Practical steps toward a blues-based approach to sonata forms, using single and double-themed variation form as a way to blur the boundaries between sonata form and variation technique with strategic use of V-IV chord movement

This is probably going to be the last post of 2024 and so it's going to be a relatively short and practical one and focused just on practical ways to develop an approach to sonata forms that draws upon ragtime and blues vocabularies, with an eye toward blurring the boundaries between sonata forms and continuous variation forms (single and double themes)

Ethan Hein discusses Robert Johnson's "Kind Hearted Woman", and a theory of blues tonality deriving from overtone series on I and IV--barring Partchian otonality & utonality, the binding thread may literally be a series of harmonics

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/kind-hearted-woman-blues/

Ethan Hein references the mythologizing habits that have surrounded Robert Johnson as nonsense and I agree.  I know that many people want to believe the myth that Robert Johnson went to the crossroads to sell his soul to the devil to play guitar better.  Avoiding the physical ordeals of plantation work and getting formal training in music sounds far, far more plausible.  If you get too immersed in some times of work there's not a lot of time or energy left to do as much musical anything.  My earliest years working were in vegetable canneries down in Oregon and there's nothing like even an eight hour shift of doing that sort of work to leave you less than ideally situated to write a bunch of music, and that's cannery work replete with union benefits and the like, not plantation anything.

I finished Bruce Cornforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow's recent biography on Robert Johnson earlier this year, so their case that Robert Johnson apprenticed or studied guitar formally with Ike Zimmerman may be something the mythologizers want to contest and let them make their case. Johnson's music is too complex to be explained as the work of a man who did everything by "feel" and didn't think through what he was doing.  

Ethan Hein on John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen", some observations about harmonic rhythm and all the songs that came after the original that missed that part of its rhythm

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/boogie-chillen/

Ethan Hein has gotten around to blogging about one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite blues musicians, John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen".  His analysis is well worth reading. Go give that a read before you read what I'm about to add about how many subsequent tributes to this classic blues song miss a crucial concept called harmonic rhythm.