The Blues and Harmonic Polarity
A first look at the blues
To experience the sound of harmonic polarity, there is no better musical example than that of the 12-bar blues. This is our great American song form, born of out the wedding of Western European folk and classical music with the musical experiences of Africans, who were first brought to American in the 19th Century as slaves and after the Emancipation Proclamation became American citizens forced to struggle on under the various expressions of racism.
Throughout the tragedy and horror of that shared experience, the original African slaves and their freed descendents kept alive their musical traditions while at the same time adopting the dominant White religion of Protestant Christianity and learning the various hymns and songs associated with that tradition. This shared musical experience is a deeply profound topic with many threads of influence and a variety of subtly shaded scholarly impressions of musical and cultural influences. FIX THIS.
Among the best work in the field, and one which has influenced my teaching on this subject, is Africa and the Blues by Gerhard Kubik. We have a copy in the library if you would like to read more deeply on this subject.
For the purposes of our study of harmony, harmonic polarity and harmonic progression, the blues is a wonderful tool because the music is so deeply heartfelt and is at the core of the American experience. If you grew up in the U.S., the blues is simply part of you, as it pervades so much of American songform. If you are from another culture, it is the blues sound that has made American popular music, espeically jazz and rock, so popular around the world.
What is fascinating and useful about the blues is that in its most basic form, it uses only three chords, the very same chords of polar harmony that we looked at on the previous page. To use Western theory terms, the blues employs the tonic, the subdominant and the dominant chords in a cyclical pattern that repeats over and over and provides a basis for verbal and instrumental improvisation. The blues musicians themselves may not have used the terms "tonic, subdominant and dominant," but they certainly used the Roman numeral names, referring to them as the "one, four and five" chords, knowing them to be based on the first, fourth and fifth steps of the major or minor scales.
We will explore the blues and African roots of the blues in more depth on another page. For now, I want you to know the basic form of the 12-bar blues and to listen to a number of musical examples, focusing your attention on the changes of harmony and hearing, (experiencing!) the swing from the central pole of the one chord, down to the subdominant , reciprocal realm of the four chord, and up to the dominant, overtonal world of the five chord, coming to rest on the tonic.
Here is the basic progresison of the blues, expressed for now just using the triads of C major (for those of you who play the blues, we will deal with the seventh chord once we have covered dominant seventh type harmony). You will notice, however, that the melody does that bluesy thing by going up to Bb over the C chord, and Eb over the F chord. We will have much more to say about this flat seven phenomenon in the blues on a later page. For now, just take in the harmonic progression and notice how the basic movement of the primary chords mirror harmonic polarity.
These two examples show the two basic expressions of the blues. Both expressions deal with the manner in which ones moves between the I, IV and V chords.
And so on... does it go V, IV, I. FInd various examples of this.
What I want you be able to do is to hear a variety of blues progressions and to identify when the blues moves between the tonic, dominant and subdominant harmonies. In the blues, these harmonies and very different emotional realms.
OK, THIS WILL BE DEVELOPED MORE IN EARLY AUGUST, 2010, TO FINISH THIS SECTION. YOU NEED TO FIND MANY MUSICAL EXAMPLES.
TWO BLUES
Here are two blues tunes that follow the standard 12-bar pattern. The first one keeps the V7 chord for two bars in the measures 9 and 10, while the second one follows the more standard pattern of V7 going to IV7 in measures 9 and 10. I want you to be able to hear and identify this difference, since this is known to all musicians.
When the sun goes down
This tune goes I for four bars, IV for two bars, I for two bars, V7 for two bars, and then the standard turanaround in the last two measures. So in this case, the move to IV before the final I chord is skipped over. This is another great Leroy Carr tune.
Standing at the Crossroads
This tune gets 131 hits on iTunes! It's been covered by everybody, but I present here the original version by Elmore James.
Note that it follows the standard 12-bar blues pattern known to all musicians:
I7 for four bars (though usually the second bar gets a IV)
IV7 for two bars
I7 for two bars
V7 for one bar
IV7 for one bar
I7, followed by the standard 2-bar turnaround
Previous: I IV V Polarity
Next: 5E Major and Minor Scales