Identifying blues melodies

This is an exciting week of class for me, because we are analyzing blues melodies, and that is a music-theoretic subject that is close to my heart. Given its impact on the past hundred years of Anglo-American popular culture, the blues has been the subject of a shockingly small amount of musicological analysis. The best resource I know of is Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis by Jeff Titon. I collect lots of other references of widely varying quality here. It’s wonderful that NYU is centering the blues in its new pop theory sequence, but how do we actually teach it? Western tonal theory is no help here, and jazz theory doesn’t have much to add. If there isn’t a systematic framework we can use, where do we even begin?

The first question we have to answer is, what constitutes a blues melody? Are we only going to count Delta blues, or other kinds of blues, or are we going to open up our inquiry to blues-derived musics like jazz, country, R&B or rock? I think we can draw on any kind of music that uses blues tonality, so my answer is all of the above, but that does not make my job any easier.

The main thing we are not going to be talking about is the so-called “blues scale“, the minor pentatonic with a chromatic connector between the fourth and fifth. This is not a real thing! Jamey Aebersold was the first person to describe the scale in print, and he almost certainly meant it as a pedagogical shorthand for the characteristic non-diatonic notes most commonly used in the blues. However, the scale has taken on a life of its own, with uncountably many beginner musicians using it as their entry point into improvisation. I was one of those beginners, and I found that while the blues scale is a good-sounding pitch collection, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for playing the actual blues. Maybe the scale has practical pedagogical value, but it’s no good if you want to develop understanding.

The main problem with conceiving of blues using any system of scales built on piano-key pitches is that no such system can account for the blue notes, pitches that fall between the piano keys. Blues is not really a system of fixed, discrete pitches at all. Instead, it uses flexible pitch zones. There are three zones that people use most often: one that centers on the minor and major thirds, one that spans the fourth and fifth, and one that centers on the flat seventh. Jeff Titon calls these zones the E complex, the G complex, and the B complex, respectively (the names are relative to a C tonic). Titon also identifies some specific recurring pitches within the zones, islands of stability in the continuum. These islands might derive from African just intonation systems based on natural harmonics, or it could be a coincidence that the just intonation intervals happen to make good-sounding blue notes.

• The minor/major third zone (Titon’s E complex) goes from below the equal-tempered minor third up to the major third. In C, that’s from below E-flat up to E. This zone includes the subminor third, the just minor third, and the just major third.
• The fourth/fifth zone (Titon’s G complex) goes from the equal-tempered fourth to the fifth. In C, that’s from F to G. This zone includes the sharp fourth/flat fifth, which a lot of people unhelpfully describe as “the blue note”. I would prefer we reserve that term for non-piano-key pitches. The fourth/fifth zone includes the harmonic eleventh, the narrow tritone, and the just diminished fifth.
• The flat seventh zone (Titon’s B complex) goes from slightly below the equal-tempered sixth to slightly above the flat seventh. In C, that’s from slightly below A to slightly above B-flat. This zone includes the just major sixth, the harmonic seventh, and the just flat seventh.

You could organize the pitch zones into a “scale”, but even then, you wouldn’t be getting at the underlying construction of the music. Titon points out that the blues singers in his study treat the pitch zones differently in different octaves; they will often sing major(-ish) thirds in the lower octave but sing minor(-ish) thirds in the higher octave, even within the same phrase.

The pitch zones don’t include every characteristic pitch in the blues. Seconds are pretty common, both in melodies and chords. Major sevenths are rare in melodies, but you hear them used in accompaniment as part of V7 chords. Flat sixths sometimes appear as chromatic upper neighbors to the fifth, or as passing tones. Flat seconds show up occasionally too, as chromatic upper neighbors to the tonic, or as passing tones.

All of this conversation has been about pitch so far, and has ignored rhythm and timbre, which are both hugely important aspects of blues melody. But I don’t have much theoretical vocabulary for those aspects, and you can understand them well enough just by listening carefully to the music. Let’s look at some examples.

“Kind Hearted Woman Blues” by Robert Johnson (1936)

I’ll be talking about this tune as if it’s in A. The official recording is pitched higher than that, but there’s a theory that it was sped up, which I believe. Here’s my transcription.

The tune generally follows the twelve-bar blues template, but Johnson adds and drops beats at will, making for an unpredictable phrase structure. The melody uses a pitch collection that resembles A Dorian mode, but with a flexible third and fourth. It has a wider range than most blues tunes, spanning two entire octaves. The lower-octave third is always major(ish), and the higher-octave third is always minor(ish). The middle-octave third can go either way. Listen to the last line, “You best to kill me as to have it on your mind.” The word “have” is C-natural(-ish) in the middle octave, while the word “your” is C-sharp(-ish) in the lower octave.

Johnson does a recurring riff that sounds like an arpeggiated diminished chord, maybe to match the diminished chords he plays on guitar. In the first verse, the line “do anything in this world for me”, the words “do anything” go from F-sharp to A to C-natural(-ish), spelling out an F#° triad.

“Boogie Chillen” by John Lee Hooker (1948)

Hooker is playing in open G with a capo on the fourth fret, so the recording sounds in B. Here’s my partial transcription.

The tune is mostly an open-ended one chord groove. The first verse has a three-phrase structure that gestures toward the twelve-bar form, but Hooker isn’t using the standard chords or phrase lengths; he only plays E7 and B7, and the three phrases are nine bars, seven bars, and three bars long.

Hooker’s vocal melody uses a narrower range than Robert Johnson’s, spanning just a fourth above and a minor third below the tonic. Hooker uses the same Dorian-with-variable-thirds pitch collection as Johnson. He also uses the same diminished-sounding riff using a minor third above and below the tonic. In the first verse, in the line “Well my mama didn’t allow me”, the words “Well my mama” are on G-sharp, B, and D-natural, forming a G#° triad. The words “she didn’t allow” are on C-sharp, the second, which is not a note that Johnson uses in his vocal melody. Hooker doesn’t sing any clear major thirds, but he uses them in the guitar, with mixed major and minor in the lower register, and minor only in the upper register. He also mixes straight and swung eighth notes during his instrumental breaks, which still sounds incredibly advanced 76 years later.

“Honey Babe Your Papa Cares For You” by Elizabeth Cotten (1958)

The recording is in F, but Cotten is fingering as if she’s playing in G, presumably with the guitar tuned down. I’ll discuss the tune as if it’s in G. Here’s my transcription.

Cotten is a ragtime player, so she often uses European-sounding chords, but her melodies always sound like the blues. This tune’s melody is in G major pentatonic with a flexible third. The accompaniment brings in other pitches: F-natural and E-flat in the chromatic descending bassline in the intro and elsewhere, and F-sharp as a bass note for the D chord. It’s significant that Cotton never uses F-sharp in the melody over the D, though; her melody seems totally independent of the chords.

There’s a recurring blue note, A-sharp/B-flat bent up toward B. Sometimes Cotten plays this note against the open B string, and she also often juxtaposes it with the open E string. When she plays the bent note over a G chord, it sounds like a minor(-ish) third; when she plays it over an Em chord, it sounds like a flat(-ish) fifth; and when she plays it over a D chord, it sounds like an augmented(-ish) fifth. Lovely.

“Chain of Fools” by Aretha Franklin (1968)

The tune is supposedly in C minor, but the opening guitar chord is a C7, and there are lots of E-naturals throughout. Here’s my partial transcription.

The vocal melody is mostly C minor pentatonic with flexible thirds and fifths. Here are some points of interest.

• On the first line of the verse, “For five long years”, the word “years” goes from high C to low C via an exploration of Titon’s G complex, moving across F, F-sharp/G-flat, and G.
• On “I thought you were my man”, the word “were” is a G-flat.
• On the line “You got me where you want me”, the word “want” is a D, a conspicuous exception to the prevailing minor pentatonic sound.
• On the line “I ain’t nothin’ but your fool”, the word “fool” starts on F, slides down to E-flat, and ends on E-natural. Blues!

As these four tunes illustrate, there is no single unified system of the blues. The music varies across styles and eras, geographic regions, and individual artists. There may never be a systematic explanation. Maybe it’s wrong to even want one. I have not observed formulaic approaches (“blues scale over the twelve-bar form”) to produce good-sounding music. My own playing only started sounding plausible after a lot of immersion in specific people’s style; learning a lot of Elizabeth Cotten tunes, for example, and sweating the details. That’s the approach I’m recommending in class too.