this video is sponsored by Skillshare! hey, welcome to 12tone! the story of music
history is a story of constant reinvention: new styles rise, have their moment in the
spotlight, and then fade away, reabsorbed into the surrounding culture. but every once in a while, a genre comes along
that's so special that it gets to stick around, influencing new musical ideas for generations
to come. we saw this with jazz, with rock, and we may
be in the process of seeing it with hip-hop too, but all of those are built on the back
of probably the most important musical style in the history of modern music: the Blues. it'd be impossible to describe the entire
genre of the Blues in one video, so today I'm just gonna focus on one of its most immediately
recognizable elements: the 12-bar blues progression. it's arguably the most influential chord progression
ever, used to great affect not just by Blues musicians but also by jazz, rock, and other
artists, but what exactly makes it so great? (tick, tick, tick, tick, tock) to answer that question, we're gonna have
to talk about the history of the 12-bar blues. the Blues, as a musical genre, was developed
in the late 1800s by black communities in the Deep South, based primarily on the influence
of traditional African music blended with elements of the European-based music of the
world they and their ancestors had been forcibly transplanted into. there's still a lot we don't know about this
early period of the Blues, in part because it was an almost exclusively oral tradition
shared in small communities of oppressed people, so a lot of the story has sadly been lost
along with the people who told it. musicologist Eileen Southern cites a New Orleans
Blues fiddler from the time as saying "ain't no first Blues! The Blues always been," and in a sense, that's
true. it's always hard to pin down the first example
of a new musical style, but in the case of the Blues, we don't even know the candidates. the progenitors of the genre have largely
been lost to history. but while we'll probably never know who invented
the Blues, we do know who helped popularize it, and a large amount of credit for that
belongs to a composer named W.C. Handy. according to Handy's autobiography, he was
first drawn to the Blues in 1903 at a Mississippi train station, where he heard a man singing
and playing what he described as the "weirdest music" he'd ever heard. it reminded Handy of the folk music of his
childhood in Alabama, and that encounter inspired him to experiment with these ideas in his
own work. this eventually led him to write Memphis Blues,
also known as Mr. Crump, which, though stylistically more like ragtime music than what you might
think of as the Blues today, is still widely considered one of the first published pieces
to use the now-famous 12-bar blues pattern, and Handy's success brought new attention
to the genre and its signature song form. so what is that form? well, like the Blues itself, it's hard to
precisely define. the most basic version, though, looks something
like this: we get four bars of the I chord, two bars of IV, go back to I for two more
bars, then V, IV, I, I, and even in this simple form, we can start to see what makes the Blues
approach to harmony so different from the traditional European one. European classical music is all about cadences
and resolutions: pieces feature long, winding progressions that eventually work their way
to a final resting point, often with the help of the famous V-I resolution, but the Blues
doesn't do that. the chords it uses would be familiar to any
student of the Common Practice era: I, IV, and V are collectively known as the primary
triads, because they're the three most important chords in the key. but they're not really arranged to give you
any sense of resolution: we only get the V chord for one bar, and instead of going back
to I, it slides down to IV. some theorists view this as an explicit rejection or modification
of European ideas, while others view it as simply the natural result of a different,
more African-influenced musical vocabulary. since we can't precisely trace its roots it's
hard to say for sure, but personally, if I had to bet, I'd lean toward the second explanation. but again, this is just the most basic version
of the 12-bar pattern. there's two changes that we almost always
see in modern Blues-based music. the first is what's called a turnaround, where
the I chord in the final bar is replaced with another chord, usually the V, in order to
mark the end of the phrase and set up a return to the top. the turnaround is also often marked by an
increase in dynamics and a strong rhythmic figure in order to make it more of an event,
standing out against the backdrop of the song. ending a phrase on the V chord like this helps
provide a sense of continuity: it creates dissonance, and by the time it resolves, the
progression's already started again. the other common change is replacing these
major triads with dominant 7th chords. this is a much more clear departure from the European
harmonic vocabulary: in Common Practice music, dominant 7th chords are seen as strongly directional. there's only one in each key, and playing
it points the listener's ear back toward that key's root. but in the blues, we see dominant 7ths all
over the place. sometimes they resolve where we'd expect,
but other times they seem perfectly happy to sit still, or go somewhere completely different. they're just not treated as directional devices. instead, they serve a different purpose: bite. there's some debate as to whether or not it's
accurate to describe them as dissonant, because that implies they want to resolve to some
sort of consonance, but either way, it's certainly true that the notes of the dominant 7th chord
rub against each other in a pretty noticeable way. the difference, though, is that this isn't
seen as a bad thing: it's just a part of the sound of the Blues. it's also a very convenient adaptation for
one of the Blues' most famous playing techniques: the slide guitar. many musicians would just tune their instrument
to an open chord, then slide a finger, bottleneck, metal bar, or even a knife up and down the
strings to play different chords. this meant that you could only really use one chord quality
or else you'd have to fret with additional fingers as well, so making everything dominant
made actually playing the chords a lot easier. but this is all further complicated by the
fact that these may not originally have been dominant 7ths at all. we're getting into contested historic territory
here, but some sources I found claimed that the dominant 7ths in the modern Blues progression
were actually an adaptation of the harmonic 7th chord. what's that? well, there's a good chance you've never heard
one before, because you can't play them on conventionally-tuned instruments, but basically…
ok, so here's the thing. when you hear a note, what you're really hearing
is a sound wave with a specific frequency, and when you hear multiple notes at once your
ear effectively calculates the ratio between those frequencies, which is what we call an
interval or, if you stack enough of them, a chord. the major triad pretty closely approximates
the ratio 4:5:6, so you might be wondering what happens if you slap a 7 on the end of
that. well, that gives you a harmonic 7th chord,
but the note you just added is about halfway between a minor 7th and a major 6th, which
means you're not gonna find it on your piano. however, since Blues guitarists often custom-tuned
their instrument by ear, it would've been relatively easy for them to include a harmonic
7th, giving them a chord that looked like a dominant 7th but was much more at rest with
itself. however, as far as I could find, this is just
speculation. again, there's a lot we don't know for certain
about the early days of the Blues. the strongest endorsement of this theory that
I could find is on the Wikipedia page for the harmonic 7th, which claims that "Frequent
use of this chord is one of the defining characteristics of blues harmony," but it doesn't include
a citation, and every other source I've looked at either describes this as an unproven theory
or just calls them dominant 7ths. now, if I had to bet, I'd say this explanation was
probably correct: it makes a lot of sense, both from a practical tuning perspective and
because Blues music does make frequent use of what're called blue notes, which are notes
in between the standard piano keys, including the harmonic 7th interval, but as for whether
the harmonic 7th chord was a foundational part of the early Blues tradition… I just don't know. it's possible someone else does, and I just
couldn't find it, but it's also very possible that this is another casualty of our lack
of records on early Blues culture. if you do have a definitive source on this,
though, please let me know. back to the progression, there's some other
common variations, like the quick-change Blues where you swap out the I chord in the second
bar for a brief visit to the IV, interrupting the otherwise incredibly long period of static
harmony and bringing in a bit more motion, but the Blues innovated with more than just
chords: at least as important as the harmony was what was happening over it. that is, the melody. I probably could've just said the melody,
couldn't I? anyway, Blues melodies were often built on
call-and-response patterns between the singer and their instrument, likely borrowing from
the African-American traditions of field hollers and spirituals. in terms of notes, the basic
phrases were fairly simple, but performances tended to feature significant embellishment
of those phrases, often involving moans, whistles, and notes from the Blues scale. this is, again, complicated: these days, the
term "Blues scale" usually refers to the collection of notes you get when you take the minor scale
(bang) remove the two notes a tritone apart to get minor pentatonic (bang) and then add
in the note a tritone above the root 'cause hey, why not? (bang) but in actual practice, Blues musicians
would often use notes from outside this collection, including, as I mentioned before, the famous
Blue notes, microtonal pitches that bent outside the traditional piano-key notes for the sake
of expression. and, of course, it's worth recognizing that
this scale doesn't actually contain most of the notes in our Blues progression. for starters,
the major 3rds from all our dominant 7th chords are nowhere to be found. by the rules of Common Practice, this scale
doesn't seem like it fits over the 12-bar blues. but if you listen to Blues-based music, then
you already know that it does, which is further evidence that the blues is just using a different
musical vocabulary. again, just like with the dominant chords,
what we might call dissonance doesn't really carry the same sense of tonal obligation here. it's just a part of the sound, an extra flavor
that the musicians can create, and that new approach to allegedly dissonant notes, viewing
them as valid sounds on their own instead of needing to resolve to something more consonant,
went on to have a profound influence on jazz, rock, funk, metal, country, hip-hop, and basically
every other genre that's developed in the last century or so. the Blues is everywhere. it's one of the most important musical inventions
in American history, and while there's certainly way more to it than just the 12-bar pattern,
that single progression is still ingrained in almost every corner of our modern musical
culture. the 12-bar blues is one of the first techniques
many musicians learn, and it's helped launch thousands of careers, but these days, if you
want to your music to reach an audience, you need to record it, and Skillshare has some
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deal. and hey, thanks for watching, thanks to our
Patreon patrons for making these videos possible, and extra special thanks to this video's Featured
Patron, Susan Jones. if you want to help out, and help us pick
the songs we analyze too, there's a link to our Patreon on screen now. you can also join our mailing list to find
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