The Blues Lyric Formula

Michael Taft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135485993
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

This book is the first rigourous and detailed exploration of exactly how blues singers used formulas to create songs, and it more than amply fills the gap in the the study of the blues, where the structure and content of the lyrics have been less fully explored than the musical form.

Focusing on the songs recorded by African-American singers for pre-World War Two commercial recording companies, this is an excellent structural analysis of the formulaic composistion of blues lyrics.

This book gives a step-by-step description of the rules implicit in this formulaic structure and inspires new discussion of lyric structures.

A wide array of readers will find this insightful and informative: from students of African-American music, cultural studies, history and linguistics, to Blues fans fascinated by exactly how the lyrics of this influential music style are written.

CHAPTER

1

Defining the Commercial Blues

One might speak of the blues as a single song form or genre, because virtually all blues share certain qualities of lyric and music, or at least share a sentiment that is, in some sense, “blue.” Yet within any genre there are subgenres, and this is certainly true of the blues. As I make no claim that this study describes all blues in all its forms and in all its contexts, I am obliged to define the corpus of those songs that I have included in my analysis and on which I base my theory of formulaic composition.

Obviously the commercial blues defines itself as a subgenre of the blues; more specifically, however, they are those blues recorded between 1920 and 1942 by commercial record companies expressly for the african american record-buying public. These recordings came to be known as “race records,” both within the recording industry and among those interested in the blues (see Dixon and Godrich, 1970, p. 17). The blues also were performed in a variety of other contexts: as field hollers by agricultural workers; in jam sessions among singers and their followers; at community picnics and other social gatherings; in juke joints, barrelhouses, dance halls, and brothels; in cabarets and on the vaudeville stage; in circuses, tent shows, and medicine shows; in work camps and prisons; at private parties; at song festivals and contests; for the benefit of folk-song collectors; on radio; in the street; in rehearsal before public performances; and in private with no audience other than the singer. The blues performed in a recording studio by a commercial record company is allied with all these other blues, but because context is so central to performance, the recording studio context created its own demands on this tradition (which I discuss later in this study).

The recording companies were not interested in the blues to the exclusion of all other types of performance, however, and their “race record” series included a number of different song forms. A large part of this commercial repertoire was religious material: mostly gospel songs and sermons. As well, these series included jazz pieces, novelty songs, ballads, popular Tin Pan Alley compositions, skits, and instrumental music. Selecting blues songs from among this potpourri, therefore, is still a matter of definition.

The most obvious and identifiable aspect of a song genre such as the blues is its texture—its use of rhyme, stanzaic structure, and line structure. In fact, most previous scholars have used these gross textural characteristics in defining the blues as a genre. As Keil stated, “the analyst is usually well advised to concentrate on form, structural regularities, syntactic rules. Indeed, blues and non blues can easily be distinguished in these terms” (1966, p. 51).

The emphasis on such textural characteristics is partly on account of the generally held opinion that the lyrics, rather than the music, are the basis of the definition of the blues. Singer Rubin Lacy said, “the blues is sung not for the tune. It's sung for the words mostly. A real blues singer sings a blues for the words” (Evans, 1967, p. 13). In more scholarly language, Szwed made the same point: “there is greater concern for textual message and meaning: the blues are information oriented” (1970, p. 222).

It is not the entire blues lyric, however, but the stanza that defines the texture of the form—an idea accepted by such varied scholars as White (1928–29, p. 207), Hyman (1958, p. 306), Charters (1973, p. 4), and Ferris (1970a, p. 34). As well, most scholars are in accord as to the structure of this stanza. Niles may well have been the first to set down the basic structure of the blues stanza:

The thought would not necessarily be expressed in a single line, twice repeated without variation. There might be and usually was one repetition, but instead, the second line would slightly modify, by way of emphasis, the first, while the third would introduce something new. (Niles, 1926b, p. 2)

Two years later, White gave a slightly more precise definition, when he wrote, “typically [the blues] consisted of either one line sung three times or a line sung twice (either with or without a modification of the second line), and an entirely different third line” (1928, pp. 387–88).

A number of scholars since the twenties have agreed with this definition (see, for example, ames, 1955, pp. 253–54; Courlander, 1963, p. 126; Locke, 1936, p. 32), while others have expanded this definition to include the stanzas metrical characteristics—twelve bars of music with each of the three lines occupying four of the twelve bars (see, for example, Blesh, 1958, p. 103; Brakeley, 1949; Chase, 1955, p. 452; Jones, 1963, p. 68; and Oster, 1969b, p. 22).

A further expansion of this definition includes the criterion of rhyme, as singer Leonard “Baby Doo” Caston explained:

In the blues theyd be making these recordings, you're playing the twelve bar blues, you have to do these things in order for maybe whomsoever listen to this particular thing wouldn't hear it the first thing you said. And so they would add the rhyming thing at the end. So this would make you do your first line two times and your rhyme would come after. Well this got to be a thing where people listening would expect that; so they still do. So in order to get things across they would do it. (Titon, 1974, p. 24)

Of course, many scholars share Caston's criteria (see, for example, Brown, 1953, p. 287; Cook, 1973, p. 24; Guralnick, 1971, p. 22; Keil, 1966, p. 51; and Rust, 1962), but Caston makes the important point that these are not merely academic criteria, but folk criteria as well. Perhaps of equal importance is Caston's view that the recording context helped to shape and solidify this particular stanzaic texture.

This texture is quite obvious to anyone familiar with the blues, whether singer or scholar; perhaps so familiar and obvious that most writers on the subject have not bothered to describe fully the features of blues texture. Is there any doubt, for example, that Courlander or Locke would include rhyme in their definitions? they simply did not state the obvious. The following textural definition by Dankworth sums up the points made previously and is probably in accord with the views of most writers on the subject:

The words of the blues are simple rhyming couplets … the first line being repeated (either exactly or with slight variation) before the second is stated, thus making three lines in all. Aach line of the poem takes four bars of music, hence the term “twelve bar blues.” (1968, p. 47)

Most writers have designated the typical blues stanza as an “AAB” form—one line repeated twice with an accompanying, rhymed third line, although such a form does not clearly indicate that the a line and the B line do rhyme. Scholars have had less to say about the texture of the individual line in the stanza. Several, however, have recognized that the blues line is divided into two parts, usually separated by a caesura: “each couplet represents, as a rule, four parts, each line two divisions, each division a single phrase” (Odum and Johnson, 1925, p. 267). A few others have noticed this caesura, although they have labeled it a pause, a break, or simply a division in the line (see Gruver, 1972, p. 8; Kent, 1971; and Nicholas, 1973, p. 1), while one scholar, Jahn, described the stanza as six lines, rather than three, because of the presence of the caesura (1968, p. 166).

Only three writers, however, have explored in any detail the placement and nature of this caesura. Metfessel scientifically measured the durations of the caesuras in various songs sung by african americans; for example, in the blues “You Don't Know My Mind,” Metfessel (1928, pp. 109–10) recorded the following caesuras, measured in hundredths of a second:

Take me back daddy [.62] try me one mo' time [.47]

Ef I doan do to suit you [.29] I'll break my back bone tryin'.

Titon described the caesura in terms of the music of the blues, where singers accomplished this pause through “a rest … an end pitch held longer than a quarter note … or an intervallic skip, usually upward, of at least a minor third” (1977, pp. 142–43). Carruth noted that the caesura might be “a pause that is either metrical or ametrical” (1986, pp. 112–13). Whatever form the caesura takes, it is quite noticeable to the listener.

There is a danger, however, in accepting all of these criteria in defining the blues. Although they hold for most blues songs, there are so many exceptions to the AAB, twelve-bar stanzaic form that a more flexible definition must be found that will include these exceptions as blues songs. Perhaps the least constant criterion is the twelve-bar nature of the stanza. Odum and Johnson were probably the first to point out that the blues is capable of considerable metric variability (1925, p. 291), and most subsequent writers have agreed that stanzas of eight, eleven, sixteen, twenty-four, or, theoretically, any number of bars are possible in the blues.

Indicative of this metric flexibility is the fact that the number of bars in a blues song does not correspond in any way to the number of vocal syllables singers used in their stanzas. As Jean Wagner pointed out, “a more or less indefinite number of unaccentuated syllables can be put between the stresses, which make a blues verse quite lengthy, so that it can be represented typographically in two lines of equal or unequal length” (quoted in Jahn, 1968, p. 167). This being the case, the metrical criterion seems rather superfluous to any definition of the verbal texture of the blues. Roxin went so far as to state that the “time of each verse is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Defining the Commercial Blues
• 2 Defining the Blues Formula
• 3 Fine Adjustments: Extraformulaic Elements in the Blues
• 4 The Ties That Bind: Formulas to Lines, Lines to Stanzas, Stanzas to Songs
• 5 Twenty Common Formulas
• 6 One Singer's Formulaic Tradition: The Repertoire of Garfield Akers
• Conclusion: Why Is the Blues Formulaic?
• Singers and Their Songs
• References
• Index