You can feel it all over by Dr. Ethan Hein

You can feel it all over people

We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life’s release, and I plan to put in some quality musicology on it. I’m starting now, with a look at a single chord in “Sir Duke”, the one that first appears at 0:48 in the chorus:

The song is in B major. The chorus goes like this: “(B) You can feel it all (???) over, (Emaj7) you can feel it all (C#m7) over (F#7sus4) people.” All of this except for the mystery chord is plain vanilla Western tonal music. The first chord is the tonic B. The last two chords are ii and V in B major, setting us up for a cadence into the B chord on the next phrase. The Emaj7 is subdominant, like C#m7, and you could think of those chords as more or less interchangeable.

Fine. So what about the mystery chord?

Well, the melody notes on the word “over” are A-sharp and G-sharp, the seventh and sixth degrees of the B major scale. So what chord could logically go under there? First, let’s consider chords from within the key.

• Bmaj7 – continuing the B chord from the first measure is boring but it makes sense.
• C#m7 – unsatisfying because it makes the harmonic rhythm awkward, but it does fit the notes.
• D#m7 – works great, makes a nice Puff schema leading into the IV chord.
• Emaj7 – moving to the IV chord a measure early creates lopsided harmonic rhythm, but it’s not unmusical.
• F#7 – also fits the notes, but also makes for goofy harmonic rhythm.
• G#m7 – the vi chord works perfectly, it sets us up for a variant on the classic doo-wop progression, I-vi-IV-V.
• A#ø7 – vii chords are not idiomatic to R&B, so while this has a nice murky quality, it’s too stylistically incongruous.

So, those are the choices from within the key. How about from outside the key?

• D7#11 – the substitute dominant in the key of C# minor, so it resolves very nicely to the C#m7 chord, and visiting Emaj7 along the way adds to the jazz flavor.
• D#7 – deceptive cadence into the Emaj7 chord, beautiful voice leading.
• G#7 – my favorite choice, because G#7 is the V7 chord in C# minor and makes perfect sense resolving to C#m7 even if you do go to Emaj7 first.
• A#7 – doesn’t make any functional sense really but sounds kind of cool from a voice leading perspective.

Okay, so those are eleven possible chords, some of which sound better than others, and none of which sound as good as Stevie’s chord, but all of which have some kind of logic to them. Here’s a track where I use all of those chords under Stevie’s isolated vocal.

But in the actual song, Stevie uses none of the chords I proposed. He uses Fm7.

Fm7? In the key of B major? Why? What possible musical logic does it have? The answer is that it sounds great, so, who cares what the logic is. But seriously, I have tried every explanation I could think of for why that chord should sound good. The voice leading into Emaj7 is pretty smooth, but that’s all I’ve got. Maybe Stevie was thinking of the #IV°7 chord, so, F°7? But that chord sounds terrible under the melody and doesn’t flow very well into the other chords either. Did Stevie adjust the F°7 so it had C instead of B and E-flat instead of D?

Someone on Reddit has another possible explanation, which I will adapt a bit: We’re in the key of B major. The relative minor key of B major is G# minor. The parallel major key to G# minor is G# major, enharmonically Ab major. And the relative minor key of Ab major is F minor. So, uh, there you go, Fm7 is the relative minor of the parallel major of the relative minor of B major. Maybe it’s what Stevie was thinking! Probably not. Probably he was just putting his fingers on the keys, looking for interesting sounds, and found this. Maybe he played it by accident and liked it. Or maybe he’s just a much more advanced harmonic thinker than the rest of us–I would believe that easily.

Adam Neely thinks Stevie might have been evoking Duke Ellington with this chord–that’s a highly plausible theory.

I don’t know of a single other piece of music by anyone, ever, that uses the minor seventh on the sharp fourth of a major key. Not one! People use major chords a tritone apart pretty often. That’s just the V/V chord. They use a major chord on the sharp fourth in a minor key occasionally for the same reason. Every once in a while, you hear minor chords a tritone apart in late Romantic music and John Williams film scores. But a minor chord on the sharp fourth in a major key? I can find precisely zero other examples in music history.

So why does this matter? As weird as the Fm7 chord is from a logical perspective, it doesn’t sound weird in context. “Sir Duke” is not a weird song! It’s mildly eccentric in places, but there’s nothing remotely difficult or off-putting about it as a listening experience. Small children understand it immediately. Musically uneducated adults do too. This is what makes Stevie Wonder so magical, that he can make such an unconventional musical choice sound perfectly natural.

Update: Wenatchee the Hatchet proposes that the weird chord was inspired by Duke Ellington’s “Warm Valley”, which moves from the I chord to the dominant on the sharp fourth. All Stevie would have to do is make that sharp four dominant into a minor seventh. I would buy it!

Anyway, exciting day for me.

Bonus track: a mashup of “Blackbird” by Billy Preston, “Blackbird” by the Beatles, “Blackbird” by Brad Mehldau, “Blackbird/I Will” by the Swingle Singers, “Blackbird” by Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Be Black, Baby” by Grady Tate, “Dreaming About You” by Blackbyrds, “BLACKBIIRD” by Beyoncé, JS Bach’s Bourée from Suite in E Minor, BWV 996 performed by Andrés Segovia, “Bluebird” by Paul McCartney & Wings, and “Jenny Wren” by Paul McCartney.

Introducing Tuniversity by Dr. Ethan Hein

and my co-founder, veteran songwriter and teacher Derek Fawcett

Read on Substack

My NYU colleague Derek and I are delighted to introduce you to Tuniversity, our new music learning venture. Our first songwriting course starts next month, and we are holding our inaugural Tune Up event at the end of April.

We were motivated by two different things: people want to study with us who don’t attend NYU, and NYU is not giving us enough classes to teach. I have been feeling frustrated for a while that, while I am at the peak of my music teaching game, I can’t find a good institutional home for myself. NYU is a perfectly fine place to be an adjunct, but being an adjunct is not sustainable. Derek has been feeling the same way. We have been starting to feel like maybe the institution for us just doesn’t exist, not in the present climate, not within the geographic areas that our family lives make available to us, certainly not at a pay point that makes sense. We didn’t want to start a business, because we are artists and educators and not businesspeople, but, well, here we are.

There is definitely something to be said for running our own shop. We like the way that NYU structures its music theory and songwriting classes for the most part, but we have our own ideas too, and it will be nice to get to act on them. To be clear, we will keep teaching at NYU, but we would like that to be the side hustle, because it is not working as a main gig.

We’re running eight-week classes, meeting online at first, but we will do in person classes in New York City eventually too. People can jump in for individual sessions, but it will be cheaper per session to do the whole course. We are also offering individualized coaching.

Derek has a similar background to mine, but we have different areas of expertise. He’s a voice teacher and a professional songwriter, and he knows the music business much better than I do. I can help you write and produce a track, but Derek can help you write lyrics, sing it, and sell it. The thing we have in common is a commitment to learning by making and doing. No exams, no flash cards, just making music, reflecting on it, making more music, reflecting on it.

We also have a technology product in mind, kind of a Wordle for music: it gives you an unfinished melody or a partial drum groove and you complete it. You get a new one every day. There’s no right or wrong answers, just these creative puzzles to solve. These things will be hand-created and curated by us. No randomly generated nonsense, no AI slop. If it takes off, we plan to bring in guest artists to do special challenges in their own style.

So, that’s what’s happening. Come to our launch party if you’re in NYC, watch this space for more information about the classes, and tell your friends!

It’s blues melody week in theory and aural skills. That doesn’t just mean we’re looking at the blues genre, though; we’re covering all the genres that use what Richard Ripani calls “the blues system”: the characteristic pitches, harmonies, rhythms and vocal techniques that make music sound bluesy. Gospel uses the blues system extensively, and nobody sings bluesy gospel better than Aretha Franklin.

In class, we’re examining Aretha’s recording of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”, a 19th century hymn that is sung around the world in many different languages. It originated as a poem that Joseph Scriven wrote in 1855 to comfort his mother. The alliteratively-named Charles Crozat Converse set the poem to music in 1868. Fun fact about Converse: he advocated for “thon” as a gender-neutral pronoun.

To fully appreciate Aretha’s recording, we need to compare it to a version that sticks closer to the written melody. I like Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 1958 recording for that. One of my students describes him as having “Christmas voice.”

Here’s my transcription of the first verse as sung by Ford. He does the song in A major (kind of; the recording is pitched about halfway between A and Bb.) Aside from some swing in his phrasing, he sings the song as written, and it sounds like standard Western tonal music. The chords are A, D, and E, and the melody stays entirely within the A major scale. That said, it does show some signs of being an American tune rather than a European one. The melody in the first half conspicuously avoids the note D, even over the D chords. This gives it a mildly pentatonic flavor that evokes “The Weight” more than Mozart.

Aretha Franklin’s version is from her Amazing Grace album, recorded coextensively with the documentary of the same name. This film had major technical problems that took decades to overcome, and I’m glad they finally sorted them out. At one point towards the end, I wondered, “Who is that white lady getting down so hard? Oh, it’s Mick Jagger.” Aretha is backed by the Southern California Community Choir, Reverend James Cleveland on piano, Ken Lupper on organ, Chuck Rainey on bass, and Bernard Purdie on drums. That is quite a rhythm section!

Here’s my chart of Aretha’s version. It’s strikingly different from Tennessee Ernie Ford’s in its rhythm, chords and melody. Let’s take those in order.

The rhythm

Tennessee Ernie Ford takes the song slow, around 53-57 beats per minute. That means that each beat is more than one second long! He uses widely swung eighth notes and very slight rubato at the ends of phrases. I didn’t notice the swing until I started transcribing; it feels more like notes inégales from classical music than like the swing in jazz or blues.

Aretha takes the tune even slower, 38-40 beats per minute, but it feels faster, because she is using doubletime, stretching every note to twice its written length. So really, her tempo is 76-80 BPM. That is still pretty slow, but the 12/8 shuffle feel adds a triple-time pulse layer that adds to the energy. Aretha pushes and pulls against the groove using sixteenth notes, sixteenth note triplets, and smaller rhythmic units that are hard to classify.

The chords

Here are the chords to the A section of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s recording, doubletimed and transposed to match Aretha:

| F | F    | Bb | Bb |
| F | F    | C  | C  |
| F | F    | Bb | Bb |
| F | F  C | F  | F  |

Now here are the chords Aretha uses:

| F | F    F7 | Bb    | Bb  |
| F | F    D7 | G7    | C7* |
| F | F    F7 | Bb    | Bb  |
| F | Gm7  C7 | F  Bb | F   |

Aretha livens up the chord progression using secondary dominants, as is standard practice in gospel.

• The F7 chords are the V7 chords in Bb major.
• The D7 chord is the V7 chord in G minor.
• The G7 chord is the V7 in C major.

The C7 in the eighth bar is actually a wonderful turnaround figure:

| C7  Bb7/D  Ab7/Eb  C7/E |

The voice leading in this progression has hip contrary motion, with the top voice descending while the bassline climbs.

The melody

As always, Aretha completely rewrites the melody in her own idiom. She sings most of the tune using F major pentatonic… sort of. This is almost the same pitch collection as the written melody, but Aretha carefully avoids E, the leading tone. In fact you can listen to Aretha for hours without ever hearing her sing a leading tone! In its place, she sings the sixth D or the second G. Also, she frequently bends the third A down to A-flat. Sometimes it sounds like a minor third, and sometimes like a delicious blue third. She also sometimes bends D up toward E-flat.

Let’s talk through the first stanza of lyrics a syllable at a time. I will be comparing Aretha’s phrasing to the original melody with all its note durations doubled. The opening line is “What a friend we have in Jesus.”

• The first measure is supposed to begin with the word “What” on the note C. Aretha starts singing it half a beat early (but it’s so swung that it’s really more like a third of a beat early.) Also, she inserts an A before jumping up to C. Finally, she cuts the word off a little early. The word “a” should come at the end of the bar, but Aretha delays it. The choir enters with “What a friend we” in the second beat, rushed compared to the original melody.
• The second measure is supposed to be the words “friend we have in”, a beat per syllable, walking down the notes D, C, A and G. Aretha sings the words “friend we have” in a complex, twisty melisma, fitting six distinct notes into the word “have”, including a sweet blue third. The choir sings “have”, and then “ooo.”
• The third measure is supposed to be the first syllable of “Jesus” on the note F. Aretha sings “in” on a little three-note flourish, so she starts “Je-” late, and then moves to “-sus” early. The choir continues to sing “ooo.”
• The fourth measure is supposed to be the second syllable of “Jesus” on the note D. Aretha has already started that syllable, and she quickly jumps from D up to F. She cuts the note off very early, and at the end of the bar, begins “all” early. The choir sings “Jesus” in lovely rising chord voicings.

• The fifth measure is supposed to be the words “all our” for three beats and one beat respectively, on the notes C and F. Aretha has already started “all”, and walks it down the pentatonic scale from F to D to C. At the end of the bar she starts singing “all” again on F.
• The sixth measure is supposed to be the words “sins and griefs to”, one beat each, on the notes A, F, C and A. Aretha sings “all our sins” on D, F and D in a complex sixteenth note syncopation. She starts “and griefs” more than two beats late and reverses their pitches.
• The seventh measure is supposed to be the word “bear” for the entire time on the note G. Aretha is still singing “griefs”. She sings “to” on A for a single sixteenth note, and then sings “bear” on a bluesy walkdown from A to A-flat to G to F. The choir enters on beat three with another “ooo” pad.
• The eighth measure is supposed to be the continuation of the word “bear”, still on G. Aretha already finished that word, so she stays out, maybe to leave space for that crazy piano turnaround. At the very end of the bar, she jumps in early with the next line.

I won’t go through any more of the tune this systematically; you get the idea. But check out the word “privilege” two bars later. In the original, each syllable is a beat long, on the notes D, C, and A. Aretha sings “pri-” on D like she’s supposed to, for about as long as she’s supposed to. She splits “-vi-” across C and A, so, anticipating the next note in the melody. Then she melismas “-lege” across G, A-flat, G, F and D in a rhythm that I can barely even notate.

In the next bar, the first half of the word “carry” is supposed to be a long F; Aretha gives it another multi-note melisma.

Three bars after that, she stretches the word “God” from a single F to a six-note blues melody. Nothing will force you to get your rhythmic chops together like transcribing Aretha!

At 2:23, Aretha introduces a hint of minor pentatonic on the phrase “you know sometimes we don’t.” At 2:51, she does a hair-raising scream on a high A-flat on the word “oh”. This doesn’t feel like a bent-down A, it feels like real minor. At 3:10, she switches to F minor pentatonic in earnest on the phrase “cause we just don’t care.” It doesn’t seem coincidental that she makes the switch over the bluesy Bb7 chord.

Aretha stays in minor pentatonic for the rest of the performance, which is a repeated tag with the choir repeating “everything everything everything, oh, everything everything everything.” This is the song’s emotional peak. Aretha sings bluesier notes, and her voice starts cracking and splitting too. At the very end, check out her final melisma on the word “yeah”. At 4:14, there is an absolutely exquisite blue third right before the word ends for good.

What does this shift from major pentatonic to minor pentatonic mean? As one of my students put it, before 3:10, Aretha is singing the song, but after 3:10, she is channeling the ancestors. We will come back to this idea below.

Three other noteworthy versions

There are a million recordings of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”. Aside from Aretha’s, there are three that really get me where I live. Elizabeth Cotten recorded a delightful fingerstyle ragtime version on her 1958 debut album, pairing it with “In The Sweet Bye and Bye”. She has fathomlessly deep time feel.

Willie and Bobbie Nelson included the song on their gorgeous 1996 album of gospel duets. Willie always sings beautifully, but he really gets into the tiny crevices of this melody.

The Campbell Brothers with Katie Jackson recorded the song in an extremely slow minor key version in 1997. Sacred steel!

Gospel and the blues

I said at the beginning of the post that gospel uses the blues system. However, gospel’s relationship to blues, rock and R&B was conflicted in the early and middle part of the 20th century. The consensus in the Black church was that blues and rock were devil music. However, gospel also drew heavily on those genres for musical inspiration. Thomas Dorsey, the songwriter who created the template for modern gospel, had a successful career as a blues and jazz pianist backing Ma Rainey and Tampa Red before having his spiritual awakening. Reverend Robert Jones tells that story and beautifully performs Dorsey’s song, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.”

Aretha does that song on the Amazing Grace album too, combining it with “You’ve Got A Friend” by Carole King. It works.

Carly Jensen wrote an accessible overview of the intertwined history of gospel and blues in her article, “What They Sang: The Religious Roots of Spirituals and Blues”. She describes the earlier spirituals as a repurposing of West African religious practice into Christian worship music, retentions that were passed on into later gospel music. Blues has some of these same African retentions. For example, while gospel and blues have different functions in very different contexts, both forms use repetition in similar ways, to amplify the singer’s emotions, and to invite the listener into those emotions.

Jensen raises the question of whether Black Christians considered blues to be devil music in part because they associated it with the older African spirituality. For example, the blues trope of making deals with the devil probably descended from stories of the Yoruba trickster god Eshu and the Vodún figure Papa Legba. White Americans have generally taken a negative or dismissive view of African spirituality, deriding it as “voodoo”, and aspirational middle-class Black churchgoers would probably have had similar attitudes. I will need to learn more about this.

Blues might seem to be the most secular music imaginable, but Jensen points out that many blues songs reference God in their lyrics with phrases like “O Lord,” “Good Lord,” and “So help me God.” She quotes the singer Henry Townsend’s explanation of the blues as “just as good as gospel”. Townsend said that, in his music, “I just stick to the truth, and if you can condemn the truth, then I haven’t got a chance, because that’s all I’m telling. And the ‘devil’s music’—I don’t think the devil cares much for the truth.”

James Cone’s book The Spirituals and the Blues has a chapter called “The Blues: A Secular Spiritual”, whose title neatly summarizes its argument. Cone argues that the blues depicts the secular dimension of Black experience rather than the spiritual dimension, but that its structure and function are more like spirituals than unlike them.

As with the spirituals, the Africanism of the blues is related to the functional character of West African music. And this is one of the essential ingredients of Black music that distinguishes it from Western music and connects it with its African heritage.

Blues came along later than the spirituals, and that timing is historically important.

The spirituals are slave songs, and they deal with historical realities that are pre-Civil War. They were created and sung by the group. The blues, while having some pre-Civil War roots, are essentially post-Civil War in consciousness. They reflect experiences that issued from Emancipation, the Reconstruction Period, and segregation laws.

The former Confederacy reacted to Emancipation by creating a rigid racial apartheid, with the rest of the country’s tacit permission. Federal troops withdrew from the South after The Hayes Compromise of 1877; the United States Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to be unconstitutional in 1883; and then it upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine in the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in 1896. As Cone puts it:

By the end of the nineteenth century, the political disfranchisement of Black people was complete. White people could still do to Black people what they willed, just as in slavery days. This was the situation that created the blues.

Blues lyrics might depict and express suffering, but the music also assuages suffering.

The blues experience always is an encounter with life, its trials and tribulations, its bruises and abuses; but not without benefit of the melody and rhythm of song.

The blues are a state of mind that affirms the essential worth of Black humanity, even though white people attempted to define Blacks as animals. The blues tell us about a people who refused to accept the absurdity of white society. Black people rebelled artistically, and affirmed through ritual, pattern, and form that they were human beings… That Black people could transcend trouble without ignoring it means that they were not destroyed by it.

Cone argues that blues’ focus on bodily experience and pleasure is inseparable from Black American spirituality. The body and soul are not separate as they are in European Christianity.

People who have not been oppressed physically cannot know the power inherent in bodily expressions of love. That is why white Western culture makes a sharp distinction between the spirit and the body, the divine and the human, the sacred and the secular. White oppressors do not know how to come to terms with the essential spiritual function of the human body. But for Black people the body is sacred, and they know how to use it in the expression of love.

Adam Gussow’s book Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition points out that because gospel sounds so bluesy, it was itself a controversial stylistic development in Black church music. Its resemblance to blues was not lost on the blues musicians who were targets for disapproval by the church. Gussow quotes the musician Jack Owens: “Well, that’s what they called it all the time, the devil’s music, but I have heard ’em make notes on the guitar, and the preacher take that note and start off with it in the church behind the pulpit. And go on and preach. … That was a blues note.”

Most blues musicians were raised in the church, and some were very close to it. John Lee Hooker’s father was a Baptist minister who called his son’s guitar “the Devil.” He let John Lee have the guitar, but made him keep it in the barn and wouldn’t let him bring it into the house. Hooker wrote a great blues song about hell.

He also performed religious songs in the same style as his blues material, like this recording of “Ezekiel Saw The Wheel” – thank you to Wenatchee the Hatchet for pointing me to this recording.

Gussow cites Angela Davis’ book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, in which she argues that blues’ preoccupation with sexual love was an expression of the new personal freedoms that Black Americans enjoyed post-Emancipation period. While their material circumstances were not much improved, at least they could control their own personal relationships, and blues celebrated that revolutionary change. Gussow recognizes the truth of that statement, but he also points out that blues often describes sexuality as

an unstable, antagonistic relationship between two freely choosing sexual subjects, a zero-sum game in which one or the other participants, often as not, ends up in thrall to insatiable desire, murderous jealousy, an aching sense of loss, or ontological confusion about the maddeningly fickle ‘devil or angel’ who has cast the singer into a hell on earth… Blues is the devil’s music, in this respect, because the devil is the avatar of ungovernable sexuality, an evil spirit that incites private heartbreak and public mayhem.

Son House apparently referred to his junk as “the devil.”

What does all of this mean for listening to and understanding Aretha? How much of the devil is there in her gospel music? My own emotional reaction to listening to her sing gospel is the same as my experience listening to her sing R&B (though I’m sure it felt different hearing her in a church.) Is she singing gospel like the blues, or is all of her blues material secretly gospel? I am definitely feeling the spirit when I listen to her, but what spirit? Aretha’s? Her ancestors? The Holy Spirit? The orishas? My own ancestors? All of the above?

Another question: what is our responsibility as musicians in response to this music? Should we try to imitate it? Or do we just marvel at it? For myself, the answer is that paying close attention to Aretha is its own reward, and it’s good practice for paying attention generally. I have no aspiration to sing like her or to try to otherwise sound like her, but I do want to be as expressive as her, to have her clarity and depth of feeling. I doubt I ever will, but I can make the effort at least.

My editor cut out my selection of comments from the YouTube video, so I include them here:

“Weird part starts at 0:00”

“I started to transcribe the tab of this for guitar but i started getting a metallic taste in my mouth and woke up in the middle of a corn field in 1947”

“This is the Future we were Primused”

“So glad my grandma’s cat recommended this to me in a dream”

“I looked up the sheet music for these tracks and they were written in wingdings”

“MOM, MY SLEEP PARALYSIS DEMONS ARE DOING FREE-FORM FUNK JAZZ AGAIN!!!”

“This feels like a trip to the 70’s … (The decade from 2970 to 2979)”

This band supports my belief that microtonality is poised to explode into the Anglo-American pop mainstream. You read it here first!

NYU’s new pop music theory sequence has its own aural skills classes, and I am pleasantly surprised to find myself teaching them. I can do it because these classes are very different from the ones that I took. Some of that is the repertoire: Stevie Wonder rather than Beethoven. The structure of the class is different too. The music we’re studying exists as recordings, not notated scores. It was substantially created by ear, and is substantially learned that way. So while we do work on notation-related skills, it can’t be the only thing on the menu. (Most of my students are better readers than I am anyway!) My job is to create classroom activities and assignments that are appropriate to pop music and its learning methods.

A lot of my own formative music learning came from jamming over repeated grooves, either with other people or over recordings. This is why I put improvisation at the center of my teaching practice. In my experience, the only lasting way to learn theory is to use it to solve problems in an authentic musical context. Jamming with a band is the ideal way to do this problem-solving, but it’s impractical in a class of 25 people, not all of whom play instruments. However, it is practical to have everyone jam over recordings, and in some ways, recordings are better than live instruments. I don’t know anyone who can play funk like James Brown’s band in 1970, but I don’t need to when James Brown’s band is right there on the computer.

Why do music students need to improvise if they aren’t playing jazz?

You might wonder why improvisation is such a big deal for pop musicians outside of jazz or jam bands. The answer is that improvisation is not just for solos. If you are creating or arranging music in any capacity, improvisation is usually the best way to do it. That’s true for songwriting, but it’s also true for lower-level, more background-y forms of creativity.

Say you’re a guitarist who’s backing a singer-songwriter. They might hand you a chord chart, and set out a basic tempo and feel. Maybe there will be some riffs or countermelodies for you to play too. But most likely, beyond the basic skeleton, whatever you play will be up to you. I guess you could work your ideas out on paper, but it’s vastly more likely that you will be making things up in the moment. This process is so natural that it might not even feel like creativity at all, but it is. The same goes for basslines, drum parts, keyboard parts, backing vocals, production choices, and so on: you might be told what to play in the broad strokes, but you will be inventing a lot of the time. The only time I have been asked to play something exact is when we were trying to do a soundalike cover. Otherwise, my musical life has been wall-to-wall improvising.

Not only do pop students need to learn improvisation as a skill unto itself, but they also benefit from improvisation as a method for learning other things. In their article “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning”, John Seely Brown, Allan Collins and Paul Duguid argue that education too often focuses on the content of learning while ignoring the context. Say you want to learn a foreign language. If you do it in a classroom, it will be a slow and painful process, and you will lose your knowledge quickly unless you keep up continual effort to maintain it. But if you learn a language through immersion among native speakers, you will pick it up quickly, and it will stick. Brown, Collins and Duguid point out that classroom content knowledge too often comes in the form of “algorithms, routines, and decontextualized definitions that [students] cannot use and that, therefore, lie inert.” You can’t necessarily do the equivalent of moving to a foreign country in a class that meets twice a week, but you can create experiences that inspire students to seek out immersion for themselves.

You can’t undervalue the emotional context of learning. It has to feel good if it’s going to stick. I took a great jazz theory and improv class in college, and I felt good studying the music and doing the improvising. Decades later, I’m still happily chasing down the threads of everything we learned there. Meanwhile, I had such an aversive experience trying to learn the classical counterpoint rules in grad school that I have to look them up all over again every semester, and I will probably never be able to retain them.

Here’s a collection of some of my favorite loops

I don’t know of a better way to learn improvisation than to simply do it. But you can’t just tell students to improvise, especially if they haven’t done it before; you need to give them some scaffolding. Looped grooves are perfect for that. Here are some of my best ones, which I call jam tracks. They will all loop perfectly if you play them on repeat, but I also put fadeouts on the ends if you want to listen to the playlist straight through.

So what do we do with these tracks in class? Sometimes we use them for structured exercises, but more often the loop itself creates all the structure we need, and everyone just takes turns scatting for four or eight bars in a continual cypher. Sometimes I shout out comments in the moment, but I prefer to not interrupt the flow. We talk afterwards about what we noticed, what we were thinking, what we were feeling. The students come up with plenty of interesting ideas on the fly that we can talk about, like when someone intuitively sings a chromatic embellishment or finds a nice riff. It’s also illuminating to have them fail in certain ways: when the classical kids sing Ti instead of Te over the Mixolydian grooves, or when the rock kids have trouble hearing Ti resolving to Do in a V7-I cadence.

Sometimes we use loops to work on a specific concept. I use “Soul Power” for practicing Dorian mode, especially for internalizing the tritone between b3 and 6. Along with open-ended scatting, I also have the students learn and sing along with elements of the track: the guitar part, the horn part, the bassline, the drums. If the backing track has some clear harmonic progression or voice leading, then scat-singing is an excellent way to internalize it. Alternatively, students can (and often do) find blues-based melodies that are independent of the harmony. Scat-singing also gets them listening to the microrhythms, the timbres, the stylistic signifiers, the instrumentation, the mixing and production. You listen differently when you’re hearing an eight bar loop repeated fifty or a hundred times, especially if you have to participate in it musically.

Students are understandably reluctant to scat in front of their peers at the beginning of the semester, so I break the ice by doing it first. I don’t have a very strong singing voice, but I’m uninhibited, and I improvise goofy lyrics about what I’m doing: “This is the thirrrrd of the chorrrrd, check out howwwww it moooooves to the roooooot of the neeeext choooord.” Occasionally students will make up their own goofy lyrics, which I love.

How did I make the loops?

The jam tracks come out of my collection of listening examples.

I use Ableton Live to play the examples in class. The first job is to warp the recording to the grid so that playback follows the performed tempo. Having a song on the grid makes it easy to jump to or repeat sections of the audio precisely. I can also have MIDI clips and the metronome follow the tempo.

Once everything is warped out, I split the audio into song sections, which I color-code and label. Then I add a couple of tracks filled with empty MIDI clips, and I label them to show chord changes, key centers, hypermeter, melodic phrasing, and other interesting features. Here’s a screencap of my session for “Dear Prudence” by the Beatles.

Getting a song annotated like this takes time, but it’s worth it. I can open one of these sessions and effortlessly identify, play and loop segments of any length, from a single beat to a full song. I can align multiple versions of the same song. I can change tempos and keys, and can also address audio production quirks. Sometimes recordings are pitched up or down in post-production, intentionally or not, so I use Live to tune them back to A440. Also, many 1960s recordings have extreme stereo panning, and I like to put things in near-mono to keep the vocals or drums from being only audible on one side of the classroom.

William O’Hara wrote about my DAW visualizations in his article ““Let’s Think in Layers”: On Twenty-First-Century Instruments of Public Music Theory.” He describes Ableton Live as an example of a “music theoretical instrument”, a physical manifestation of theory concepts. He points out that staff notation and the piano keyboard are theoretical instruments too, and they have constraints in what they can and can’t illustrate. For example, they aren’t much use for pitch bends. The DAW has constraints of its own, but it opens up many new possibilities too.

As I have been using my Live sessions in class over the past few semesters, I find particular sections that make good loops, and I have started marking them with a special pink MIDI clips so they are easier to find. The next step has been to make new Ableton sessions containing the loops only. I want to be able to run the loops continuously, without having to break up the flow by stopping and starting playback, or by jumping around within the track arrhythmically. I also edit them to remove awkward discontinuities at the beginnings and ends of the looped segments, or in transitions from one loop to another. These special loop sessions are my jam tracks.

The process of identifying good improv loops is the same process that hip-hop and dance music producers use for finding samples. Any of my jam tracks could be the basis for a hip-hop instrumental. One thing you discover when digging the crates for samples is that there is a difference between a great song and a great groove. “Yesterday” is a beautiful song, but there’s no part of it you can loop into a satisfying groove. Meanwhile, the opening minute and a half of “God Make Me Funky” by the Headhunters is one of my most reliable in-class grooves, but I hardly ever listen to the complete recording, because the second half of the track goes in a strange and annoying direction.

I have a few go-to loops that I haven’t made into separate jam tracks because it hasn’t been necessary. For example, I like the intro to “Back to Black” by Amy Winehouse for practicing minor-key leading tones. It doesn’t require any editing; all I have to do is click the intro clip and activate looping. By contrast, “Boogie Chillen” by John Lee Hooker is a brilliant groove all the way through, but it took me a substantial amount of editing to create seamless loops.

Some of my loops have vocals in them, but I try not to have too many specific lyrics or famous melodies, because I don’t want students having to compete with them. I could use AI stem separation to remove vocals, but so far, I haven’t done that. It’s not because I have a principled objection to stem separation; I just don’t like the muffled and artifacted audio it produces. I made my vocal-less loop of “Dear Prudence” from the song’s original multitracks.

What about copyright? So far, no one has ever come after me for any of this. If they did, I could make a good educational Fair Use argument, but it’s a grey area for sure. I’m not trying to teach my students to ignore copyright law, but I do want them to understand that you’re allowed to do whatever experiments you want to in the privacy of your own room. If you are jamming over a James Brown loop and you come up with a good idea, that is your idea. You can always record it without the James Brown loop later.

It’s important to me to use actual recordings of James Brown rather than playing soundalike grooves on guitar or piano, or programming soundalikes in Ableton. I have made a bunch of self-created practice tracks for various specific purposes, and sometimes we use them, but I find myself reaching for the jam tracks more, and the students show a lot more enthusiasm for them. The students like my contrived tracks okay, but they can’t create the feeling in the room that half an hour of “Soul Power” does. Everyone walks out glowing after that, and it’s the exact opposite of the vibe in the aural skills classes I took as a grad student.

The academic literature on improvisation as an aural skills method

Improvisation is not a widespread practice in aural skills classes, so far as I know, but there are people doing it. Most of the literature on the subject is about teaching in traditional Western classical settings. In the 18th and 19th centuries, improvisation was a common practice for composers and performers, and some educators think it was a mistake to abandon it.

In The Routledge Companion to Aural Skills Pedagogy, Jena Root argues that improvisation is valuable even for classical musicians because it “allows each student to explore musical space on his or her own terms and at his or her own pace” (p. 403). However, assessing improvisation is difficult, and one might wonder whether it is even worth doing at all. Root believes that we do need to grade improvisation exercises, because doing so communicates to students that we consider the exercises to be important. She also recognizes, however, that grading creates anxiety, which is inimical to the creativity and playfulness we hope to foster through improvisation in the first place. Root therefore recommends that we make improvisation assignments low-stakes, worth only a few points.

Root also suggests that we not force students to improvise on the spot in class. Instead, we should allow them to do it one on one, or by submitting recordings outside of class time. That allows them to record multiple takes, which is a good thing, because it’s a valuable form of practice. I think it’s fine to expect pop students to be able to improvise in front of their classmates, but I agree that it’s a lot to ask of classical students.

Also in the Routledge Companion, Susan Piagentini talks about using improvisation to reinforce solfège skills. She creates a “solfège menu”, a vertical list of syllables written on the board. At the beginning of the term, the menu is limited to diatonic pitches, but it grows to include chromatic pitches as the class progresses. The instructor points to syllables on the menu as students sing along. The instructor can then tap out a sequence, which students have to sing back in tempo. Finally, the menu can be a format for improvised composition; students can compose a melody in real time by pointing to syllables while the rest of the class sings along. I haven’t tried this exercise yet, but it’s on my list.

In his book Aural Awareness, George Pratt recommends that students begin by improvising on a single note. Limiting the pitch content frees their attention for other musical parameters. As their skill and confidence grow, you can open the restrictions up wider. Pratt suggests that instructors should record students’ in-class improvisation so we can play it back and analyze it. I see the wisdom of that, but I don’t want my students feeling too inhibited; some of them find the process to be challenging enough without being recorded on top of that.

Later this semester, I am going to assign my aural skills class to record themselves scat-singing over a loop and then transcribe it. They can do as many takes as they want. This assignment is a warmup for the final project, which is to write a song and notate it. I want to get the students writing by recording improvisation rather than by composing onto the page. Creating in notation is fine if you are extremely fluent with it, but for most of my students, notation constrains them too much rhythmically. Anyone who listens to pop will intuitively come up with sixteenth note syncopations, but those are a pain to write, so there’s an incentive to sand down your rhythmic subtleties. Conversely, notation doesn’t constrain you enough pitch-wise. It’s too easy to write complex angular melodies full of awkward interval jumps. Vocal improvisation enforces a level of good taste.

In their article “A Critical Review of Current Aural Skill Materials and Pedagogical Practices”, Timothy Chenette, Stacey Davis and Stanley Kleppinger observe that “unlike sight singing, improvisation activities benefit from repetition, since the same melodic or rhythmic prompts can yield multiple effective and imaginative ‘solutions’” (p. 156). They also suggest basing improvisation on aural stimuli, rather than only using notated prompts. It would never have occurred to me to use notated improvisation prompts to begin with, but classical teachers don’t usually work from recordings or by ear.

I was expecting to find useful ideas for improvisation-based aural skills in the jazz pedagogy literature. However, I can’t find any mention of a jazz-specific aural skills class at all. In the departments I’m familiar with, jazz majors have to take the classical aural skills classes. Besides, jazz players work on their aural skills constantly through their regular playing, so having a separate class for it seems beside the point.

What is aural skills class for?

When I asked a class of music education majors whether there should be some baseline body of knowledge shared by all college music majors, they all agreed that there should be. When I asked them what that knowledge should consist of, they couldn’t agree at all. That makes sense! A future dance music producer does not need to learn the same things as a future symphony cellist. This is only a problem if we need there to be a single standard music theory curriculum for everyone. But most institutions want a single standard curriculum, at least implicitly. When I was a grad student, NYU made every music major do the same classical theory and aural skills sequence, regardless of our specialties, and that didn’t make much sense. But I don’t think that every music major needs to scat-sing over James Brown either.

In their article “Signals and Noise: How Higher Music Education Institutions Define Popular Music”, Thomas Calkins, Wessel Coppes and Pauwke Berkers point out that “popular music education and Western high art may coexist in much the same way that very divergent disciplines do within the typical university setting (e.g., physics and literature)” (p. 12). I like this idea: there can be pop musicians and classical musicians, just like there are physics majors and English majors. In a liberal arts institution, we would hope that the classical and pop musicians would take some of each others’ classes, the same way we expect English majors to take some science and physics majors to read some literature.

My motivation for making loops isn’t entirely professional. I make them because I love to make them. I have a friend who keeps asking me if I’m writing anything original these days, and yeah, I am, but I feel like the jam tracks are the truest expression of my musical self. You might not think that just looping audio would be much of a creative act, but it changes the musical meaning of the material that you’re looping. Joseph Schloss explains in his book, Making Beats:

[L]ooping automatically recasts any musical material it touches, insofar as the end of a phrase is repeatedly juxtaposed with its beginning in a way that was not intended by the original musician. After only a few repetitions, this juxtaposition… begins to take on an air of inevitability. It begins to gather a compositional weight that far exceeds its original significance (p. 137).

Making loops and using them as the basis for my own ideas transformed my musical life, and has brought me immeasurable joy. It’s a gift that I want to pass on. I don’t think you can meaningfully impact someone’s musical understanding very much in a single semester, but you can definitely help students develop better learning habits, you can light a fire of curiosity in them, and you can point them in new directions.

All the chords you need for rock by Dr. Ethan Hein

can be found using a simple formula

When I was learning guitar, I did a lot of studying and memorizing chord progressions. I did even more thinking about chords when I was learning to play jazz. When I shifted over to mainly producing electronic music, all my focus went to thinking about groove and timbre and I stopped thinking about chords completely. But now that I’m teaching music theory, I’m back to thinking about chords, and as I prep examples for class, I am in particular thinking about chords in rock songs in a serious way for the first time since my 20s.

You can’t generalize about chord progressions in Anglo-American pop across the board, because there’s too much stylistic diversity between metal, country, hip-hop, R&B, dance music and so on. However, rock has stabilized into a canon, and it’s possible to get your arms around the entire thing.

So given all that, here’s my explanation of rock harmony in one sentence: put major chords on the notes in the natural minor scale, and put minor chords on the notes in the major scale. That doesn’t explain every chord you’ll find in a rock song, but it does explain a lot of them.

Let’s think about the key of E. The notes in the E natural minor scale are E, F-sharp, G, A, B, C, and D. If you use each scale degree as the root of a major triad, you get E, F#, G, A, B, C, and D chords. These are all plausible chords for a rock song in E, in just about any order and any combination.

Now let’s consider the E major scale: E, F-sharp, G-sharp, A, B, C-sharp, and D-sharp. We’re going to ignore the seventh, D-sharp, so we’re really thinking about the diatonic hexachord. We’re going to use the first six scale degrees as roots of minor triads. That gives you Em, F#m, G#m, Am, Bm, and C#m chords. These are also all plausible chords to use in a rock song in E.

Combining the lists, we get:

• E and/or Em
• F# and/or F#m
• G
• G#m
• A and/or Am
• B and/or Bm
• C
• C#m
• D

Like I said, this is not every chord you would find in a rock song in E, but does include all the common ones and several less-common ones too. This set of roots also aligns well with the global pitch set used in most rock melodies, which David Temperley calls “the supermode”.

My one-sentence theory has some serious problems!

• It says nothing about melody.
• It says nothing about musical time or harmonic rhythm.
• It doesn’t tell you anything about how the chords function, what order you should use them in, or what combinations sound good.
• It doesn’t tell you about how often the chords are used in rock. The bIII major chord is much more common than the iii minor chord, for example, and the minor ii chord is much more common than the major II chord.
• It only includes major and minor triads, and doesn’t say anything about seventh chords. That means that it can’t make sense of the blues. You could plausibly add a flat seventh to almost all of the chords on my list, but not quite (G7 sounds goofy and D7 sounds too jazzy.)
• It doesn’t tell you about other kinds of Anglo-American pop, or about more extreme kinds of metal.

If you want to go deeper into these questions, I recommend David Temperley’s book The Musical Language of Rock. His chapter on harmony generally supports my theory. He bases his explanation on a study of the 500 greatest rock songs compiled by Rolling Stone magazine in 2004. He and his research partners transcribed all 500 songs from this corpus and did statistical analysis on them. You could debate the validity of this corpus as a representation of the rock music canon, but it seems to me as good a place to start as any. Temperley argues that rock melody and harmony both draw from a pitch collection that he calls the “supermode”, the union of the major and natural minor scales. In E, the supermode contains every note except for F and A-sharp.

Temperley presents the supermode as a section of the circle of fifths. If you start with E and go sharpwards, you get E, B, F-sharp, C-sharp, G-sharp and D-sharp. If you start with E and go flatwards, you get E, A, D, G and C.

Temperley observes that in rock, chord roots usually stick close to the tonic on the circle. So for songs in E, you mostly see chords with roots on E, A and B; you commonly see chords with roots are on D, G, F-sharp and C-sharp; and you occasionally see chords with roots further from E. Furthermore, the other notes comprising the chords will almost all come from within the supermode. In the key of E, F#m is more common than F#. Temperley believes that this is because F#m includes the notes F-sharp, A and C-sharp, all within the E supermode, whereas F# includes A-sharp, which is outside the E supermode.

Temperley finds some patterns in which chords appear together. In general, chords from the flat side of the circle of fifths don’t appear with chords from the sharp side. So if a song in E uses D, G or C chords, then it is unlikely to use F#m, C#m or G#m chords, and vice versa. (Chords in the middle, the E, A and B chords, mix well with both sides.) Temperley observes that songs with more sharp-side chords sound more pop, while flat-side songs sound harder. See all of this in notation.

It’s very striking when a songwriter mixes chords from both sides. The Grateful Dead frequently mix sharp-side and flat-side chords, which makes their songs sound quirky and colorful. In “Jack Straw”, for example, which is in E, they go straight from G#m (the sharpest sharp-side chord) to D (a flat-side chord.) It’s ear-grabbing!

What about progressions? Temperley finds that rock songwriters have clear preferences about which chords they use, but they don’t seem to care what order the chords are in. So for a song in E, you can have E come before A or after it; before D or after it; before G or after it. You move from A to B as often as you move from B to A. This is very different from Western European classical tradition, where you would hardly ever move from B to A in a piece in E major.

Temperley’s book is an extraordinarily thorough and rigorous analysis of the Rolling Stone corpus, but you might have some doubts about how well that corpus represents rock as a music. There isn’t much metal in there, certainly not any of the more extreme varieties. A corpus centered on metal would look very different; there would hardly be any sharp-side harmony and few full chords. Flat two would be a pretty common chord root, and sharp four wouldn’t be unheard of. But if a consensus exists around a canon of metal, I am not aware of it. Among the metal fans I know, the only consensus is that there is no consensus. None of this is meant as a criticism of David Temperley! He is as rigorous as musicologists get. My silly theory is something I came up with out of the blue. It’s gratifying that Temperley’s research mostly validates my instincts, but they are still my instincts.

Take a load off, Fannie by Dr. Ethan Hein

Take a load for free

There is a truism that art makes the strange familiar and makes the familiar strange. The Band’s biggest hit is intimately familiar to every classic rock listener, but it is quite a strange song. The lyrics seem like they are talking about ordinary people in ordinary situations, but they don’t add up to any specific identifiable reality. The devil makes an appearance. There are two different characters named Annie and Fanny. The narrator is on the run, but we don’t know from what. There are three different singers, all of whom sound like backwoodsy Muppets. In photos, the musicians look like Civil War re-enactors, or Bushwick hipsters, or rednecks, or academics, or all of the above. In the days before the internet, everything about them was mysterious, from the band name on down.

“The Weight” appeared on an album called Music From Big Pink because it came out of jam sessions that the Band held with Bob Dylan in the basement of Big Pink, a house deep in the forest outside Woodstock, New York. The house is, you guessed it, big and pink. You can rent it! We took my father-in-law to see it, and even though it’s way out in the boonies, we were not the only fans making a pilgrimage there that day. 

My first band in college did a cover of “The Weight”, as has seemingly every other band that has ever existed. Aside from The Band themselves, nobody has done it better than the Staple Singers.

The version that the Staples performed with The Band for The Last Waltz is one of the most magnificent performances ever captured on film. As this guy says in his reaction video, “Ay, if this don’t move your soul, you might be soulless.”

Aretha Franklin’s recording is great too, and includes a scorching slide guitar intro by Duane Allman.

The Chambers Brothers’ version is beautifully funky and smooth.

I also like this version by High Mountain Hoedown, though I have no idea who they are, there is no information about them online.

“The Weight” originates in the era when The Band were working as Bob Dylan’s touring band under the name The Hawks. Here they are in action in 1966.

While Dylan was recovering from his 1967 motorcycle accident, he and the Hawks held extensive jam sessions around Woodstock, at his house and in the basement of Big Pink. They spent months rehearsing and recording folk, country and early rock songs. In A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Andrew Hickey tells the story.

[Dylan] and [Robbie] Robertson had had something between friendly discussion and outright arguments about Dylan’s style of songwriting while on tour the year before. Robertson — who, at this time, remember, had a body of songs that mostly consisted of things like “Uh Uh Uh” — thought that Dylan’s songs were too long, and the lyrics were approaching word salad. Why, he wanted to know, did Dylan not write songs that expressed things simply, in words that anyone could understand, rather than this oblique, arty stuff?

Dylan saw the validity of this critique. He started introducing the Band to his older folk repertoire, which was new to them. As Robertson explained:

None of the guys in The Band were about folk music. We were not from that side of the tracks. Folk music was from coffee houses, where people sipped cappuccinos. Where we played as The Hawks, nobody was sipping cappuccino, I’ll tell ya. We were playing hardcore bars.

As Dylan taught folk songs to the Hawks, they adapted them to their playing style. Andrew Hickey again:

While the Hawks were all Canadian, they’d been trained by Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm in how to play rock and roll, and that meant that they had picked up the way music was played in the Deep South. Not only that, but they’d played sessions in Nashville with [Roger] Hawkins, and Robertson had played with A-team musicians on the Blonde on Blonde sessions.

The result was that they picked up an instrumental style that sounded like the music that came from what the writer Charles L Hughes refers to as the country-soul triangle of Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville — a style that comes, ultimately, from white country musicians backing Black soul musicians, and which we’ve seen coming up time and again from Arthur Alexander to Aretha Franklin to Otis Redding. The Hawks’ music doesn’t sound anything like the more uptempo music from those musicians, all slashed guitar chords and stabbing horns, but it sounds very, *very* much like the ballads coming out of Memphis and Muscle Shoals, which were dominated by gospel piano, organ pads, and delicate picked guitar, records like Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” or James Carr’s “Dark End of the Street”… When sung by white singers, rather than Black ones, and coupled with the folk-style lyrics that Dylan was introducing to the Hawks, that style became known as Americana.

Dylan and the Hawks also wrote some Americana-flavored originals, which formed the eventual basis for the material on Music From Big Pink.

“The Weight” seems simple, but things get weird in the chorus! It begins with Robbie Robertson’s wistful guitar intro. Here’s a good tutorial. This leads into the main groove, a two bar loop that you could learn in ten seconds.

||: A  C#m | D  A :||

This is a standard rock and pop chord progression that my NYU colleagues call the Puff schema because it appears in the first line of “Puff the Magic Dragon.” While the chords are simple, there’s some intrigue in the move from A to C#m. Both of these chords share the notes C-sharp and E, but the A chord contains A, while the C#m chord contains G-sharp. This is a strange bit of voice leading, because G-sharp is the leading tone in the key of A, a tense and dissonant note that would normally make you expect a resolution back to the tonic. However, C#m functions more like a tonic chord than a dominant; you could even think of it as a rootless voicing of Amaj7. So the chord is both settled and unsettled, at rest and pulling away.

Levon Helm’s lead vocal is all within the A major pentatonic scale, and it involves some mild melodic-harmonic divorce. For one thing, Levon never sings the note D, even over the D chord. Also, on the line “Hey mister can you tell me”, he accents F-sharp over the A and C#m chords, and that is not a chord tone from either chord.

The chorus begins with the same chord sequence as the verse, but with a faster harmonic rhythm.

| A  C#m  D | A  C#m  D | A  C#m  D |
| Dadd9 | (3/4) Dadd9 |
| A  A/G#  A/F#  A/E | Dadd9 |

There is even stronger melodic-harmonic divorce in this section, because Levon keeps singing C-sharp over the D chords, like on the word “free” in the line “Take a load for free”.

After the second time they sing “Take a load off, Annie”, the most magical part of the song occurs: the band hits a D(add9) chord, that is, a D chord with E on top, and they let it ring. On the second beat of the measure, Levon Helm sings “annnnd” on the note A, the fifth of the D chord. One beat later, Rick Danko joins with “annnnd” on D, the root. Finally, on the last beat of the measure, Richard Manuel comes in with “annnnd” on E. That is not the expected note! You expect him to sing F-sharp to fill out the D major triad. Instead, it’s a D(add9) chord, and there is significant tension between Rick’s D and Richard’s E.

Next, there’s a bar of 3/4 time in which Levon sings “put the load right on me”, and Rick and Richard repeat the line a beat later. They are still singing on D and E respectively. On the word “me”, Levon jumps from A up to C-sharp, which rubs extraordinarily hard against the D and E. When people cover the song, they don’t do that! It’s a dissonant cluster you’d expect to hear in a Thelonious Monk song, not country-rock made by hippies.

Finally, there’s a bar of A with a bassline that walks down the A major scale, and a concluding bar of D(add9) with Richard Manuel’s wordless falsetto vocalizing on top. The song ends on that chord, too, a highly inconclusive conclusion.

So what are the lyrics about? Mavis Staples recalls asking the guys in The Band that question, and their response was, “We don’t know.” Robbie Robertson got the opening line from the sticker on the inside of his guitar, a Martin made in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. The name reminded him of Nazarín, a Luis Buñuel film, and he said that he wanted to convey that film’s satirical atmosphere. Levon Helm explained that some characters in the song were people that he and the Hawks knew in Arkansas, including Young Anna Lee and Crazy Chester. Others were names that they chose for old-timey vibe: Carmen, Miss Moses, Fanny.

A few nights ago, the family and I went to see Mavis Staples, who is 86 years young and is still a dynamite stage presence. Her cracked and craggy voice only enhances her sound, and her repertoire is surprisingly fresh and current. The show was all about multiracial Americana. Mavis’ opening act was Allison Russell, a Black singer-songwriter who plays banjo and clarinet. Her all-Black band used only acoustic instruments and did an appealing fusion of country, gospel and soul. Mavis herself had a mostly white band consisting of just guitar, bass, drums and two backup singers. Her guitarist is the excellent Rick Holmstrom, who plays country-flavored fingerstyle on a Fender Telecaster, using no effects at all except for amp tremolo. There was a surprise appearance by Norah Jones, the queen of multiracial Americana herself. She and Mavis sang “You Are Not Alone”, written for Mavis by Jeff Tweedy.

Mavis didn’t do “The Weight” at the show, but she still performs it regularly. Here’s a recording she did with Levon Helm in 2011, shortly before his death.

What genre is this song? It’s tighter and more polished than hippie folk-rock, but it’s looser than current country. It’s less groovy than funk, but it’s funkier than rock. It’s not as rural as country, but it’s not as urban as pop. Americana seems like an outgrowth of the 1960s folkies, but it points back to an earlier time, before jazz, blues, country and R&B diverged in the first place. If you listen to music from the rural South in the early 20th century, it’s impossible to sort any of it into genres. Here’s a blues song by Lottie Kimbrough and Winston Holmes that features yodeling. Here’s a Jimmie Rodgers song with trumpet by Louis Armstrong. Here’s a Bob Wills rag with solos on lap steel and alto sax. Greil Marcus coined the term “old weird America” in his book Invisible Republic about the Basement Tapes, and I know some people resist that term, but I don’t know of a better one.

I don’t believe that genres are meaningful musicological descriptors. Genres really describe audiences. The Band makes rock because they have a rock audience. Mavis Staples makes Americana because she has an Americana audience. Bob Dylan was a folkie because he had a folk audience, and they got very angry when he revealed himself to be more of a rock fan than a folkie at heart. Is any of this “authentic”? Mavis Staples can’t be anything but authentic; she bestows authenticity on everything she touches. Levon Helm acquired a certain gravitas when he was older, but what about when he and the other beardos in The Band were young? Does it even matter? If “The Weight” isn’t about anything in particular, then it can be about whatever we want. It would be simpler if it had a specific meaning and origin, but it’s from The Band’s imagination of America, and ultimately, imagination is where it lives on.