Post 413: I - II7 - V7 - I : THE FOUR-LEAF CHORD PROGRESSION

What do all the following tunes have in common?

Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None Of My Jelly Roll 

Big Butter and Egg Man
Big Chief Battleaxe (Main Theme)

Button Up Your Overcoat 

By the Light of the Silvery Moon
Congratulations 

Darktown Strutters Ball 

Destination Moon 

Do Do Blues (Nothing Can Be Right...)
Don’t Sweetheart Me 

Down In Honky Tonk Town 

Down In Jungle Town 

Eccentric [first theme]
Exactly Like You 

Honey
I Can't Escape 

If You Were The Only Girl In The World 

Jersey Bounce 

I Like Bananas Because They Have No Bones 

I Love You So Much It Hurts Me
I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy
I’m Looking Over A Four-Leaf Clover 

I'm Nobody's Baby
Lulu's Back in Town [in half-bars] 

Ma, He's Making Eyes At Me
Mandy, Make Up Your Mind

Me, Myself and I
Memories 

My Cutie's Due at Two to Two
New Orleans Shuffle
Oh, You Beautiful Doll 

On Treasure Island 

Peg o' My Heart 

Put on Your Old Grey Bonnet [the verse - not the refrain]
Red Hot Mamma
Six or Seven Times

Somebody Else Is Taking My Place 

Toot Toot Tootsie

True: You Don't Love Me
Ory’s Creole Trombone  [main theme]

Underneath the Arches
Walking My Baby Back Home
Working Man Blues [2nd theme]
You Made Me Love You

The answer is that they all use one of the most common chord patterns - usually called the 'Four-Leaf' progression.

What happens is that the tune starts on the Tonic Chord and then follows this with the commonest chord progression of all - known to musicians as II - V - I. So a tune beginning on the chord of C major, for example, would progress on to D major (the chord of the second note of the scale), followed by the chord of G7 (the dominant seventh - the fifth note of the scale) before returning to C major. A very satisfying 8-bar musical phrase can be built on two bars each of these four chords.

It is the basis of that iconic song of the music hall era, My Old Man Said Follow The Van. This song, made famous by Marie Lloyd, was written at the end of the Nineteenth Century by Fred Leigh and Charles Collins.

The chord sequence was most common in the early Twentieth Century. Famous tunes using it were Oh, You Beautiful Doll of 1911 (with music by Nat D. Ayer), The Darktown Strutters Ball (written by Shelton Brooks in 1917), and Button Up Your Overcoat (1928, with music by Ray Henderson).

Nat D. Ayer used it again in 1916 to start his lovely song If You Were The Only Girl In The World.

Exactly Like You, Destination Moon, Don’t Sweetheart Me, Con Conrad's 1940 hit Ma, He's Making Eyes At Me, Memories (the Robert Van Alstyne tune), On Treasure Island, and Somebody Else Is Taking My Place, Peg o' My Heart, Jersey Bounce, I Can't Escape, and Congratulations are eleven more tunes you may know: they are all in the Four-Leaf pattern. The Progression is sometimes used in 16-bar tunes, too: an example is Red Hot Mama of 1924.

Lil Hardin and King Oliver used the structure - exactly as in my example on the staves above - for the whole 8-bar (repeated) structure of the main theme in his Working Man Blues (1923).

And another tune in which the entire structure of the first, second and final eights is built on the pattern is that great Chris Yacich classic from 1935 I Like Bananas Because They Have No Bones.

Specifically in the field of traditional jazz good examples are Down In Jungle Town, Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None Of My Jelly Roll, the main theme of Ory’s Creole Trombone (written and recorded by the great Kid Ory in 1922) and Down In Honky Tonk Town.

In fact Down In Honky Tonk Town begins with four bars on each of the chords ( 1 - 1 - 1 - 1 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 2 etc.); this is a feature it has in common with the ever-popular and eponymous I’m Looking Over A Four-Leaf Clover (with music composed in 1927 by Harry M. Woods).

And another interesting variant is You Made Me Love You (1913, with music by James V. Monaco). After two bars on the tonic, it has just one bar on the second chord followed by just one on the dominant 7th. And Lulu's Back in Town follows the pattern in half-bars.

I am keeping things as simple as I can. I know that if we were to see the original piano sheet music of these songs, we would often find the use of four different chords in one bar, for example. What I am giving is the general sweep of the changing harmonies.

In connection with the FOUR-LEAF pattern, for example, some tunes begin with one bar on the tonic and then have one bar on the VI7th before moving on to the 'II'. My correspondent Allen Robnett has kindly emphasised this point and indicated some of the tunes to which this applies. He writes:

I think the following songs are improved by (and some demand)  the pattern   I  VI7  II7  V7  I:

Button Up Your Overcoat; 

If You Were The Only Girl In The World;

Memories;

Oh, You Beautiful Doll;

Peg O' My Heart;

Somebody Else Is Taking My Place.

It could be argued that the tonic chord can be substituted for the VI7, but then it could also be argued that you can play everything with just I, IV and V (and, unfortunately, some people do just that.)

Allen is right on both counts.

Post 230: WHAT JIMMY MCHUGH AND DOROTHY FIELDS DID FOR US

It started when I noticed what a terrific tune I'm Living In a Great Big Way is. In the streets of New Orleans, the best dancers and bands make quite something of it. See this video for example: CLICK HERE TO VIEW.

I wondered who composed this song. I found it was one of the batch of compositions by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields that traditional jazz bands have taken to their hearts.

Jimmy and Dorothy

You hardly ever hear a traditional jazz programme that does not include something by the formidable Fields and McHugh team. Jimmy McHugh wrote the music; and Dorothy Fields provided the lyrics.

Think of these, for example:

I Can't Give You Anything But Love
Exactly Like You
Magnolia's Wedding Day
On the Sunny Side of the Street
Don't Blame Me
I'm in the Mood for Love
I'm Living in a Great Big Way
Diga Diga Doo

And then there are some good numbers rarely played these days, even though they were recorded by the likes of Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller:

Take It 'Way
Blue Again
Raisin' the Roof

And there were plenty more songs from the partnership, some of which would still make good material for our bands. Examples are:

Cuban Love Song

I Must Have That Man

I Feel a Song Coming On

I Won't Dance

Thank You For a Lovely Evening

The Way You Look Tonight

Lost in a Fog

All these - and many more tunes - were produced by the pair over a period of just seven years. Quite remarkable. At other times in their lives, they both composed with other partners. Jimmy wrote many songs in collaboration with Ted Koehler, Al Dubin and Harold Adamson. Dorothy went on to set lyrics to the music of such luminaries as Jerome Kern and Cole Porter. With Kern, she gave us the unforgettable advice: 'Pick yourself up; dust yourself off; start all over again.' 

Dorothy Fields

Jimmy and Dorothy wrote their songs mostly for revues and shows. For example, I Can't Give You Anything But Love comes from their score for the Broadway Musical Blackbirds of 1928. On the Sunny Side of the Street and Exactly Like You both come from the same show - Lew Leslie's International Revue. They also provided title songs for films.

Who exactly were Jimmy and Dorothy?

James Francis McHugh from Boston was born in 1894. His father - a plumber - at first wanted Jimmy to join him in the business. But the family was quite musical too. In his early years Jimmy worked as rehearsal pianist for Boston Opera House and then as a demonstrator for Irving Berlin's publishing company. In 1921 he settled in New York as professional manager to the Jack Mills music publishing business (where he also found a job later for Dorothy). He went on to compose over 500 songs, including many for stage shows and films, and they were performed by pretty well all the big singing stars from 1930 onwards. McHugh lived until 1969.

Dorothy Fields - eleven years younger than McHugh - was the daughter of a Polish immigrant (Lewis Maurice Schoenfeld) who was in show business - first as a comedian and then as a Broadway producer. Her brothers Joseph and Herbert were also in the entertainment industry, mainly as writers. So show business was in the family's blood. Dorothy grew up in New Jersey and New York. While at school, she started regularly writing poems. She worked for a short time as a teacher and laboratory assistant. According to one source, Dorothy appeared on the stage in London, where she was said to have acted in the Midnight Follies at the Metropole in the 1920s.

At the age of 18, Dorothy married Dr. Jack. J. Wiener of New York. She was soon noticed as a talented lyric-writer; and her seven-year collaboration with McHugh began when she was only 23 years old. She went on to write the lyrics for about 400 songs. In the final years of their collaboration, they worked in Hollywood.

Dorothy's second marriage, in 1938, produced two children. Dorothy died at the age of 68, in 1974.

Why is it that the work of the Fields-McHugh partnership lends itself so well to interpretation by traditional jazz bands? I think these are the three reasons:

(1) McHugh composed good, simple, catchy melodies and structured them in such a way (usually 32 bars, based on the pattern  a - a - b - a) that they could easily be caught and memorised after a couple of hearings.

(2) His harmonic structures are relatively simple. There's not too much of a challenge in most of his (often basic and repetitive) chord progressions, so they are not difficult for jazzers to improvise on.

(3) Dorothy Fields - whether writing lyrics for comic or whimsical settings, or for more heartfelt and emotional songs - manages to find lyrics that strike us as 'just right'. You wouldn't want to change a word. She could skilfully express sophisticated and complex notions in idiomatic and colloquial language and sharp images.

So let's carry on, as the elephant said, Livin' in a Great Big Way!