Post 534: 'COME BACK SWEET PAPA' - PAUL BARBARIN, LUIS RUSSELL AND LOUIS ARMSTRONG

'Come Back Sweet Papa', composed by Paul Barbarin and Luis Russell, was recorded by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five in Chicago on 22 February, 1926. You can hear that two-and-a-half-minute recording by clicking here.

Paul Barbarin

'Come Back Sweet Papa' has a good melody and is fairly easy to play, especially as its chord progression is simple. The 16-bar Verse makes good use of the 'Nowhere Chord'; and the Chorus is a straightforward 32-bar (16 + 16, with a 'break' on Bars 15 and 16, as in dozens of other traditional jazz classics).

I used to play this tune ten years ago but, when I needed it recently, I had to re-learn it and was reminded what a good tune it is. I keep it in one of my mini-filofaxes (see below), where I had written it out in the transposed key of C (correct for the trumpet and other Bb instruments) but of course that means Concert Bb to the band as a whole.

Armstrong chose to use six bars from the final eight of the Chorus as the basis for an Introduction; and his band played the Verse only in the middle of the recording, as a sort of Interlude. The Hot Five also added a neat little four-bar Coda of stop chords. But of course it is up to any band today to treat the total 16 bars of Verse and 32 bars of Chorus in any way and order that they like.

Isn't it amazing, by the way, that you can get all the information you need to play a great jazz classic on just 20 square inches of notepaper?

But you can find a much tidier - and probably more accurate - lead-sheet on the site of the great Lasse Collin, at:
http://cjam.lassecollin.se/songs3/comebacksweetpapa160122.html

Post 309: THE NOWHERE CHORD AND THE CLAPHAM JUNCTION CHORD

Listening to Wabash Blues, I was reminded that what 'makes' this tune is the 13th bar (measure), where we suddenly land on a note and chord that sound alien but are in fact just right.

Don't know what I mean? Well, hear what happens at 30 - 32 seconds into this video (click on to view) and again (more conspicuously) from 1 minute 42 seconds to 1 minute 44 seconds.

Checking it out, I found it's the chord on the flattened 6th of the key in which the tune is played. So, if you are playing in C, the flattened 6th would be the chord of Ab. If you're playing in F, it would be the chord of Db:

And so on.

The flattened 6th is a chord that rarely appears in our music but, whenever it pops up, it creates a special effect.

I discussed this with my friend Ralph Hunt and he told me that among banjo players such as himself it is known as the 'Nowhere Chord'. That sounded really interesting. Did it mean the chord that led nowhere? Did it mean the chord that seemed to come from nowhere? Unfortunately the explanation was much more mundane: it came from the tune 'Out of Nowhere', in which the chord plays a prominent part.

The led us to wonder what other tunes we could think of in which the listeners are hit at some point with the chord on the flattened 6th. In five minutes we came up with these:

Bye Bye Blues (on the word 'blues': you can hear it, can't you?)

Come Back Sweet Papa (very emphatically in the Verse)
I Never Knew What a Girl Could Do (both in the verse and in the main theme)

Love Songs of the Nile
Oriental Strut (in the main theme)

Oh, You Beautiful Doll

Marie (30th bar)

Mama's Gone, Goodbye (Mama's gone, Mama's gone goodbye)

My Melancholy Baby (in the second half of each of the first two bars):

San (it makes the Chorus truly distinctive)
Sorry (bars 3 & 4, for example)
Golden Leaf Strut (bars 25 and 26)

Henry Kiel reminds me that four more are:
Alabama Jubilee (in both Verse and Chorus)
Angry
Black and Blue (Middle Eight)
Dancing With Tears in My Eyes

But no doubt you will tell me there are more......

And while we're on the subject of these strange named chords, did you know there is one called 'The Clapham Junction Chord'? I learned about it from The Oxford Companion to Music. It is the chord of the 7th diminished. For example, in the key of C, it would contain B, D, F, and Ab.

Why Clapham Junction? Because that is a railway station in South London from which routes branch off in many directions. In the same way, when you play this chord, you can modulate into any one of several different chords to follow it.