Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form

266 Pages·2020·22.265 MB·English

by  Nicholas Stoia

Sweet Thing
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Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form,
Nicholas Stoia
Sweet Thing
The History and Musical Structure of a Shared
American Vernacular Form
NICHOLAS STOIA
1
3
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Names: Stoia, Nicholas, author.
Title: Sweet thing : the history and musical structure of a shared American
vernacular form / Nicholas Stoia.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020021059 | ISBN 9780190881979 (cloth) |
ISBN 9780190881986 (pdf) | ISBN 9780190881993 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Folk songs, English—United States—History and criticism.
| Ballads, English—United States—History and criticism. |
Hymns, English—United States—History and criticism. |
Ragtime music—History and criticism. | Blues (Music)—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML3551 .S76 2020 | DDC 782.42162/13—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021059
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190881979.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
In memory of Ursula Catherine Mills
1919– 2012
Acknowledgments
I am enormously grateful to Stephen Blum, not only for his initial sparking of my
interest in this topic but also for his invaluable advice at several pivotal points in
the development of this book. I would like to thank Suzanne Ryan and Steven
Rings of Oxford University Press, not only for recognizing potential in this pro-
ject but also— along with OUP’s Mary Horn, Andrew Maillet, Sean Decker, Amy
Whitmer, and Melissa Yanuzzi, and copyeditor Molly Morrison— for guiding it
through the various stages of production. Two anonymous reviewers at OUP pro-
vided critical comments that helped me significantly strengthen the manuscript, for
which I am grateful. I would also like to thank Philip Rupprecht, Kyle Adams, Mark
Anson- Cartwright, Joseph Straus, Mark Spicer, Charles McGuire, Stacey Jocoy, and
Caroline Stoia for their invaluable support and feedback at various points along the
way. Finally, I would like to thank Laura Williams and Linda Purnell for their help
in tracking down several rather obscure sources.
Introduction
When I was a kid, I was sometimes cajoled into singing “If You’re Happy and You
Know It, Clap Your Hands.” Ironically, this song usually made me less happy than
before, because I found the enforced hand clapping and foot stomping more con-
ducive to indignation than to joy. Moreover, as the consummate red diaper baby,
I was already more inclined to cast about suspiciously for the hidden purpose of this
coerced happiness than to blindly submit to it through song: “No, fellow children!
Do not clap your hands! Ask instead why they foist this blithe passivity upon you!”
What I didn’t know at the time was that this song was burning a rhythmic and
textual model into my subconscious that would subsequently resonate with many
future encounters with the same pattern, and that this pattern had been pene-
trating the minds of musicians and listeners for centuries. Indeed, I continued to
encounter “If You’re Happy and You Know It” in later years, but in more reputable
genres like rhythm and blues, rock and roll, rock, and punk. And, more impor-
tantly, I encountered not the song itself, but rather its musical attributes.
A beautiful example is Little Walter’s rhythm and blues song “My Babe,” from
1955. Although a world away in style and subject matter, it bears an uncanny resem-
blance to “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” as can be seen when the two are placed
one after the other:
If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands
If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands
If you’re happy and you know it
And you really want to show it
If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands
My baby don’t stand no cheating, my babe
Oh yeah, she don’t stand no cheating, my babe
Oh yeah, she don’t stand no cheating
She don’t stand none of that midnight creeping
My babe, true little baby, my babe
(Little Walter, “My Babe,” 1955)
In both, the first line repeats in its entirety to form the second. Then the third line
begins with the same content, but its closing fragment—“ clap your hands” in the
children’s song and “my babe” in Walter’s— is dropped, and the remainder forms
2 SWEET THING
part of an interior rhyming couplet, with rhymes, shown in bold, on “know it” and
“show it” (in “If You’re Happy”) and on “cheating” and “creeping” (in “My Babe”).
And in both songs, the closing line brings back the previously abandoned lyric
(“clap your hands” and “my babe”).
The reason for these similarities is that both songs are realizations of the same
scheme: a preexisting musical structure that musicians use as a shared resource,
which carries certain predetermined constraints and allowances with respect to
text, rhythm, harmony, and melody. American vernacular musicians frequently rely
on schemes to create songs, and among the most productive are familiar ground
basses like the standard twelve-b ar blues scheme and the passamezzo moderno.1
Another is the “Sweet Thing” scheme, which is exemplified by both “If You’re
Happy” and “My Babe,” and which is named for a group of song lyrics collected by
John and Alan Lomax ([1941] 2000, 298– 99; 1947, 83, 106– 8). As several scholars
have noted, this scheme has generated a large group of songs related through a pe-
culiar stanzaic form.2 These include many songs from the early and mid-t wentieth
century, including the blues songs “My Babe” and “Motherless Children,” the
country songs “Peg and Awl” and “Crawdad Song,” the gospel songs “Pure Religion”
and “This Train,” and countless others. It continued to generate songs in postwar
popular music, including Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman,” Buddy Holly’s “Early In
the Morning,” Sam Cooke’s “Mean Old World,” the Beatles’ “One After 909,” and the
Kinks’ “Apeman,” to name only a few.
But unlike the standard twelve-b ar blues and the passamezzo moderno, which
are clearly characterized by their harmonic progressions, harmonic rhythms,
phrase rhythms, and couplet forms, the profusion of variation in text, rhythm, har-
mony, and melody in realizations of the “Sweet Thing” scheme has made it difficult
for scholars to define its musical parameters. Part of the reason for this abundance
of variety is that, to a greater extent than most other schemes, the “Sweet Thing”
scheme is the result of the intertwining of the various musical components of many
different sources, some with very deep roots in the past. From the late eighteenth
century through the early twentieth century, and through both oral and written
transmission, the musical forms of these older sources penetrated many different
genres of American vernacular music. With the advent of radio and the phono-
graph, and the rise of the recording industry in the early twentieth century— and
especially with the new and widespread circulation of blues, country, and gospel
1 Otto Gombosi (1944; 1946), Peter van der Merwe (1989, 198– 204), and John Ward (1994, 313– 15, 322–
23), among others, discuss the currency of the standard twelve-b ar blues and the passamezzo moderno as
ground basses in American vernacular music. Like the eighteenth-c entury schemata discussed by Robert
O. Gjerdingen (2007), these two schemes form part of a stock repertory employed by composers, but unlike
many of those schemata they are characterized more by their root progressions than their bass lines, and their
harmonic rhythms are among their defining attributes. They are closer in some ways to older patterns like the
passamezzo antico—g round basses that support multiple discant tunes (Ward 1967, 47–4 8).
2 Scholars who have noted the poetic and musical similarities of songs generated by what I call the “Sweet
Thing” scheme include Bertrand H. Bronson (1959–1 972, 1:143); Peter van der Merwe (1989, 23–2 4); Guthrie
T. Meade 2002 (504– 6); D. K. Wilgus and Lynwood Montell (1968, 308); Timothy P. Lynch (2001, 103); and
William H. Tallmadge (1995, 174–8 5), among others.
Introduction 3
records from the early 1920s to the early 1940s—t he various components of these
older forms grouped together and intertwined in different ways, resulting in a
number of hybrids and textual, rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic variants.3 It is this
cluster of twentieth- century variants that I call the “Sweet Thing” scheme. Defining
the musical characteristics of this scheme in a way that is flexible enough to accom-
modate its substantial variation and exploring the historical sources for its musical
attributes are the subjects of this book.
But before going into these historical sources, and the appearance of the scheme
on early blues, country, and gospel recordings, it will be useful to briefly examine
the general characteristics—a nd the elusiveness—o f the “Sweet Thing” scheme in
several genres of postwar popular music with which many readers will be more
familiar.
***
The first four examples show lyric transcriptions from six songs in several different
postwar popular genres, recorded over a span of thirty- seven years, from 1955 to
1992. Little Walter’s “My Babe” and Chuck Berry’s “Thirty Days” are rhythm and
blues songs recorded in 1955. Patsy Cline’s “Yes, I Understand” (1959) is an example
of country pop and the “Nashville Sound.” Bob Dylan’s “Honey, Just Allow Me One
More Chance” was recorded in 1963, during the folk music revival. The Velvet
Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man” (1967) is from the band’s early output,
which had “an enormous effect on countless punk and indie bands in the decades
to follow” (Cogan 2010, 346). And Tom Waits’s “Jesus Gonna Be Here” (1992) is an
example of Waits’s increasingly experimental rock from the 1980s and 1990s.
Given the separation of time and style between some of these recordings, the
similarities between certain aspects of their musical structures are remarkable.
For example, with respect to their poetic forms, all six songs use refrain syllables—
small groups of syllables or short phrases or lines, repeated within each verse or in
multiple verses, or in both. And in all six songs an interior rhyming couplet falls
in the analogous place, just before the last line. Walter, for instance, uses the re-
frain syllables “my babe” (Ex. 0.1, underlined), which conclude the first two lines
and then become part of a refrain line that concludes each verse (“My babe, true
little baby, my babe,” also underlined). (I use “refrain” to denote these lower-l evel
repetitions, and “chorus” to denote a formal section with repeating music and
lyrics.4) The transcription of the first two verses illustrates how the refrain syllables
and refrain line recur in the second verse. In the first verse, the rhyming words of
the interior couplet, shown in bold, are “cheating” and “creeping,” and in the second
“love me” and “hug me.”
3 On the immense impact of the phonograph on blues composition, specifically, see, for example, Evans
(1982, 115– 31).
4 In taking this approach, I follow John Covach’s definition of a chorus as a section of form “in which the
lyrics remain constant each time it sounds” (2005, 67). Unless otherwise noted, the examples represent the
opening verse or verses of a song.
4 SWEET THING
Example 0.1. Poetic form in Little Walter’s “My Babe” (1955). Refrain syllables and
refrain line underlined and rhyming syllables of the interior couplet in bold.
Example 0.2. Poetic form in Chuck Berry’s “Thirty Days” (1955), second and fourth
verses.
Berry uses the refrain syllables “thirty days,” which also form part of the re-
frain line “I’m gonna see that you’ll be back home in thirty days” (Ex. 0.2). This
refrain line appears twice in its entirety in the second and fourth verses, which are
transcribed in the example (the alternate verses use a different form). In Berry’s
second verse, the rhyming words of the interior couplet are “hoodoo” and “suit
you”; in the fourth, “-g ain’ ya” and “send ya.”
Dylan uses the refrain syllables “Honey, just allow me one more chance,” which
fall at the beginning of the first two lines and then at the end of the refrain line that
closes each verse (the latter without the opening words “Honey, just”; Ex. 0.3[a] ).
The first two verses of Dylan’s song illustrate how the refrain syllables recur in each