Chords for Wynton at Harvard, Chapter 20: Blues Fundamentals

The blues was rural music codified by W.C. Handy, father of the blues,
and made cidified by jazz musicians and composers of the American popular song.
It was folk music, pop music, and fine art all at once.
It was traveling music, born to take you wherever you wanted to go.
And America was a country whose people were always looking beyond the next horizon.
Well, we still are, as it is.
A journey could literally change your position in life.
Well, it could be a train ride from Mississippi to Chicago.
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_ _ _ [B] _ _ _ It could be a metaphorical ride on the Underground Railroad. _ _ _ _
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_ _ Or the metaphysical journey [B] every Sunday [E] to the glory land itself.
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_ _ See, the blues is a train, and the train meant freedom, and it still does,
even if we've never been around one.
It's now a dead metaphor.
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It was guitar picking.
It was whining [C] fiddles.
And it was the cries and shouts of people in heat played on horns.
[Bbm] It was people singing about God in church and people in whorehouses crying over something lost that would never be found.
[Dm] The blues resonated with everyone in the country at the same time [Db] because it had little bits of everybody in it.
It was the shuffle combining the African six and the Western march.
_ _ _ It was the three [Gb] fundamental harmonies of Western music [G] that [C] _ those old Greeks used to talk about.
It was the pentatonic scales of Eastern [Bb] music and the American spiritual.
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_ _ _ [Bb] _ _ _ It was a [C] movement to the subdominant chord, _ _ _ like so many hymns and fiddlers reels and trio strains of marches and the third strains of rags.
That subdominant motion always makes music sound holy.
[F] _ _ _ [C] _ _ _
[F] _ _ _ [C] _ Well, nobody can really say where the blues came from, except from God.
It just appeared and was [F] perfect.
Old Charlie Poole and his North Carolina Ramblers played a pile of it.
It came steaming out of King Buddy Bolden's horn in New Orleans, and the singing [N] breakman Jimmy Rogers had run away from his home twice by the age of 13 to play some of it.
W.C. Handy heard it and understood immediately this was freedom from slavery.
It was fear of being lynched.
It was bad feelings.
It was poverty.
It was deeper than that.
It was your woman left with your best friend.
_ It was Frankie shooting her cheating Johnny.
It was about natural catastrophes getting high.
It's about your wife dying.
Yes, the blues were trivial and cheap and profound and deep like all of us.
And it was about freedom to tell it like it is in public.
And the blues told you everything going to be all right this morning.
Everything will be all right.
And it was because in spite of all the tragic things that had happened, you could sing and play and laugh and cry and mean it.
It was earned optimism.
It made you talk and it taught you how to listen.
My rain, he said, I'm going to buy me a pistol just as long as I am taught.
Shoot my man and catch a cannonball.
If he won't have me, he won't have no gal at all.
Bessie Smith said he's got that sweet something.
And I told my girlfriend Lou from the way she's raving.
She must have gone and tried it to _ Sunhouse _ told you look like it was 10,000 people standing around the baring ground.
I didn't know I loved to do that till they let it down.
Well, I got up this morning at the break of day, just hugging the pillow where my good gal used to lay.
[Ab] Whether it was the boogie woogie of me, Lux Lewis or the rock and roll of Jerry Lee Lewis, the singing of effort waters or the Chicago electric of muddy waters.
The blues was a train whose destination was freedom.
Freedom from the blue demons of [A] life that afflict us all.
The blues didn't have to have a happy ending.
It was the happy ending.
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_ [G] It's all right, baby. _ _ _
Baby, it's all right. _ _ _ _ _
Well, [C] it's all right, baby.
_ _ _ [A] Baby, it's [G] all right. _ _ _ _
_ [D] It's all right, baby.
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Baby, it's [G] all right. _ _ _ _ _
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[Cm] _ _ [Gm] _ _ _ _ _ _
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_ [Gm] _ _ _ _ _ _ [E] _
_ [G] _ _ _ _ [Gm] _ _ [G] _
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[G] _ It's all right, baby.
Well, it's all right, baby. _ _
Baby, it's all right.
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_ [C] _ It's all right, baby. _ _ _
[D] Baby, it's all right.
[G] _ _ _ [Em] _ _
_ [D] _ It's all right, baby.
[C] _ _
Baby, it's [G] all [C] right.
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