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.