[lbo-talk] Southern culture vs African-American Music (was other things)

[Miles Jackson]

ravi wrote:
> On Nov 19, 2007, at 3:48 PM, Chris Doss wrote:
> 
>>Does suffering have a 4/4 rhythm, a I-IV-V chord
>>progression, and a song structure involving
>>alternating verses, choruses, and bridges? Does it use
>>a pentatonic scale?
> 
> On the other hand, I have heard that a lot of the wailing and so on,  
> in the fields, to which blues roots have often been traced, grew out  
> of surreptitious ways to continue to use native songs and such.
> 
> But anyway, my point is to question what significance should be  
> assigned to where the music is derived from when assigning credit to a  
> culture. The very thing you point to in fact makes a different case: a  
> simple three chord progression is not (and cannot be) the significant  
> differentiating factor that makes the blues what it is in distinction  
> from southern white folk music.
> 
> 	--ravi

Harmonically speaking, the odd thing about the blues compared to "white" 
folk music is that the blues are based on the major pentatonic scale of 
the flatted third of the key of the song, not the major pentatonic scale 
of the key that the song is in.  Thus a white folk song in A-major 
typically uses the notes from the pentatonic scale for A (A, B, C#, E, 
F#), but a blues song in A-major uses the notes from the pentatonic 
scale for C (C, D, E, G, A).  The crucial "blues" notes are the flatted 
third and the flatted seventh of the major diatonic scale of the key of 
the song (e.g, C and G in the key of A).

We take this blues scale for granted nowadays, so it's easy to overlook 
how different this is from white folk music.  I know of no plausible 
historical explanations for this harmonic transposition up to the 
flatted third in blues music; I'm just happy it happened.

Miles