Post 423: 'WORKING MAN BLUES'

In 1923 the 37-year-old cornet-playing band-leader Joe 'King' Oliver and his 25-year-old pianist Lil Hardin (who had a music diploma from Fisk University, Nashville, and who later became Mrs. Louis Armstrong) composed Working Man Blues - sometimes written as Workingman's Blues.

At the time, King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band had a residency at Lincoln Gardens, 459, East 31st Street, Chicago - not far from the Lake. (As far as I can tell, there is today a glass office block on the site.) The band made a recording of Working Man Blues for the Gennett label in Richmond, Indiana, on 3 October 1923. You may listen to it BY CLICKING HERE.

It's a really good piece for the repertoire of our bands and easy to master. 

As you see, there are just three short and simple sections. The first (A) is only a 12-bar blues, using a pretty riff. The second (B) is a 16-bar theme using The Four-Leaf Clover chord progression. (You can read about that progression BY CLICKING HERE.)

Section (B) is structured to include three opportunities for 2-bar breaks. Johnny Dodds makes the most of those in that 1923 recording.

The third 'theme' (C) involves free-style improvising over another 12-bar blues structure, but this time allowing a 'break' in bars 7 and 8. Oliver's band had the clarinet, cornet and trombone (Honoré Dutrey) respectively taking these breaks.

The tune is rounded off by a neat 2-bar CODA.

Some bands today, unlike Oliver himself, make more of Themes (A) and (B), staying on them for longer, or even dropping Theme (C) altogether.

Oliver chooses to devote the whole of the second half of the performance to three choruses of Theme (C).

He was constrained by the limited amount of time for which a 78 rpm record could play. Bands today are freed from such constraint and - with more choruses - tend to make the tune last much longer. However, as I have said elsewhere, a short performance can often be more effective than a longer one (especially if the musicians have nothing special to 'say'). For me, Oliver's original recorded version feels just right.

On the choice of key, some bands today play the piece in F. It sounds fine in that key and is perhaps for some musicians a little easier than Lil Hardin and Oliver's choice of Ab.

To watch a clear and reverential performance of Working Man Blues by a much later band (The Peruna Jazzmen) CLICK HERE.

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The book Playing Traditional Jazz by Pops Coffee is available from Amazon.

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.