Sometimes when listening to old blues it seems like they deliberately "start early" or miss a bar or something. I don't know what it is. An example is howlin wolf in this video but Ive heard stuff that sounds a lot more strange.
In this, it seems like he should have started singing later? Not saying he aint doin it right, just sayin it just sounds strange where he began singing to me. Or maybe he did the first bar silently?
Could someone please tell me what and why on this?
In this particular piece I think he starts in time? But I know what you mean, there are tons of songs that employ that kind of singing or playing.
And I think the absolute brilliance of black blues music lies in this kind of musical behavior. It's the perfection in imperfection. It's meant to be like that. If you listen to Robert Pete Williams, for example, you can feel the music really "rambles". Blues is not meant to be played with a metronome or precision tuners. It's drifting in aural form.
If you're interested in musicological explanations, I recall Jeff Todd Titon writing about it in his book "Worlds of Music". I'm not 100% sure, though, I read it a long time ago. The blues part is definitely worth reading nevertheless.
There should be plenty of information about it in books on ethnomusicology. It's one of the key features in black music. You can find it in field hollers, sermons, all types of call and response -singing etc.
I have a drummer friend who talks about singers who sing and play guitar alone. He calls it folk time. It's not in time with anything else, but it's in time with itself.
Maybe, you shouldn't worry about thinking about it and get out there and do it. Maybe, you won't always come in perfectly maybe you will. The beauty of seeing the older artists wasn't perfection in timing or execution, it was that they conveyed raw emotion in their playing.
It wasn't always perfect. It was a lot like real life. Dont over analyze it.
Lots of classic blues song have some pretty interesting timing phenomena (just look at "Juke"). Check out this video where Manfred Mann's drummer talks about how he and the trained musicians in the band thought that the 12 bar blues contained 12 bars, but that Sonny Boy Williamson corrected them ("It's however many bars I want it to be.")
This clip finally gave me a signature line to use:
I've always wanted to play the blues harp so badly, and now I do!
Last Edited by on Apr 02, 2011 10:26 AM
Maybe I'm counting double time, I counted 6 measures and then he came in on measure 7. I do not call this tune a 12 bar blues progression. It might be 12 bar blues, but I hear no progression, only 1 chord. So it sounds OK to me.
I do understand that a lot of us try to keep things in groups of 4, and was not an "even group of 4",but what he did was good enough for me for that type of tune. ---------- intermediate level (+) player per the Adam Gussow Scale, Started playing 2001
Last Edited by on Apr 02, 2011 1:55 PM
