Other Forms

Chapter 6 briefly considers some examples that depart from either the poetic or rhythmic parameters outlined in earlier chapters. The most common departures are songs that maintain the familiar poetic forms but abandon the typical rhythmic profile. The most common textual departures maintain the rhythmic profile without the most constant elements of the poetic form.

Melodic Designs

The most flexible element of the “Sweet Thing” scheme is melody, the subject of Chapter 5. Because this component is so fluid, a great number of melodies defy categorization and seem largely unrelated to one another; and yet there are many that share noticeable characteristics of general shape and contour, which are here categorized under four titles: “Pirate,” “Stand By Me,” “Frog,” and “Blues Frog.” Moreover, these designs clearly relate back to earlier sources. The “Pirate” design, in particular, exhibits especially deep roots, extending back several centuries and ultimately adapted to the stylistic norms of twentieth-century popular music; but the “Stand By Me” and “Frog” designs also have clear origins in earlier music, the former in gospel hymnody and the latter in ragtime. In one of the most fascinating developments in the emergence of the “Sweet Thing” scheme, a melodic design descending from one branch mixes with a poetic form or rhythmic type—or both—descending from another, generating a new hybrid.

Conclusion

The Conclusion turns back to the initial postwar examples. After the preceding excavation of the musical past, we can now see the ancient foundations upon which these later songs are built. It is not within the scope of this study to make a detailed exploration of the “Sweet Thing” scheme in postwar popular music, but consideration of these and a few other examples gives some indication of the increasingly wide range of genres that it enters into during this period, and of later popular music’s strong reflections of the past.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the “Sweet Thing” scheme through postwar popular music, and defines a scheme as a shared musical structure with predetermined constraints and allowances. The “Sweet Thing” scheme is the result of the intertwining of various musical components of many different sources, some with very deep roots in the past, which penetrated many genres of American vernacular music. With the advent of radio and the phonograph in the early twentieth century—and especially with the widespread circulation of blues, country, and gospel records—the various components of these older forms grouped together and intertwined in different ways, resulting in a number of hybrids and variants. It is this cluster of twentieth-century variants that I call the “Sweet Thing” scheme. Defining its musical characteristics in a way flexible enough to accommodate its substantial variation and exploring the historical sources for its musical attributes are the subjects of this book.

“The Frog’s Courtship” and Other Sources

The stanzaic form of “The Frog’s Courtship” represents a second major branch in the lineage of the “Sweet Thing” scheme. Chapter 2 concerns its progress from Elizabethan England all the way to late nineteenth-century ragtime and early twentieth-century blues and country music. The stanzaic form appears in the United States by the early nineteenth century and then largely disappears from print until reemerging in several songs collected by folklorists in the early twentieth century, demonstrating its strong endurance in oral tradition. More often than “Captain Kidd,” this second stanzaic form appears in extensively abbreviated versions, reflecting its oral mode of transmission, which allows for more flexibility in length of bars. In early ragtime, the form unites with the harmonic language of contemporaneous popular music and acquires melodic and textual content that subsequently imbues early blues and country music as pervasive elements of the twentieth-century “Sweet Thing” scheme.

From “Captain Kidd” to Gospel Music

The roots of the “Sweet Thing” scheme reach back to sixteenth-century Scotland and England. One of the main branches of this lineage crosses the Atlantic as a penitent broadside ballad castigating Captain William Kidd, a pirate sent to the gallows in London in 1701. Chapter 1 concerns the history of this branch: the long journey of a stanzaic structure from ancient Scottish popular song through English broadside balladry, from the transatlantic broadside “Captain Kidd” through the fervent folk hymnody of the Great Awakening, and from nineteenth-century popular song and urban revivalism to twentieth-century gospel music. Throughout this span, the distinctive rhythmic and textual attributes of the form are apparent in all of the genres that it crosses. In both broadsides and folk hymns we can observe or reconstruct certain melodic characteristics that accompany the form, and in the folk hymns we can also see some general harmonic attributes.

Harmonic Progressions

Chapter 4 explores the combination of the poetic forms and rhythmic types with the harmonic language of early blues, country, and gospel music. The main harmonic building blocks of these genres are the major tonic (I), subdominant (IV), and dominant (V) chords, and these are the chords that make up the harmonic progressions in most realizations of the “Sweet Thing” scheme. The harmonic element of the “Sweet Thing” scheme is highly flexible, but this chapter demonstrates that its progressions nonetheless divide into broad comprehensible categories—namely blues-like progressions, periodic progressions, fragmented progressions, and amalgamated progressions—and that the harmony is always closely intertwined with text and rhythm.

Poetic Forms and Rhythmic Types

Chapter 3 examines the poetic forms and rhythmic types of the “Sweet Thing” scheme in early blues, country, and gospel music. Approaching the scheme through its rhythmic profile and poetic form yields an accurate description of its consistent musical characteristics while simultaneously allowing enough flexibility to accommodate its substantial variation, especially with respect to its diverse harmonic progressions and melodic designs. Through a comparison of the rhythmic types identified in this chapter with the rhythmic characteristics of the earlier English, Scottish, Irish, and American sources, it becomes more apparent which ancient songs are the main sources for which modern variants of the scheme: “Captain Kidd” and “The Frog’s Courtship” each left their distinctive rhythmic fingerprint on the multitude of songs they each spawned, and this mark is still evident in many twentieth-century realizations of the “Sweet Thing” scheme.