European and African Elements 1
As a musical tradition, the balladA simple song of natural construction, usually in the narrative or descriptive form. A ballad usually has several verses of similar construction and may or may not have a refrain. has European roots but flourished in the United States. It frequently took a sixteen-bar form, with four or eight-line stanzasThe division of a poem that consists of a series of written lines arranged together. This is usually in the form of a recurring pattern of meter and rhyme. In music, a stanza, or verse, is a poem set to music with a recurring pattern of both rhyme and meter. A "strophic" song (as opposed to a "through-composed" song) has several stanzas or verses set to music that remains the same or similar with each stanza. Many hymns follow this pattern.. However, a more compact type consisting of a coupletA term used in the 1600's and 1700's for the intermediate sections of a rondeau. followed with a refrainA verse which repeats throughout a song or poem at given intervals. line circulated in the 1890s. The ballad of " Frankie and Albert " commercially exploited as "Frankie and Johnny" was typical. Following is only one of its ten stanzas:
REFRAIN
Frankie was a good girl, everybody knows.
Paid one hundred dollars for Albert's new suit of clothes.
He was her man, but he done her wrong
Notice how the first two lines are connected through the rhyme between "knows" and "clothes" and between "be" and "Lee" in the stanza below. The "Ballad of Stack O'Lee" which took a similar form, was popular amongst African Americans:
REFRAIN
Police officer, how can it be?
You can 'rest ev'rybody but cruel Stack O' Lee
That bad man, oh, cruel Stack O' Lee.
It seems probable that these shorter stanzas, frequently sung over twelve bars, were extemporized as hollers, eventually contributing to establishing the "twelve-bar blues" form. A blues verse would typically consist of a repeated line and a third rhyming line forming an AAB structure. Each line was sung over two bars, generally with an instrumental "response" of two bars, making four bars in all for each of the three lines. For example, a newcomer might sing:
| The Standard Twelve-Bar Blues Progression I'm a Stranger Here Blind Boy Fuller |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| Vocal Call | Instrumental Break-Response | ||
| I-(C) | I-(C) | I-(C) | I-(C) |
| I'm a stranger here, just blowed in your town (A) | Instrumental Break-(response) | ||
| IV-(F) | IV-(F) | I-(C) | I-(C) |
| I'm a stranger here, just blowed in your town (A) | Instrumental Break-(response) | ||
| V-(G) | IV-(F) | I-(C) | I-(C) |
| But just because I'm a stranger, 'body wants to dog me aroun'. (B) | Instrumental Break-(response) | ||