Week Five Key Terms

Twelve-bar blues, theoretically:
First line, four bars, in home key
Second line, four bars, travels to different key, returns to home key
Third line, four bars, to yet another key, returns to home key

Blue Notes
Typically flatted third and seventh notes

The Delta Blues

Mississippi Delta Map

Robert Palmer: "Delta blues is a dialogue between the overt and the hidden. The music's apparent simplicity--basic verse forms, little or no harmonic content, melodies with as few as three principal pitches--is superficial. Apparently straightforward rhythmic drive often proves, on careful listening, to be the by-product of a mercurial interplay between polyrhythms, layered in complex relationships. The music's supreme rhythmic masters kept several rhythms going simultaneously, like a juggler with balls in the air or like the most gifted modern jazz drummers. Sometimes the music seems to lie behind the beat and rush just ahead of it at the same time...

"The simplest way to characterize the music's origin is as a turn-of-the-century innovation, accommodating the vocal traditions of work songs and field hollers to the expressive capabilities of a newly popular stringed instrument, the guitar. Older black ballads and dance songs, preaching and church singing, the rhythms of folk drumming, and the ring shout of 'holy dance' fed into the new music as well. But the richly ornamented, powerfully projected singing style associated with the field holler was dominant, which is hardly surprising; the Delta is more or less one big cotton field."

Charlie Patton, "Down the Dirt Road", 1929
Charlie Patton, "Pony Blues", 1929
Skip James, "Devil Got My Woman", 1931
Son House, "Country Farm Blues", 1930
Robert Johnson, "Me and the Devil Blues", 1937
Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues", 1936
Ike Zinneman
Paramount Records, Grafton and Port Washington
Wisconsin Chair Company
The Chicago Defender
Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Black Snake Moan", 1926
Meade Lux Lewis, "Honky Tonk Train Blues", 1930
Alan Lomax