Kind Hearted Woman Blues

So far, I have resisted writing about Robert Johnson on this blog. I love Robert Johnson, but it feels so corny to be yet another a white dude rhapsodizing about him. However, Robert Johnson is so sublimely great that he leaves me no choice.

Robert Johnson’s life is famously not well documented, and his fans have filled the vacuum with endless mythologizing. I find it distasteful to read about him selling his soul to the devil to get good at guitar. It’s patronizing. Doesn’t it seem more likely that he got so good by just practicing a lot? Rather than engaging with all of that nonsense, I would prefer to focus on his music. Here’s the first song Robert Johnson ever recorded.

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Boogie Chillen

Here’s one of the heaviest and most wonderful recordings ever made.

The song is so mysterious, so intense, so ancient-sounding yet so fresh. John Lee Hooker recorded it in 1948 at United Sound Systems in Detroit. (He re-recorded it many more times afterwards.) It went to number one on the R&B chart, which is pretty impressive for a song whose only percussion is Hooker’s foot stomping on a miked-up shipping pallet. When I was an ignorant teenager, I assumed that Hooker recorded this way because it’s how he was used to playing on his back porch in Mississippi. In fact, Hooker usually played with a band at the time, and he only recorded solo at the suggestion of his producer, the breathtakingly sleazy Bernie Besman.

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Brokedown Palace

My stepfather died a year and a half ago, but thanks to the pandemic, we’re only now able to have a memorial service for him. My sister, stepsiblings and I are going to sing a Grateful Dead classic:

For me, “Brokedown Palace” represents the high point of the Dead’s acoustic folkie side. On American Beauty, it comes right after “Ripple”, which is better known and is more of a singalong standard. I love “Ripple” too, but its lyrics aren’t about much of anything. “Brokedown Palace” has actual feelings in it. But I can see why it isn’t such a campfire song: it’s harder to play, and it’s in the not-very-folk-friendly key of F.

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Did Lorde rip off George Michael?

Lorde has a new song. If you are a George Michael fan, parts of it will sound very familiar!

The guitar part in the first verse is strongly reminiscent of the one in “Faith.”

But people seem to be mainly worked up about the similarities in the overall rhythmic groove and chord changes to the ones in “Freedom ’90.”

Let’s unpack!

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Kicking out the JAMS

That’s JAMS as in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. I wrote a review of Ableton Live 11 as a tool for musicology and education for their new issue. Email me if you don’t have university library access and I’ll send you a PDF.

Pieces vs Songs vs Grooves

In preparation for making a bunch of new YouTube videos, I have been thinking about Anne Danielsen’s distinction between songs and grooves. It’s a useful scheme for thinking about pop, but it doesn’t cover everything in Western music. We need a third category for linear through-composed music. So here’s my proposal: all of the music in our culture falls into three big overlapping categories: pieces, songs, and grooves.

  • A piece is linear: a series of non-repeating events that occur in a specific order.
  • A groove is circular: a short cell that repeats an indefinite number of times, without any larger-scale structure.
  • A song is in between: a linear arrangement of circular elements.

The categories are not perfectly distinct. Think more in terms of a continuum. On one extreme, you have total circularity, an infinite loop of a breakbeat or drum machine pattern. On the other extreme, you have total linearity, a serialist composition without any repetition at all. All Western music lies somewhere on this continuum. (All other music probably does too, but I don’t know enough about everyone else’s culture to be able to speak confidently about it.)

 

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Chain of Fools

“Chain of Fools” by Aretha Franklin is a song I loved for many years just for listening and enjoying, but then I started to love it even more as a music theory teaching example. It’s emblematic of blues tonality, one-chord changes, and groove structure.

The released version is edited down from its original arrangement, which is longer and has a free-rhythm blues intro:

Don Covay wrote “Chain of Fools” for Otis Redding, but producer Jerry Wexler thought Aretha would be a better fit. The tremolo guitar on the intro is by Joe South. (He’s also the bass player on Blonde on Blonde!) Jimmy Johnson, a ubiquitous session cat, plays the other guitar part. Spooner Oldham plays Wurly, Tommy Cogbill plays bass, Roger Hawkins plays drums, and Cissy Houston is one of the backup singers. That is a lot of musicianship in one room!

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Oye Como Va

Santana’s recording of “Oye Como Va” is one of the most outrageous grooves I’ve ever heard. David Welna describes it as “a Cuban cha-cha composed by a Puerto Rican New Yorker and performed by a Mexican immigrant and his San Francisco rock band.” It’s red-hot from its opening seconds. As the organ starts the montuno, someone in the band says “Brrrrrr, sabor”, meaning flavor, and that is definitely the word.

The song is a cover of a 1950s cha-cha-chá by Tito Puente.

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Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor

A passacaglia is a Baroque dance that is a lot like the chaconne. One of Bach’s greatest hits is his Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. Like the Chaconne, the Passacaglia is a long series of variations on a short, simple dance form. Also like the Chaconne, it’s pretty awesome.

Bach got the first half of the theme from André Raison’s Trio en Passacaile from Premier livre d’orgue. He took it a lot further out, though.

Before we go any deeper into the music, let’s talk about this instrument. Each pipe in a pipe organ plays a single note with a particular timbre. There are multiple pipes for each note, each of which produces a different blend of overtones. The knobs all around the keyboards on the organ are called stops, and they activate and deactivate different banks of pipes to produce different timbres. A big organ will have multiple keyboards, one of which is a set of foot pedals, and each keyboard controls its own array of banks of pipes. Furthermore, each keyboard can have different stop settings, effectively making each one a separate instrument. If you think about it, that makes a pipe organ the mechanical equivalent of a modular analog synthesizer.

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