I've been wondering about this for a while, and one of my professors asked me to deal with the issue, so now I'm gonna need some clarity.
How do you distinguish the folk ballad form from, say, the 8-bar blues form? Is it simply a matter of emphasis? Are there certain notes that typically change (for example, more flat notes in blues)?
Lastly -- and this is a matter of opinion -- can you separate the lyrics from the way they're communicated? If carried across as a blues song, do words that were originally folk ballad lyrics become blues lyrics? (the whole 'the author is dead/present' issue ought to be left out, for the sake of sanity)
This is directed at everyone, but it'd be awesome if a certain Dr. Gussow were to weigh in (subtlety has never been my forte)
I suspect the chord changes are different, but I don't really know. I know there is a pop chord progression that is used in A TON of pop songs.
For semantic reasons I suppose you could say a song wasn't a blues song if it wasn't to blues chords. I suppose it may depend on what direction you approach it from. I was a aspiring poet long before I started playing harp. A big part of how I define a blues song in my mind is the lyric. Is it a blues topic? Does it have blues references and language? If it does, it sounds like blues to me. On the other hand we have some songs that are 12 bar blues that aren't traditional blues vocals. I imagine if you come at it from the musical perspective you may be more concerned with the chord structure over the lyrics.
On a slight tangent, there are several ways to do covers. You can copy the original, or you can make it totally different. One of my favorite covers is cover of Imagine by Perfect Circle. They take a major key song and switch to minor chords with very powerful results.
My band used to do a version of Amazing Grace to a totally different melody. We've played it as twelve bar too.
Nacoran: To you, then, the lyric comes before the actual music. Or maybe I'm reading into your post a little too much. If I were to take a poem by, say, Langston Hughes (many of his poems had a structure similar to that of blues songs) and put it to music, would it become a blues song of Langston Highes' poetry, or would it be a blues song that happens to use a poem by Langston Hughes for its lyrics? It seems to me that the origin of the lyric would matter, but then, is the lyric absorbed into the music, or does it have an identity beyond the way it is phrased in the song? How does that identity change once it is used in a song that utilizes different emphasis?
Take, for example, the noticeably different phrasing of the lyrics of "Baby Please Don't Go" when you compare Big Bill Broonzy's rendition to that of Muddy Waters. And then Aerosmith's version is a different story entirely. Or Roscoe Holcombs (pre)bluegrass rendition of "House of The Rising Sun" to Bob Dylan's and then to the one done by the Animals.
You asked for the difference between Folk and Blues, but I remember a thread a few months ago where people could not agree on what was the blues.
One description of a classic blues song is the call and response. Two measures of singing followed by 2 measures of listening for a response. Though I cannot quote with certainty, I find that most folk songs tell a flowing story. The phrasing of the melody is more continuous. ---------- intermediate level (+) player per the Adam Gussow Scale, Started playing 2001
Ballads are about somebody else; they're sung in the third person about other people--usually large, mythic personalities. "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" and "Staggolee" are ballads--and they're blues ballads.
Blues are about the singer; they're sung in the first person ("I'm going to Chicago....") or the second person ("You're a mean mistreater," or "You know you done me wrong, baby"). Occasionally they're sung in the third person when it's really the first person singing about himself ("Trouble is all poor Lightnin's ever seen....").
Another distinction: ballads tend to be NARRATIVE (they tend to tell stories) while blues are often MEDITATIVE (they evoke moods; each verse offers a variation on a theme rather than the next chapter in a story).
Tf, yeah, about three quarters of my songs start as words on a page and then music gets added later. The rest are usually things I write singing in the car where the words and the melody share the birthing process.
You could use a pop song chord progression and a Langston Hughes poem and it might sound bluesy because of the lyrics if you sang it all melancholy. I know it might not be the most technically accurate, but if you had no music theory and someone else with no real music theory came in moping and asked you to play the blues for them, would you look for something in 12 bar or something that sounded mopey? I guess my definition might be a heavily focused on the 'I got the blues' variety of blues- 'Saint James Infirmary' instead of 'Bad to the Bone'.
Adam, that's a great definition. Is the first person song sung as third person an expansion of the royal we/and or the people who talk about themselves in the third person or is it a sort of veiled reference to give some Plausible deniability if to protect the innocent or to hide some stretched facts? Also, what about a first person narrative? I've got a song I wrote in sort of a hypothetical first person (I'm not going down to New York City to shoot anyone!) but it's a story about why I'm going down to New York City to shoot someone. (They stole my girl and made her go missing, (also hypothetical)). I don't lament the events, just describe them and say what I'm going to do about it. ---------- Nate Facebook Thread Organizer (A list of all sorts of useful threads)
Adam: That is indeed a useful distinction -- I hadn't ever thought of blues songs as meditative by definition.
When I say the ballad form, I'm talking, literally, about the form. It's simply a metrical arrangement that can be phrased differently in different places, be it on the page, or in music. That distinction, then, is useful in terms of placing various genres of the structural form into context.
To be clear, this is a poetry and poetics class -- for some reason, my professor assumed that I was knowledgeable because I happen to play a few instruments and record blues/indie rock/folk oriented music. How woefully mistaken was she...
nacoran: its interesting that you start most of your songs on the page. I'm the complete opposite, I need the melody before I have the words, especially given that different melodies call for different emphasis. That's where I distinguish lyrics and poetry -- I deal primarily with the latter, and the task of adapting the habits I've developed writing upon paper and silence to expression in music has been quite an adventure.
I still can't seem to determine where I stand regarding the ownership of lyrics in relation to music (I could also call it their agency, which I believe would be quite appropriate), but this has been -- and hopefully will continue to be -- an interesting discussion.
