INSIDE THE MUSIC

Key: F (Blues mixed mode)

Novel Features: Major/minor interchange, Parallelism, Blues microtonality Tempo: ≈71bpm

This is a revisiting of Memphis Minnie’s and Kansas Joe McCoy’s 1929 classic and oftrecorded country blues song. Here Page’s electric slide guitar, Plant’s blues harp and Bonham’s immense drum sound (enhanced by the use of semiquaver delay) transport the tune from the intimate voice and finger-picked guitar texture of the original to a full-on 70s blues-rock context.

There is, however, a preservation of fundamental early blues concepts. Memphis Minnie, who co-wrote and performed guitar on the original track, was a highly accomplished, hugely influential and woefully under-acknowledged blues guitarist. Page, perhaps inspired by Memphis Minnie’s use of open G (or ‘Spanish’) tuning (from low to high DGDGBE), opts for the even more unorthodox F tuning (FACFCF), with judicious use of slide. A second guitar uses standard tuning and also employs slide, complementing the harmonica and reinforcing the blues aesthetic.

While the chosen instruments have stylistic connotations they also influence the musical mechanics. In the case of the slide guitar it facilitates two musical mechanisms:

1) parallelism – the open-string tuning is essentially made mobile by the slide and can be

transposed to any pitch with little effort.

2) microtonality – the notes in between frets are readily available.

At the heart of much blues harmony and melody is a bittersweet mixture of major and minor implication. It’s a common misconception that all blues is ‘just minor blues scales’; most players use a sophisticated and paced mix of major and minor thirds, major and minor sevenths as well as other ‘blue notes’.

One way to examine this in the context of Levee is by looking at some of the chords used. These are all parallel ‘slides’ of the open-string F major chords. Three of these chords (F, Bb and C) belong to F major and three (Ab, Db, C) belong to F-minor. A bittersweet balance of hope and sadness, all from one moveable chord.

Figure 1: Some transpositions of F major implying either F major or F minor.

F major and F minor (and blues scales based around these) are also used but what is fundamental (and extraordinarily beautiful) about blues expression is that the notes between the major and minor scale degrees are used to great expressive effect. Sometimes they’re used as passing tones, but also as targets, which embed the major-minor ambiguity deeply. These most readily appear between the major and minor third – sometimes called the ‘neutral third’ or the ‘blues curl’, and occasionally between the major and minor seventh (the ‘neutral seventh’). You can hear these implied in Page’s guitars and Plant’s vocal inflection and blues harmonica playing, demonstrating a genuine rather than pastiched connection to the core of the blues style, despite the forward-thinking invention elsewhere on the album.

Figure 2: Two fundamental blues microtones occur between the major and minor third, and the major and minor seventh scale degrees