I spent quite a while on the phone today, being asked questions about John Lee Williamson by a reporter from Aurora, Illinois. This year is the 75th anniversary of the recording and release of "Good Morning Schoolgirl," aka "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl," a song that has been recorded many many times by blues and rock acts.
One thing that came up in the course of the conversation is that GMS (as I'll call it) is, to my knowledge, absolutely unique among blues songs in one respect: it's a nine-and-a-half bar blues.
The great preponderance of recorded blues songs are 8, 12, or 16 bars long. "Key to the Highway," "Sweet Home Chicago," and "My Babe" are three representative recordings at those respective bar lengths, and each of them, too, has been recorded many times. There are some blues in the North Mississippi tradition and elsewhere that are basically one-chord blues. (John Lee Hooker plays a lot of one-chord blues.) There are a few classics, like "Worried Life Blues," that move differently. And there are some obvious exceptions among country bluesmen, which I note below.
But GMS has an extremely rare chord progression--not rare in terms of the chords used (they're the same old I, IV, and V), but rare in terms of the way the song is structured, and especially so for a song that has been covered by seemingly everybody in the country blues, urban blues, and rock blues tradition.
Although I've known the song for decades and offer a lesson on this website, I wanted to be 100% sure of what I was saying to this reporter. So I patched up the original SBW recording and counted it out loud. I also counted the version that Charlie Hilbert and I do. If you count it so that "Good morning little...." are the lead-in and beat 1 of bar 1 is the word "school," you get the following progression, with each roman numeral and each dot representing one beat:
I...I...IV...IV. I...I... V...IV...I...I.V.
The last six bars of the song are identical to a 12-bar blues: they're the standard bar 7-12 chord progression. The first four bars, by contrast, SEEM to be heading in the direction of a standard 8-bar blues, but bar 4, that IV chord, is sounded for only two beats, not four.
This is the genius of the song. It seems to be one kind of song--it starts off like a certain kind of 8-bar blues--"Sitting on Top of the World," for example--that follows two bars of I chord with two bars of IV chord, but then it chops things off--that second IV chord only lasts two beats, not four--and takes you in an unexpected and yet entirely familiar direction.
We're all familiar, of course, with the unevenness of country blues playing. Guys like Honeyboy Edwards often leave uneven amounts of space between vocal phrases. Thirteen-and-a-half bar blues and the like are common in the country blues. Thirteen-and-a-half bars this time around, twelve-and-a-half bars next time around, and so forth. Whatever the bluesman feels like is right. You can do that when you're playing solo; you can do that when you're in a musical culture where stretching the bar is acceptable practice.
But GMS is something different: It's absolutely standardized, at least in the original recording and in any later version that tracks the original (including Charlie and my recording, and my recording on Kick and Stomp), at nine-and-a-half bars. That's the progression, chorus after chorus after chorus. It feels entirely natural. It lingers in the mind. John Lee dug down into the DNA of the blues progression and found a remarkable mutation that has become one of the most covered blues compositions of all time.
Here's a question for the scholars on this forum: Can you name another nine-and-a-half bar blues? I can't, but I suspect that somebody has set new words, another song, to SBW's chord progression.
Last Edited by on Apr 16, 2012 2:21 PM
Nice finds! Both Minnie's (1941) and Fuller's (1938) songs were attempts to capitalize on the popularity of Williamson's (1937). Fuller's even begins his songs with one of Williamson's stanzas.
I was familiar with a zydeco version of Minnie's song, but I'd never heard the original, and Fuller's is new to me. Great finds.
While we're playing trace the influence, this seems to have grown out of the Memphis Minnie takeoff:
Also, Dylan's "Obviously 5 Believers" (I couldn't find a version on YouTube) seems to come right of the Chuck Berry version.
Last Edited by on Apr 16, 2012 3:59 PM
"Airplane Blues," the Fuller song I posted above, was recorded by Sleepy John Estes in 1935. Perhaps the 9 1/2 bar format originated in Brownsville. Estes, Bonds and Nixon all played together (along with Yank Rachell and others). There's harmonica on Estes' "Airplane Blues" as well (presumably also Nixon). I haven't gotten a chance to listen to the entirety of "Back and Side Blues" (just the preview on iTunes). From that preview, I didn't catch anything about a schoolgirl or an airplane. It's possible the tune went from Bonds to Estes to SBW.
An associate of Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon, Bonds played very much in the same rural Brownsville style that the Estes-Nixon team popularized in the '20s and '30s. Curiously, either Estes or Nixon (but never both of them together) played on all of Bonds's recordings. The music to one of Bonds's songs, "Back and Side Blues" (1934), became a standard blues melody when John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson from nearby Jackson, TN, used it in his classic "Good Morning, (Little) School Girl" (1937). According to Nixon, Bonds was shot to death, while sitting on his front porch, by a nearsighted neighbor who mistook him for another man.
Hey, thanks for that great scholarship. So "Back and Side Blues" is where it starts. Brownsville and Jackson are only 25 miles apart, so we're really talking about a local sound, a local inflection on the blues form. I wonder what gets it going? I'm not surprised to learn that SBW didn't invent it from whole cloth. I need to get a copy of that original.....
And yes: If Jim O'Neal says it, it IS true. He's a superb blues scholar.
Last Edited by on Apr 16, 2012 5:13 PM
I've just purchased "Back and Side Blues" and listened to it once. It's definitely the root source, but here's something interesting: it's a 10 bar blues, not a nine-and-a-half bar blues. The harp playing is primitive, too.
EDITED TO ADD: Actually, it veers from 9 1/2 to 10 bars and back again. Very strange. But definitely antecedent to SBW's more famous song.
Last Edited by on Apr 16, 2012 5:27 PM
