Betty Davis and the blues sus4

I heard this Betty Davis song while I was doing a shift at the Park Slope Food Coop and the guitar riff grabbed my ears. In this post, I explain why, and what the riff can tell us about blues harmony.

First of all: is this music blues? You might argue that it’s a funk song. It is a funk song, but Tony Bolden’s book Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk makes the case that, well, it’s right there in the title. The sixteenth-note swing of funk is different from the eighth-note shuffle of the blues, but they share the same harmonic structure, and the same general cultural context. Betty Davis makes the connection explicit in this song, which is all about her and her family’s love of the blues.

“They Say I’m Different” opens with a guitar riff consisting of three notes: F-sharp, A, and B.

(About the colors in the pitch wheels: purple notes are octaves/unisons, fourths and fifths above the root. Blue notes are minor or flatted intervals. Green notes are major or natural intervals.)

With only this information to go on, you’d assume that the groove is moving between I and IV, F#7 and B7 (or maybe F#m7 and B7, or F#m7 and Bm7.) After two bars, the bass enters playing F-sharp and E under the implied F#7, and nothing under the implied B7. So far, so normal. But when the vocal melody and the other guitar part come in, something strange happens: there is no IV chord. The entire tune stays on F#7.

Once you know this, the guitar riff is more surprising. The F-sharp is the tonic, no big mystery there. The A is the flat third, which is not unusual on a tonic seventh chord in the blues. But the B is the suspended fourth, and it is an ironclad law of Western tonal theory that this is a tension that needs resolving down to the third.

However, in “They Say I’m Different”, the fourth doesn’t resolve at all. The guitar riff keeps playing that B as if it’s a stable pitch.

I transcribed the beginning of the tune. Notation is completely inadequate to the pitch nuances of this music, but I did my best. Most of the A naturals are bent up a bit toward A-sharp. Because they are blue notes, I colored them blue in the chart.

So what are we hearing? Are we supposed to hear the B in the riff as changing the chord to F#7sus4? Is that a stable sound? Or does the clash between the B and the underlying A-sharp not matter? Is it even a clash at all in this context? Betty Davis and her band don’t seem to think so. Later in the song, the backing vocals superimpose both A natural and A-sharp with the B in the riff (“Talk about it, talk about it”). The guitars play lots of F#7 chords, while the piano that enters later plays both F#m7 and F#7 on top.

I can’t think of any other songs that use an unresolved sus4 on top of a I7 chord. However, it’s a very common thing to hear unresolved 4ths on V7 chords in blues and related musics. For example, listen to this Albert Collins tune.

The tune is in F, and Collins’ guitar riff simply repeats the note F through the entire first chorus. When he gets to the C7 chord at 0:11, Collins continues to play F, the suspended fourth of C7, without resolving to E.

Adam Maness points out that Oscar Peterson plays tonic harmony on his V7 chords quite often at the end of sections.

Prince does the same thing on the V chords in “Starfish and Coffee“, and Aretha Franklin does it repeatedly on her amazing 1972 live recording of “Amazing Grace.”

It’s also pretty common to suspend the 4th on the IV chord without resolving it. Listen to Muddy Waters’ song “Honey Bee.”

The tune is in F. Muddy sings the words “sail on” on the notes E-flat and C, the flat seventh and fifth respectively. But then he sings those two words on the same pitches over Bb7, where they are the fourth and second. The E-flat doesn’t ever resolve to D, the third of Bb7.

So what does it mean? Let’s go back to the Betty Davis song that started this off. Which of the notes are consonant, and which are dissonant? I don’t hear all those B’s as being especially tense or in need of resolution. I don’t really hear any of the notes functioning that way, to be honest. I hear a lot of tension and resolution in the song, but it’s all rhythmic and timbral. Betty Davis’ rasps and screams have the effect on me that dissonance is supposed to. I hear tension and resolution when she rushes or drags before lining herself back up with the expected rhythms. I hear the pitches as having color, and their relationships as having meaning, but it is not the meaning they would have in “functional” harmony. I don’t think we have the vocabulary for the way blues harmony works. At least, I don’t. I know how to play this music, but not how to verbalize that knowledge.