of all.

Several other patterns that Gombosi does not include—presumably because Foster does not use them—are shown inExample 33 as Patterns 7–13. Of these, Pattern 7 is especiallyproductive (Example 28). Gombosi does not make clear why heconsiders the extension of I into bar 4 of Pattern 2 a mere variantwhile considering the analogous extension of I into bar 2 ofPattern 4 its own separate pattern.99 Here I consider such dif-ferences in the distribution of the three primary harmonies en-ough to signify separate patterns. I consider only otherharmonies, such as II� and VI�, substitutions, as in VernonDalhart’s ‘‘The Death of Floyd Collins’’ (Example 30), where II�substitutes for I on the downbeat of bar 7; this is perhaps bestconsidered a variant of Pattern 9, because the entry points of theprimary harmonies are the same.100 Georgia White’s ‘‘If YouCan’t Get Five, Take Two’’ (Example 27) has substitutions ofboth VI� and II�; this is perhaps best considered a variant ofPattern 1, because bars 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8 are the same and bar 7

example 19. Lonnie Johnson, ‘‘Mr. Johnson’s Blues No. 2’’ (1929). (Standard twelve-bar blues scheme, Type 3.)

downbeat of bar 1 to the downbeat of bar 2, analogous to ‘‘Nearer My Godto Thee,’’ from the downbeat of bar 3 to the downbeat of bar 4.

97 In Example 32, I maintain a strong correlation between the poetic structureand length in bars, in addition to taking the smallest regular pulse as thesubdivision of the main beat.

98 Gombosi (1944, 136).

99 Ibid.100 Other examples with the same progression as Dalhart’s ‘‘The Death of

Floyd Collins’’ include Hall Brothers’ ‘‘The Wrong Road’’ and DixonBrothers’ ‘‘The Schoolhouse Fire.’’ If the variant of Pattern 9, with thesubstitution of II�, is more popular than the diatonic version, as thisstudy suggests, the reason is perhaps the variant’s faster harmonic rhythmand strong metric placement of the dissonant harmony II�.



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has the fastest harmonic rhythm. Songs with substitutions areincluded, with asterisks, in Example 32.

Based on the shortest harmonic duration present in everypattern, both the eight- and sixteen-bar forms have sixteenpotential metric-harmonic positions, labeled at the top ofExample 33. In the eight-bar form the sixteen positions are halfbars, and in the sixteen-bar form they are bars. The exception tothis level of harmonic rhythm is Pattern 12, which elides thetonic harmony in position 13 of the basic pattern (Examples 25and 26). Pattern 12 has the same downbeat harmonies asPattern 8, but with the shifts in positions 4 and 12 removed.A similar pattern, 13, has the same elision, and is like Pattern 8with only the shift in position 12 removed. Of these two, Pattern12 is especially productive. Ward, too, accepts progressions withthe elision of I in bar 7 as the (cut-time) passamezzo moderno,observing: ‘‘Except for bar 7 [of Pattern 1], in which V some-times displaces I, the bass pattern changed little over thecenturies.’’101

The harmonic pattern and the rhythm of the text are inter-twined to a certain extent, especially with respect to the last twopositions. Example 34 redistributes the patterns of Example 33according to whether the final tonic falls in position 15 (columnA) or 16 (column B). (Column C is explained below.) Texts that

come to a close on position 15 combine with the patterns ofcolumn A, so that the final accent and the final tonic coincide inthat position (as in Examples 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, and 31);analogously, the first halves of such texts come to a close onposition 7, with the arrival of the dominant. Texts that accentboth positions 15 and 16, coming to a close on the latter,combine with the patterns of column B, with V (or I–V, in thecase of Pattern 10) falling on position 15 and I on position 16 (asin Examples 28, 29, and 30). The first halves of such textsanalogously accent positions 7 and 8, but those two positions arenot necessarily linked to two harmonies; Patterns 2 and 7(Example 28) have one harmony for the two positions, butPatterns 9 (Example 29) and 10 have two (as does the patternwith the substitution as shown in Example 30). In short, thefinal accent of the text coincides with the final tonic.

There is apparently no comparable connection between textand harmonic rhythm with respect to the subdominant: the texttypically accents positions 3, 4, 11, and 12, regardless of thepattern. But performers display a very strong overall preferencefor those patterns that emphasize the large-scale dissonance ofthe subdominant through placement in the relatively strongpositions 3 and 11 (columns A and B) over those that do not(Patterns 4, 5, and 11). Admittedly, this does not explain thelack of interest in Pattern 6, where IV is in the even strongerposition 5; perhaps it is unpopular because of the absence of

example 20. Ida Cox, ‘‘Mojo Hand Blues’’ (1927). (Standard twelve-bar blues scheme, Type 3.)

101 Ward (1994, 298).



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example 21. Charley Patton, ‘‘Revenue Man Blues’’ (1934). (Standard twelve-bar blues scheme, Type 3.)



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harmonic rhythm in the first four positions. Column C showsthose patterns in which IV initially falls in a weak (even-num-bered) position or is delayed until position 5, such patterns beingunproductive in the repertoire and accounting for only two ofthe forty-seven realizations of the passamezzo discussed here. Ofthose forty-five that have IV in the strong position 3, twenty-three resolve back to I on position 4 (Patterns 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, and13, asterisked in Example 34), thus throwing into further reliefthe dissonance of the subdominant through stronger metricplacement than its chord of resolution. Patterns 3, 7, 8, 9, and10 have analogous IV–I motion in positions 11–12.102

Like other schemes of this type, the passamezzo supportsdistinctive, recurring discant tunes—apparently more of thesethan the twelve-bar blues—but more often original ones. Recur-ring discants include ‘‘Jesse James’’ (Example 24) and ‘‘FloydCollins’’ (Example 30); in the case of recurring discants sung

to more than one pattern, like ‘‘Fare Thee Well’’ (Example 31),‘‘Willow Tree’’ (Example 25), and ‘‘Old 97’’ (Example 23), thosepatterns belong to the same column of Example 34, maintainingthe connection between the rhythm of the text and the harmonyin the last two positions.103 Original discants are quite diverse,as Examples 26–29, which represent just a small sample, dem-onstrate. In the vast majority of realizations of the passamezzo,the underlying harmonies strongly inform the melody.

Songs generated by the passamezzo moderno sometimeshave a contrasting strain that is half variation, half repetition ofthe scheme.104 The most common contrasting strain beginswith a IV–I–I–V progression that replaces the first half of thepassamezzo progression and, like the latter, leads to a half


102 Van der Merwe (1989, 201–02) notes the particular popularity of Pattern 3among American musicians. The attraction toward putting IV in a strongmetric position perhaps helps to explain the popularity of an offshoot of thepassamezzo, which is comparable to Pattern 7 but with another appearanceof IV in position 13, as in Lil McClintock’s ‘‘Furniture Man.’’ Because IVand I occupy positions 13 and 14, respectively, V does not arrive untilposition 15 and I position 16, and thus the offshoot combines only withtexts that end in position 16. A similar offshoot puts IV in position 5 aswell, as in the Hickory Nuts’ ‘‘Louisville Burglar.’’ No examples of theoffshoots appear in Examples 32 and 34, but several are cited in Example 2.

103 Other examples of the ‘‘Fare Thee Well’’ discant using Pattern 3, but withharmonic substitutions, include Ma Rainey’s ‘‘Titanic Man Blues,’’ VirginiaListon’s ‘‘Titanic Blues,’’ and Johnnie Head’s ‘‘Fare Thee Blues’’; GeorgiaWhite’s ‘‘Fare Thee Honey Fare Thee Well’’ uses Pattern 1. Anotherexample of the ‘‘Willow Tree’’ discant with Pattern 12 is WoodyGuthrie’s ‘‘Bury Me Beneath the Willow’’; examples with Pattern 1include the Carter Family’s ‘‘Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow’’ andDelmore Brothers’ ‘‘Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow.’’ Otherexamples of the ‘‘Old 97’’ discant with Pattern 1 include ErnestStoneman’s ‘‘Wreck of the Old 97’’ and Kelly Harrell’s ‘‘The Wreck onthe Southern Old 97’’; Woody Guthrie’s ‘‘Wreck of the Old 97’’ usesPattern 12.

104 Ward (1994, 298).



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example 22. Graphic summary of descending melodic fragments in Charley Patton’s ‘‘Revenue Man Blues.’’



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cadence. The second part of the contrasting strain is identical tothe second half of the principal strain (Example 24).105

It is not always clear whether to classify a scheme as a secondor third type, as is the case with the eight-bar ‘‘Alabama Bound’’scheme (see Example 35). Musicians realize the scheme withboth four and—perhaps in part because of its association withragtime—two beats per bar.106 Examples 35(a) and 35(b) show

example 23. Vernon Dalhart, ‘‘Wreck of the Old Southern 97’’ (1928). (Passamezzo moderno scheme, Type 3.)

example 24. Ken Maynard, ‘‘Jesse James’’ (1930). (Passamezzo moderno scheme, Type 3.)

105 In Ken Maynard’s ‘‘Jesse James,’’ the contrasting strain comes after the secondverse, which is not shown in Example 24. Songs with a similar contrastingstrain include Smyth County Ramblers’ ‘‘My Name Is Ticklish Reuben’’ andLeadbelly’s ‘‘Cottonfields.’’ Many contrasting strains have a differentprogression replacing the first half of the passamezzo.

106 Robert Hoffman’s rag ‘‘I’m Alabama Bound’’ (1909, reproduced in Jasen[1986, 33]) is in 2/4, and Jelly Roll Morton plays in duple meter in



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example 25. Hackberry Ramblers, ‘‘’Neath the Weeping Willow Tree’’ (1935). (Passamezzo moderno scheme, Type 3.)

example 26. Edward L. Crain, ‘‘Bandit Cole Younger’’ (1931). (Passamezzo moderno scheme, Type 3.)

example 27. Georgia White, ‘‘If You Can’t Get Five, Take Two’’ (1936), second strophe. (Passamezzo moderno scheme, Type 3.)

example 28. Ernest Stoneman & Kahle Brewer, ‘‘The Fate of Talmadge Osborne’’ (1927). (Passamezzo moderno scheme, Type 3.)



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two distinctive, recurring discant tunes associated with the pro-gression. I call the first the ‘‘Alabama Bound’’ discant becausethat phrase is usually in the title for songs with that melody orelse figures prominently in the lyrics; other common lines andtitles include ‘‘Elder Greene is gone’’ and ‘‘Don’t you leave mehere.’’ The second I call the ‘‘Cocaine’’ discant because it islinked to lyrics about narcotics, usually with the refrain ‘‘Hey,hey, honey take a whiff on me.’’ In both cases, the harmonyinforms the melodic structures, which often outline the under-lying harmonies through arpeggiation. The harmony also in-forms substitutions: in ‘‘Croquet Habits’’—a disguise for‘‘Cocaine Habits’’—Fronzo Cannon’s melody, a variant of the‘‘Cocaine’’ discant, has much the same shape as Leadbelly’s, butbegins one chord step lower (Example 35[c]).107

Musicians have long associated these two discants with theI–I–IV–IV–V–V–I–I harmonic progression,108 suggesting cat-egorization as Type 2. They later came to associate the schemewith at least three more recurring discants—‘‘Nobody’s Busi-ness,’’ ‘‘Blue Eyes,’’ and ‘‘Nine Pound Hammer’’—further sug-gesting classification as Type 2.109 But, although the schemeretained its association with the recurring discants, musiciansincreasingly used it to support a considerable number of originaldiscants as well, suggesting that they perhaps began to regard thescheme as primarily a vehicle for the creation of new melodies,

example 29. The Carter Family, ‘‘No Telephone in Heaven’’ (1929). (Passamezzo moderno scheme, Type 3.)

example 30. Vernon Dalhart, ‘‘The Death of Floyd Collins’’ (9 September, 1925). (Passamezzo moderno scheme, Type 3.)

both of his recordings, ‘‘Alabama Bound’’ and ‘‘Don’t You Leave MeHere.’’

107 In sung verses, Freeny’s Barn Dance Band (Example 35[c]) reaches Vhalfway through bar 4; in instrumental sections, they reach V in bar 5; inboth the sung verses and instrumental sections they consistently elide bar 8,abbreviating the scheme to seven bars. Further examples using the‘‘Alabama Bound’’ discant include Charley Patton’s ‘‘Elder Greene Blues’’and Henry Thomas’s ‘‘Don’t Ease Me In’’ and ‘‘Don’t Leave Me Here,’’

among others. Other examples using the ‘‘Cocaine’’ discant includeMemphis Jug Band’s ‘‘Cocaine Habit Blues’’ and Woody Guthrie’s ‘‘Takea Whiff on Me.’’

108 See Jasen and Tichenor (1978, 69), Jasen and Jones (2000, 167), Oliver(1984, 115–17), and Scarborough (1925, 90–91).

109 Examples of the ‘‘Nobody’s Business’’ discant include Earl Johnson & HisDixie Entertainers’ ‘‘Ain’t Nobody’s Business’’ and Mississippi John Hurt’s‘‘Nobody’s Dirty Business,’’ among others. Examples of the ‘‘Blue Eyes’’discant include the Carter Family’s ‘‘I’m Thinking Tonight of My BlueEyes’’ and Gene Autry’s ‘‘I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes.’’Examples using the ‘‘Nine Pound Hammer’’ discant include the MonroeBrothers’ ‘‘Nine Pound Hammer Is Too Heavy’’ and Frank Blevins & HisTar Heel Rattlers’ ‘‘Nine Pound Hammer.’’



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example 31. Leadbelly, ‘‘The Titanic’’ (1948). (Passamezzo moderno scheme, Type 3.)

16-barPattern

8-barAB couplet AB/CD ABr/ABr ABr/CDr

1

Alphabetical Four

n the Southern

ury Me Under the Weeping Willow ; Georgia Whi ,

(12/8):

2 (12/8):

3

(4/4): Charley (2/2): Man *

Blues. *

4

5 (2/2): n Heaven for Me.

6

7

(2/2): Earnest Stoneman & Kahle dge

Osborne(4/4): Frank Stokes,

Chance. (6/8): The Carter Family,

8 (4/4): Gidden Sister

9

(4/4): Dixon Br

10

11

12

The Woody Guthrie,

Beneath the Willow, ; Hackberry Ramblers, . (6/8): Edward L. Crain,

13*Songs substituting II , or II and VI .

example 32. Summary of the passamezzo moderno sample by length in bars, poetic structure, and pattern of harmonic distribution.



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and that it may be more accurate to categorize the scheme asType 3.110 ‘‘Alabama Bound’’ is a good example of how musi-cians’ usage of a scheme can change over time. Though thescheme is difficult to classify, placement between the second andthird types reveals that singers associate the scheme with a smallnumber of recurring discants to a greater extent than third typeslike the standard twelve-bar blues, but see it as a vehicle for the

creation of original discants to a greater extent than second typeslike ‘‘Frankie and Johnny.’’

iv. type 4

In the fourth type of scheme, the melodic structure is mostconsistent and the harmonic progression displays considerablevariance, but performers nonetheless recognize certain generalrequirements for it. Example 36(a) shows the melodic structure

example 33. Harmonic patterns for the passamezzo moderno: 1–6, Otto Gombosi’s patterns; 7–13, additional patterns.

110 Examples with original discants include Cannon’s Jug Stompers’ ‘‘Going toGermany’’ and Ashley & Foster’s ‘‘East Virginia Blues,’’ among many others.



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*IV I in positions 3 4: (23). Patterns 3, 7, 8, 9, and 10 have analogous IV I motion in positions 11 12.

AI in positions 15 & 16IV in strong positions

3 & 11: (34)

BV I in positions 15 16IV in strong positions

3 & 11: (11)

CIV in weak positions

or delayed until position 5(2)

Pattern 1: (15)Pattern 2: (1)

Pattern 3: (11)*Pattern 4: (0)Pattern 5: (1)Pattern 6: (0)

Pattern 7: (5)*Pattern 8: (1)*

Pattern 9: (4)*Pattern 10: (1)*

Pattern 11: (1)Pattern 12: (6)

Pattern 13: (1)*IV in strong positions 3 & 11: (45)

example 34. Distribution of the passamezzo moderno sample by position of final tonic and position of subdominant.

example 35. ‘‘Alabama Bound’’ scheme (Type 2 or 3?): (a) Papa Charlie Jackson, ‘‘I’m Alabama Bound’’ (1925); (b) Leadbelly, ‘‘Take a Whiffon Me’’ (1935); (c) Freeny’s Barn Dance Band, ‘‘Croquet Habits’’ (1930); (d) harmonic progression.



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of the nine-bar ‘‘Sitting on Top of the World’’ scheme, witha number of different harmonizations (b–k) given below.111 Inrealizations of ‘‘Sitting on Top of the World,’’ most performersfix upon a tonic–subdominant progression in bars 1–4, anda tonic–dominant–tonic progression in the following five-bargroup that includes the refrain. In the great majority of realiza-tions, they reach the subdominant in bar 3, highlighting thedissonant non-tonic harmony through strong metric placement,but some return to the tonic in bar 4 while others delay it untilbar 5. Shifting back to the tonic harmony in bar 4 puts IV ina stronger metric position than its chord of resolution and allowsfor melodic resolution to 1̂ over I in bar 4; prolonging IV

through bar 4 delays the coincidence of 1̂ over I, and thus anysense of strong resolution in the strophe, until the downbeat ofbar 8.

As discussed above in reference to Example 4, bar 7 is the onlybar that contains two accents, and the span from the downbeat ofbar 7 to the downbeat of bar 8 constitutes the central area ofrhythmic activity. Many musicians respond to the increasedrhythmic activity in the melodic structure by simultaneouslyaccelerating the harmonic rhythm; just as bar 7 is the only barthat contains two accents, it is also the only bar that frequentlycontains two harmonies. The shift in harmony in bar 7 coincideswith the bar’s second accent. Although most musicians recog-nize the harmonic acceleration in bar 7 as characteristic ofthe scheme, the choice of harmonies varies. Some, like TampaRed (Example 36[d]) and Bob Wills (Example 36[i]), introduce

example 36. ‘‘Sitting on Top of the World’’ scheme (Type 4): (a) melodic structure, after Charley Patton; (b–i) harmonizations.

111 Another scheme of this type is the twelve-bar, cut-time ‘‘WhitehouseBlues’’ scheme, examples of which are cited in Example 2.



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their most conspicuous chromatic chord on the downbeat ofbar 7, highlighting the dissonant chord through strong metricplacement and drawing further attention to the area of height-ened rhythmic activity. In both cases the lowered 3̂ in themelody on the downbeat of bar 7 informs the choice of chro-matic harmony: both �VI and VIIo7/V are simultaneities thatincorporate �3̂.112

Bar 9 unites with bar 8 to create the sensation of two suc-cessive weak bars, and serves to separate the end of one stanza,on the downbeat of bar 8, from the relatively large pickup(usually at least three syllables) at the beginning of the next.Without bar 9, bar 8 is perhaps too active, holding both the endof one stanza and the beginning of the next, with too littlerhythmic separation between stanzas. For this reason, andbecause I have not found recordings without the nine-bar struc-ture, I consider nine bars the organic length of the scheme. Theeight-bar schemes under discussion have vocal rhythms that endin bar 7, usually on the downbeat, and thus do not require a ninthbar for satisfactory separation of stanzas.113

v. type 5

In other schemes in which the length in bars and melodicstructure are most consistent, performers have a strong, sharedconception of the scheme’s melodic profile, but little sharedconception of the harmonic progression. Sometimes, they taketheir cues for harmonization from the melodic structure, as inthe ten-bar ‘‘John Henry’’ scheme.114 As mentioned above, thetext is a rhyming AB couplet in which the second half of Brepeats (Example 37). Performers quite often repeat the last fourbars, creating a fourteen-bar structure.115 Occasionally, bars11–14 are an instrumental repetition of bars 7–10.116

Like the ‘‘Sitting on Top of the World’’ scheme, ‘‘JohnHenry’’ has a central area of rhythmic activity. Rhythmically, themelodic structure consistently fills out all of the strong bars, but

Strong Bar Weak Bar

Beats: 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4bar 1 bar 2

John Henry, when he was a babylines of text: A

bar 3 bar 4sitting on his ma- knee

bar 5 bar 6Picked up a hammer in his little right hand, said,B

bar 7 bar 8the death of me, me, me,

bar 9 bar 10the death of

BCentral area of

rhythmic activity

example 37. Woody Guthrie, ‘‘John Henry’’ (1944): rhythmic activity of the vocal line.

112 Wagner (2003, 355) notes that when �3̂ combines with harmonies otherthan the major tonic, subdominant, or dominant, these tend to be, like �VIand VIIo7/V, rooted in conventional European tonal harmony. In Example36(a), I indicate flats above the staff to allow for variations in singers’intonation of 3̂. Bill Broonzy (Example 36[e]) plays a prominent 6̂ in thebass on the downbeat of bar 7; he does not fill in a VI chord in the uppervoices, and so I am reluctant to show VI in that position, but to fail toacknowledge any surface harmonic change there also seems misleading, so Icompromise by indicating the upper neighbor (N) to V. The MississippiSheiks (Example 36[b]) use a comparable surface harmonic change,introducing a prominent �3̂ in the bass halfway through bar 7; here �3̂functions as a ‘‘dropping third’’ (DT) (Van der Merwe [1989, 120–25];Stoia [2010, §4 ff.]) that resolves to 1̂ on the following downbeat.

113 Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys (Example 36[i]) play the first three bars intriple meter (a compound form of 3/2, probably best notated as 18/8), butswitch to quadruple meter for the refrain to allow for the accent halfway

through bar 7, an impossibility in triple meter without a hemiola. A lessproductive, eight-bar offshoot of the scheme essentially eliminates bar 7.The offshoot—examples of which are cited in Example 2—supportsa rhyming AB couplet with refrain, but the refrain is shorter. Most signif-icantly, most realizations have only downbeat accents, and thus lack a centralarea of rhythmic activity and a corresponding acceleration of harmonicrhythm. A common theme in many of the lyrics for songs generated by the‘‘Sitting on Top of the World’’ scheme is defiance in the face of hardship.

114 Another scheme of this type is the eight-bar, cut-time ‘‘Reuben’’ scheme,examples of which are cited in Example 2.

115 Examples include Williamson Brothers & Curry’s ‘‘Gonna Die with MyHammer in My Hand’’ and Riley Puckett’s ‘‘A Darkey’s Wail,’’ amongothers.

116 Examples include Reese Crenshaw’s ‘‘John Henry’’ and J.E. Mainer’sMountaineers’ ‘‘John Henry Was a Little Boy.’’ That there are many cut-time realizations of ‘‘John Henry’’ probably stems from its origins as a worksong; in the recording by ‘‘22’’ and Group made by Alan Lomax at Parch-man Farm, each bar coincides with two strikes of a tool. Nelson observesthat ‘‘John Henry’’ ‘‘was among the first of the songs that came to be called‘the blues’ and was one of the first recorded ‘country’ songs’’ (2006, 2).



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it varies in the weak bars: bars 2, 4, and 10 contain relatively littlerhythmic activity, with words on only the first beat—the ‘‘rep-etition’’ of the second half of B omits the rhythmic activity afterthe downbeat in the weak bar—but bars 6 and 8 contain con-siderably more, and are the only weak bars with accents on thethird beat. Bars 5–8 thus constitute the central area of rhythmicactivity.

Example 38(a) shows the melodic structure, with several har-monizations (b–e) below. The melodic emphasis on the membersof the tonic triad allows for harmonization with the tonicthroughout (Example 38[b]), but performers also use the domi-nant where 5̂ is emphasized (Example 38[c]), or the subdominantwhere 1̂ is emphasized (Example 38[d]). Leadbelly uses both(Example 38[e]). Thus, while the melodic structure remainsconsistent, musicians seem to have little shared conception forthe harmonic structure, instead deriving their progressions fromwhat the melodic structure suggests to them.117

conclusion

As with the European grounds of the Renaissance and laterperiods, those blues and country schemes that primarily sup-port original discants are the most productive. The preferencetoward such schemes is not surprising—they have the fewestconstraints on the melody and text and thus allow for thewidest range of melodic creativity and emotional content. But

the high productivity of this type of scheme leads too easily tothe assumption that all schemes are defined mainly by theirharmonic profile, which is untrue. Furthermore, describingschemes of the first and second type simply by length in barsand harmonic structure omits important aspects of the melodicstructure that musicians associate with those schemes.

Even where a scheme is difficult to classify, it is still infor-mative to know between which two categories it falls; thisplacement reveals much about musicians’ conception andtreatment of the scheme, and what they consider characteristicand defining when realizing it. The ambiguous position of the‘‘Key to the Highway’’ scheme between the first and secondtypes reveals that singers accept certain requirements for therhythm and contour of the melodic structure that are less rigidthan those of Type 1 like ‘‘Trouble in Mind,’’ but that arenonetheless in effect even during the creation of an originaldiscant. The categorization of the ‘‘Alabama Bound’’ schemebetween the second and third types indicates that singers asso-ciate it with distinctive, recurring discants, but see it as a vehiclefor the creation of original discants to a greater extent thanschemes squarely of Type 2 like ‘‘Frankie and Johnny.’’

Scholars observe that black and white musicians of the 1920sto the 1940s shared much with respect to musical repertoireand genre, and that the separation of the two on commercialrecordings grew out of the prejudices of record companies.118

Expanding the notion of the common stock to includeschemes—and broadening our understanding of schemes toinclude different types—reveals even greater musical interpen-etration between the two populations. Example 2 revealssomething of the extent to which black and white musiciansrelied on the same foundational musical resources; despite thedivision of the market along racial lines, many differences lie on

example 38. ‘‘John Henry’’ scheme (Type 5): (a) melodic structure, after Williamson Brothers & Curry; (b–e) harmonizations.

117 Riley Puckett’s ‘‘A Darkey’s Wail’’ is a guitar instrumental; another is FrankHutchison’s ‘‘K.C. Blues.’’ The melody in bar 8 of ‘‘Gonna Die with MyHammer in My Hand’’ (Example 38[a]) is split between two singers, onestopping on the downbeat, the other continuing to beat 3; the WilliamsonBrothers & Curry (Example 38[d]) play V in bar 9 of some strophes, butonly I in others. Leadbelly realizes the melody with a plagal range,emphasizing the high 1̂ in bars 2 and 6 and transposing the last four barsup an octave.

118 See, for example, Wolfe (1990, 33), Wells (2003, 136), and Barker andTaylor (2007, 29–99).



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the surface, while on a deeper level the two populations havemore in common musically than is often acknowledged. Fur-thermore, in sharing a stock of schemes, black and white mu-sicians necessarily also share a conception of how to realize eachone, a conception of each scheme’s constraints and allowanceswith respect to rhythm, harmony, and melody—those compo-nents that define type. This consensus in musical treatmentindicates extensive musical sharing.

That the passamezzo is apparently the most productivescheme in both country and gospel music is quite telling; sty-listically, these two genres differ considerably, but looking belowthe surface reveals that much of the repertoire is built upon thesame musical foundation. Furthermore, as Examples 32 and 34show, both black and white musicians apparently prefer the samespecific patterns for realizations of the passamezzo. Perhaps themost significant difference between the two populations in theirapproach to musical construction is black musicians’ greaterreliance on the storehouse of formulaic descending melodicfragments in realizations of the standard twelve-bar blues scheme,but the scheme was nonetheless highly productive in both the‘‘race’’ and ‘‘hillbilly’’ series.

This is not an exhaustive study of the common stock ofschemes in early blues and country music, and further researchwill surely uncover more schemes shared by the two popula-tions.119 Because of the difficulties in obtaining many record-ings, I have not been able to hear all that I would like, anda wider sample might reveal that some of the schemes in thisstudy placed outside of the common stock actually belong in it.Further investigation might also uncover extensive sharing ofschemes among black and white musicians across other genres.

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Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 35, Issue 2, pp. 194–234, ISSN 0195-6167,electronic ISSN 1533-8339. © 2013 by The Society for Music Theory. Allrights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy orreproduce article content through the University of California Press’sRights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/mts.2013.35.2.194



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stoia, common stock of schemes.pdf

Documents

country schemes

country musicians

thecreation of new music

raciallyseparated rhythm

storehouse of songs

race series

hillbilly series

new pieces