Stormy Monday

Sometimes you find a song that is so full of clear examples of music theory concepts that you want to build your whole syllabus around it. The Allman Brothers version of “Stormy Monday”, which they adapted from Bobby Bland’s arrangement of a T-Bone Walker song, is a case in point: it has extended chords, augmented chords, tritone substitutions, and modal interchange at a nice slow tempo. I love when I can get this much juice out of a single tune.

First, here’s the T-Bone Walker original from 1947, with the unwieldy title “Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just As Bad)“.

Here’s a live performance from 1968.

Bobby Bland recorded his version in 1961, which includes some new chord changes. (Deadheads: at this same session, Bland also recorded “Turn On Your Love Light“.)

The Allmans added still more chord changes for their recording of the tune on their classic live album At Fillmore East in 1971.

Here’s a good guitar tutorial.

The skeleton of the tune is twelve bar blues in G, the jazzy variant with ii-V rather than V-IV in measures nine and ten.

| G7  | C7 | G7 | G7 |
| C7  | C7 | G7 | G7 |
| Am7 | D7 | G7 | D7 |

Here are the changes in the Allmans version.

| G13 | C13 | G7 Ab7 | G7  Db7 |
| C13 | C13 | G  Am7 | Bm7 Bbm7 |
| Am7 | Cm7 | G7 C7  | G7  D7+  |

The Allmans imply the G13 chord in the first measure using a nifty riff. It’s just a pair of sixths: the root G and the sixth/thirteenth E, then the flat seventh F and the fifth D. In the second bar, this riff gets transposed up a fourth to form C13 and C7.

In measure three, the Allmans insert Ab7, the substitute dominant in G. Usually the dominant chord in G would be D7, whose active ingredient is the tritone between F-sharp and C. Jazz musicians realized that Ab7 includes the same tritone as D7 (though in Ab7 it’s spelled G-flat and C). This means that Ab7 and D7 can both function as dominant chords in the key of G. The difference is that rather than a boring D to G bassline, you get an exciting A-flat to G. Guitarists love tritone substitutions because it’s so easy to just slide your G7 chord up a fret to Ab7 and then back down.

In measure four, the Allmans do another tritone substitution, this time leading to C7. The dominant chord in the key of C is G7, and its active ingredient is the tritone between B and F. You can find this same tritone in Db7 (spelled C-flat and F), so you can use Db7 in place of G7. The simple way to think of tritone substitutions is just to remember that you can precede any chord at all with the dominant seventh a half-step higher.

Measures seven and eight include some chords that Bobby Bland added. Rather than sitting on G for two bars, he walks up and down the G major harmonized scale.

• The G chord is the result of starting on the first scale degree and adding every alternating scale tone on top.
• The Am7 chord is the result of starting on the second scale degree and adding every alternating scale tone on top.
• The Bm7 chord is the result of starting on the third scale degree and adding every alternating scale tone on top.

This sounds pleasantly smooth, but it’s too smooth; it feels more like Simon and Garfunkel than like a gritty blues song. So Bobby Bland also inserts Bbm7 between Bm7 and Am7 on the way back down. This makes no functional harmonic sense at all, but its physical logic on the guitar neck is obvious, and it introduces some nice rich dissonance.

In measure ten, the Allmans extend Bobby Bland’s minor seventh chord planing idea even further. Rather than moving from Am7 to D7, the conventional jazz ii-V progression, they walk Am7 up to Cm7. This is a nice bit of modal interchange; Cm7 is the iv chord borrowed from parallel G minor. To add to the melancholy, Cm7 is a minor third higher than Am7, so it’s like minor squared.

Measure twelve ends in a suspenseful D augmented chord. This is like the standard D chord from the key of G major, except it has a sharp fifth, A-sharp rather than A. Blues musicians like this chord because that sharp five of five is enharmonic with the flatted third, so it fits the blues aesthetic perfectly.

“Stormy Monday” is a jam-session standard. But what if you want to play it? How do you navigate all these chords? The answer is, you don’t. You just play G blues over the whole thing. You can certainly aim for the chord tones in each chord as they go by, and it will sound good if you do, but it’s vastly more important to focus on your line’s melodic logic. The chords are there to create a colorful backdrop for G blues, not to constrain your note choices.

If you want an excellent model for playing this tune, listen to Duane Allman’s guitar solo at 3:26. He more or less ignores the chords, and just plays G blues: G, A, the pitch zone between B-flat and B, C, D, and the pitch zone between E and F. Some of Duane’s notes happen to be chord tones, and some of them openly conflict. He plays with so much authority and such beautiful touch and phrasing that it makes no difference at all. Here’s a transcription of his solo, which required me to oversimplify a lot of the pitch nuances.

Duane Allman’s solo on Stormy Monday by ethanhein1

You can look at this analytically, and you should, it’s interesting. But you can also just listen to the recording and hear how good Duane sounds whether or not his notes match the chords underneath.

I do not usually love white rock bands’ arrangements of blues tunes, especially when those arrangements are more harmonically “complex” than the originals. But I do love the Allmans’ version of “Stormy Monday.” It helps that when they introduce the song from the stage, they name both Bobby Bland and T-Bone Walker. But I like the musical qualities of their version too. It feels like it’s building on the earlier versions, not trying to “improve” them, just expanding outward. My students certainly reacted more warmly to the Allmans than to Led Zeppelin playing “When The Levee Breaks.” Maybe the Allmans have more folkloric integrity, or maybe they are just better at playing the blues.