Blues Composing

“The music seemed to cry, but the words somehow laughed.”

In class we are going to compose a standard blues stanza.

(From The Smithsonian Folkways website:)

The “blues stanza” became a standard lyric strophe in popular music. It is composed of three lines: the second line repeats the first; the third line rhymes. Here, for example, is a stanza from “Green River Blues” by the Delta musician Charley Patton:

Some people say the Green River blues ain’t bad.

Some people say the Green River blues ain’t bad.

Then it must-a not been the Green River blues I had.

Here is a seminal bit of blues-based rock and roll:

You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, cryin’ all the time.

You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, cryin’ all the time.

You ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine.

Blues music is usually set in twelve bars of music, in 4/4 time. While the lyrics of the blues are rarely in regular meter, the music often has a driving beat that is not unlike the heartbeat rhythm of iambic verse: da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM.

The first to recognize the potential of the blues as written poetry was Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. Hughes first heard the blues in Kansas City when he was eleven years old. As biographer Arnold Rampersad describes it: “The music seemed to cry, but the words somehow laughed.”

Hughes moved to the East Coast in 1921 and heard the music again, in clubs on Lenox Avenue in Harlem and Seventh Street in Washington, D.C. “I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street,” he once said. Those songs “had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.”.., as demonstrated in this stanza from the poem “Morning After”:

I said, Baby! Baby! Please don’t snore so loud.

Baby! Please! Please don’t snore so loud.

You jest a little bit o’ woman but you sound like a great big crowd.

The line breaks give a further sense of the music, indicating where a singer might pause or drag a word across a few beats.