“Work Song” and blues harmony

It’s a cliché to say that jazz is European harmony plus African rhythm. For example, this lesson plan from Jazz in America says that jazz got its rhythm and “feel” from African music, and its harmony and instruments from European classical. This is not untrue, but it’s an oversimplification. A substantial amount of jazz harmony is African-derived too. Nat Adderley’s “Work Song” is a case in point. It’s one of the funkiest and most soulful jazz standards, inspired by the singing of chain gangs in Adderley’s native Florida.

The head is an archetypal example of the blues scale, and it is mostly played without chords. You need chords for the solos, though, so which ones should you use? Is the tune major, or minor, or modal, or what? There is no consensus in the jazz world. This is a surprise, given that “Work Song” is such a standard. In this post, I’ll talk through a couple of possible interpretations, before giving my preferred explanation (spoiler: it’s in blues tonality.)

The Real Book says that “Work Song” is in F minor, and uses these changes:

| F-7 | F-7 | F-7   | F-7 |
| F-7 | F-7 | C-7   | C7  |
| F-7 | F-7 | F-7   | F-7 |
| F-7 | Bb7 | G7 C7 | F-7 |

Most transcriptions you can find online use similar chords, with some minor variety in the last two bars. Martin Saunders’ DMA thesis, an exhaustive analysis of Nat Adderley’s recorded solos on the tune, agrees that the tune is in concert F minor (transposed to G minor in his trumpet charts). On the other hand, Jamey Aebersold‘s chart uses F7 instead of F-7, which implies F Mixolydian mode. The Hal Leonard chart uses F5 during the head and F7 during the solos.

Jazz is an aural form more than a notated one, so to really resolve this dispute, we should consult some recordings. I consider the canonical one to be Nat Adderley’s. He uses F7 throughout, so that would seem to be case closed. But both the soloists and the rhythm section frequently use A-flat on top, so it’s ambiguous as to whether the feel is major or minor. To make matters more confusing, Nat also recorded the tune many times with his brother Cannonball, and Cannonball always played it in F minor. But then the soloists sometimes play A natural on top! How do we make sense of this? Western tonal theory is not much help here. I think the only useful explanation is to say that “Work Song” is in F blues tonality, which is neither major, minor, nor modal, but which combines elements of all three.

Here’s my transcription of the head as heard on Nat Adderley’s recording.

Let’s dig into Wes Montgomery’s guitar solo, at 1:38 in the recording above. It’s just about my favorite jazz guitar solo ever, and is soaked with blues feeling. Wes plays with so much articulation and touch, you can practically hear him talking to you. The chords are my best approximation of Bobby Timmons‘ comping.

Wes plays a variety of different scales from the expanded blues universe: the F blues scale, of course, but also the F major scale, F Mixolydian mode, F Dorian mode, and various chromatic alterations to all of the above.

Here are three particularly remarkable moments:

• Measures 73-74: Wes repeats some long Fs, each of which lands in a different place in the bar: the “and” of one, the “and” of three, the downbeat, the “and” of two, and finally on beat four. After all this syncopation, the quarter notes in measures 75 and 76 are so surprisingly square that they almost become a kind of syncopation themselves.
• Measures 87-89: After a few bars of bebop-like flowing eighth notes, Wes plays a repeating riff that evokes Charlie Christian. The first two times through, the riff uses the notes A, C, A, D over a C7 chord. The third time, Wes switches the D to an E-flat, an unexpected acknowledgement that the chord has changed to F7. So hip.
• Measures 94-96: The notes here are a standard way to harmonize some of the notes in the blues scale by adding minor thirds under them: putting F under A-flat, putting G under B-flat, and putting A-flat under B natural (enharmonically C-flat.) This harmonization is effortless on guitar just by barring across the B and G strings with your index finger. The remarkable thing isn’t Wes’ note choices, it’s his rhythm. He plays the harmonized blues riff three times. The first time, it starts on beat three; the second time, it starts on beat two; and the third time, it starts on beat one. This elegant bit of hemiola evokes Basie or Ellington’s horn charts.

Beyond loving this solo, I present it here to show the full diversity of blues harmony in a jazz context. Wes is not playing anything particularly unusual or far-out, but this simple-seeming tune can still support a dazzling variety of different harmonic approaches. When you hear Cannonball Adderley’s more intellectual and abstract approach, you’ll hear just about every chromatic pitch class at one point or another. It’s easy to write impenetrable atonal music; the genius of the blues is that it supports wild flights of harmonic imagination while still sounding “good” to casual listeners.

The most famous version of “Work Song” is the one by Nina Simone, with lyrics by Oscar Brown Jr. This performance, from the Merv Griffin show, is a good one.

Nina Simone does the tune in minor. I prefer it the way Nat Adderley does it, but it works great this way too. It’s fascinating to me that a blues melody can work just as well over major (dominant) chords as it does over minor. In standard “Western” tonality, you can’t just freely interchange major and minor under the same melody!

Here’s my question for every teacher of music theory: does “Work Song” count as “Western” music? It certainly doesn’t fall within the tradition of common-practice tonal music, but neither does it challenge the concept of tonality the way twentieth century “art” music does. “Work Song” doesn’t sound exotic or far out; quite the opposite. I remember it sounding intimately familiar on first hearing. The tune is part of a continuum of blues tradition that, for all we know, stretches back centuries. Is the blues part of “Western” culture or not? If not, on what basis can we exclude it? And if it is part of our culture, why does formal music pedagogy neglect it so completely?