Now that the novelty of merely getting to talk about the blues in class has worn off, I am dealing with the practical question of how best to teach it. Rather than working from a set of abstract principles, I decided to walk my students through a selection of specific tunes to see what we can learn from them. I am especially interested in examples that don’t follow the standard twelve bar blues form or use the I, IV and V chords. Too many music education resources boil the blues down to these tropes, and I want students to understand that the music is more stylistically diverse than that. For example, listen to “Hobo Blues” by John Lee Hooker, which he first recorded in 1949.
This song sounds like the blues, but it doesn’t use the twelve bar form or the IV and V chords. Does it even have a form or chords at all? It’s more like an open-ended drone. Hooker learned this style of playing from his stepfather William Moore, who was from Louisiana where the blues sounded different from the predominant style of the Mississippi Delta.
Here’s a live performance of “Hobo Blues” from the 1965 American Folk Blues Festival. Despite the name, this festival took place in Europe.
If it wasn’t for European television, we would have no decent footage of America’s best mid-twentieth century Black artists at all.
Here’s another live performance from 1992.
I had always thought that “hobo” was synonymous with “tramp”, an old-timey word for “homeless.” But back in the early twentieth century, a hobo was a migrant worker, not a bum. Hooker talks about hobo-ing as a way to search for work, not as a way to avoid it.
Here’s my transcription of the original 1949 recording. Hooker’s guitar is nominally in open G tuning, but it actually sounds somewhere between A-flat and A. I wrote my chart in G for simplicity.
“Hobo Blues” is a loosely structured one-chord groove. Hooker hammers the low open G string on just about every beat in the song, and the effect is hypnotic. I used time signature changes to try to convey the open-ended phrase structure. This involved a lot of subjective interpretation on my part. Sometimes you can feel Hooker playing clear downbeats, but sometimes it feels like there are no barlines at all.
The melody is mainly built on G minor pentatonic: G, B-flat(-ish), C, D and F. When I say “B-flat-ish”, I’m not referring to a single pitch, but rather, a pitch zone ranging from equal-tempered B-flat to equal-tempered B-natural. Hooker also sings his F’s with some flexibility; you can feel them pulling down toward D. My notation shows whatever piano-key pitch Hooker is singing closest to, but listen to the recording for the truth.
The guitar part uses the same pitch collection as the vocal melody, including both the open B string and many fretted B-flats. Hooker sometimes bends those B-flats a little sharp. There are also occasional E’s in the lead parts. Each verse ends in a guitar melody that Hooker hums along with, and in those sections, he adds C-sharp/D-flat to the pitch collection. He only sings/plays that note a few times, but he places it on strong beats, and repeats it for emphasis.
If the “Hobo Blues” melody is built from G minor pentatonic with a chromatic connector between C and D, isn’t that the regular old G blues scale? In a sense, yes, but I don’t plan to present it that way in class, because I don’t consider the blues scale to be a real thing. “But Ethan! I’ve seen the blues scale all over the place! It has its own Wikipedia article!” I know. I learned the scale the same way every beginner rock guitarist does. But I don’t like the scale as a pedagogical tool.
There have been a lot of “blues scales” described in print. The “minor pentatonic plus sharp four” version was first presented by Jamey Aebersold as a shorthand for the non-diatonic pitches most characteristic of jazz musicians’ blues playing. Since then, the scale has taken on a life of its own, and when people say “the blues scale”, the Aebersold scale is usually what they mean. The scale doesn’t sound bad, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient for good blues playing. You need that flexible third, bending from minor to major and various points in between, and you need that seventh bending down toward the sixth. You also want the sixth itself, and often the second (though you don’t need it for “Hobo Blues”).
The guitar part in “Hobo Blues” seems simple enough. You could play the entire left hand part with one finger. If you can find the third, fifth, sixth and eighth frets, you’re in business. On the other hand, the right hand part is not easy at all. The triplet feel has to be insistent and steady, but also flexible. Your palm muting has to be exactly on point, and you need to have your dynamics completely under control. When I searched for guitar tutorials online, the first result was a video by a fedora-wearing white guy named Delta Lou. He plays too fast, too loud, and without palm muting. He also adds a IV chord that isn’t on the recording. The result is extremely corny. If you want to know how to get Hooker’s panther-on-the-prowl feel, Delta Lou is no help.
“Hobo Blues” sounds superficially similar to “Boogie Chillen“, my favorite Hooker tune. They use the same open G tuning, some of the same guitar riffs, and similar 12/8 shuffle feels. They are also both metrically unstable, with uneven phrase lengths. However, there are some crucial differences too, in groove, in melody, and in structure.
“Hobo Blues”
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Tempo: 80-90 BPM
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Vocal: No spoken/rap
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Guitar melodies: Doubled with humming
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Groove: “Four on the floor”
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Harmony: No chord changes
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Vocal melody: Aebersold blues scale with flexible third
“Boogie Chillen”
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Tempo: 145-155 BPM
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Vocal: Mostly spoken/rap
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Guitar melodies: Not doubled with humming
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Groove: Avoids downbeats
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Harmony: Each sung phrase starts on the IV chord
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Vocal melody: Dorian-ish with flexible third
“Hobo Blues” is the rare blues tune that has been the subject of serious musicological analysis. Richard Ripani talks about it in his book, The New Blue Music : Changes in Rhythm & Blues, 1950-1999. The discussion comes in the book’s second chapter, which is a helpful literature review of other blues scholarship.
Ripani uses the term “the blues system” to describe the music’s characteristic pitches, rhythms, harmonies and timbres. Rather than talking about a blues scale or scales, Ripani refers to “the blues mode.” This is not a set of discrete pitches like a Western diatonic mode. Instead, the blues mode includes three flexible notes or pitch regions, which Ripani calls the third, the fifth and the seventh, after their closest equal-tempered major-scale equivalents. The blues mode also includes many other notes.
“Hobo Blues” is an important example for Ripani because of its use of the blue fifth, variously described as the “flatted fifth,” “sharp fourth,” or “sharp eleventh”. As with the blue third, the blue fifth is best understood as an island of relative stability (or several islands) in the pitch continuum between two equal-tempered pitches. In G, you could play the blue fifth as C-sharp, or bend it down toward C or up toward D. There is no consensus about where the blue fifth might have originated. Is it a heavily bent fourth or fifth? A harmonic eleventh? Two blue thirds stacked up? We may never know.
Not all blues songs use the blue fifth. The ones that do use it don’t all treat it the same way. In “Kind Hearted Woman Blues“, Robert Johnson only uses the blue fifth as a connector between four and five. By contrast, Hooker places it at the top of his phrases, going up to it and coming back down. (A small correction: Ripani says that Hooker always resolves the blue fourth down to C in “Hobo Blues”, but it also resolves up to D in the second guitar solo.)
Finally, Ripani uses “Hobo Blues” to talk about some essential elements of blues rhythm. He points out that when European classical composers use syncopation, it’s “an effort to introduce something out of the ordinary, a change from the regular beat… a musical special effect” (p. 47). By contrast, off-beat phrasing is the foundation of the blues’ rhythmic structure. It’s not a temporary disruption of the prevailing meter; it is the prevailing meter. Ripani also points out that blues uses rubato differently from European classical music. Classical ensembles play rubato rhythms in tight synchronization under the direction of a conductor. In the blues, however, a rubato vocal melody or instrumental solo usually sits on top of a steady beat in the rhythm section. In “Hobo Blues”, Hooker’s singing sometimes aligns with the guitar’s driving triplets, but often floats above it without being locked in.
There are so many things I love about “Hobo Blues” – Hooker’s foot tapping out time on a wooden pallet; his voice cracking on the word “somewhere” at 1:35; the way the guitar part quiets all the way down to silence at a few points; the way every single vocal phrase ends on G except for “take care of my child” at 2:33.
Why does this song feel so real? Why does it sound like Hooker is telling the truth so directly? I don’t know whether he was ever actually a hobo. He sings and plays with authority, but that doesn’t mean he is speaking from personal lived experience. His song “I’m Bad Like Jesse James” is also very compelling, but I don’t think he ever paid to have someone murdered, you know? I want to treat Hooker’s music as non-fiction because he has a commanding baritone, a distinctive guitar style and a life story filled with hardship, but that ignores the fact that he had as much of an imagination as any other songwriter. It’s easy to romanticize Skip James or Elizabeth Cotten in the same way, and that would be a shame, because that reduces them to cartoon characters, avatars of folk tradition rather than the creative artists that they were.