In part 2 of this week's episode, Elizabeth Newton and Franklin Bruno continue their discussion on the bridge in popular songs.

This episode was produced by David Thurmaier.

SMT Pod's theme music was written by Zhangcheng Lu with closing music by David Voss. For supplementary materials on this episode and more information on our authors and composers, check out our website: https://smt-pod.org/episodes/season01/.

[SMT-Pod theme music playing]

Welcome to SMT-Pod, the premiere audio publication of the Society for Music Theory. In this episode, Elizabeth Newton and Franklin Bruno continue their conversation about the bridge in pop music.

"Tracks of my tears" is a case where the bridge is serving that purpose but it’s also precious in that it just comes once. Right?

Yes

And so, yeah, it’s interesting. Maybe we can turn to an example where the bridge actually does repeat. For example, in older forms that follow an AABA whereby the B is the bridge. And a lot of those cases, if I understand this correctly, the AABA functions basically as a single chorus that might be repeated 2 or 3 times as a unit throughout a single recording.

Yes, now that’s a little bit complicated because the AABA form has history of its own but we tend to associate that term- the idea of 32-bar AABA form with Tin Pan Alley and musical theatre songs. I think if you don’t think about it, you think it’s always been around. I would trace it to the mid-20s being where it becomes a dominant form. Those songs were almost always written with a verse before the AABA chorus. And this is a kind of legacy of vaudeville and musical theatre. There would be a section where maybe the joke is being set up, or whatever. And then you sing the part that’s called the chorus, right? And many of these songs written with multiple verses and then alternating with the chorus. Eventually, song writers like Gershwin or Rogers and Hart and Kern started paying more attention to the chorus at the expense of the verse with the fact that pop recordings would not record the verse. And then this also happened in jazz practice. Almost all the songs that we think of as jazz standards, like “Body and Soul,” there’s some other section.

Yeah, but it’s dropped.

But you never hear it. It gets dropped in favor of what in jazz is called the head arrangement. You play the melody or a paraphrase of the melody first, and then there’s a series of solos over the 32-bar cycle, but you never go to this other verse section. So, basically, jazz musicians use the AABA chorus as a sort jumping off point for a series of cycles in that form. And, if the thing you started with has a bridge, well you are going to go to the bridge changes every so often in the solo too, so yes, you do hear the bridge multiple times. And I would point out that lots of songs that didn’t come directly from Tin Pan Alley writers, like lots Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn songs, or Monk’s compositions, often, in this period, once it became the dominant commercial form, it was used widely in jazz composition. And the AABA often without a verse, does survive into rhythm and blues and early rock n roll, certainly Buddy Holly or the Everly Brothers and also country.

Yeah, like we’ve spoken about “Your cheatin’ heart” which brings a lot these features together. It’s AABA where the B is the bridge, just a short bridge. And that whole AABA is repeated later in the tune. Right?

Yes, on the record certainly

Yeah. And then with sections from that excerpted as the basis for solo material to be like the chords played beneath the solo. So, I’ll bring that up here.

["Your Cheatin’ Heart" playing]

So this is a case for me, if I were just in a state of distracted listening, maybe had this on in the background and doing chores, I would hear this whole section as a series of straight up repetitions in part because I tend to be like in my musicology work, I tend to be focusing on lyrics and rhyme and poetry. So, I would hear the repetition of the rhyme scheme. And I might not, having my ear drawn to the changes, I might just skim over that V of V that happens over the bridge.

Right, you do hear it when it’s pointed out.

Right, yea I definitely hear it when it’s pointed out. And I hear that V of V, which is something one of my favorite song writers, Eliot Smith, he brings out that move a lot, not necessarily in bridges. It adds a lot of richness and direction. But my experience with the song made me think about something you talk about in your book. Which is that tendency among certain critics or scholars who are writing about bridges to minimize the bridge or kind of as you say, explain away the bridge. And I can just totally see how that’s easy to do. And I was curious if you could talk a little more about that.

Let me just say a couple things about the record and then answer that more generally. So, yes, this is a 32-bar AABA song with some harmonic contract at the bridge, As you implied, really there are 4 chords in the song. All of the A sections by which I mean the first 8 bars, the second 8 bars, and the last 8 bars, right? You’re only going to hear the I IV V. Another thing, since you mentioned lyrics, notice that Your Cheatin’ Heart, the title appears in the first two lines, “Your cheatin’ heart will make you weap” and then it appears again at the end of the second A section, “Your cheatin’ heart will tell on you”. That whole 16-bars form, what some would call a double period. Then you get 2 lines: “When tears come down like fallin’ rain you’ll toss around and call my name.”

The only section in which the time doesn’t appear. There is a lyrical contrast in how much emphasis there is on the central image of the song. And then you end “you’ll walk the floor the way I do” and then you repeat “your cheatin’ heart will tell on you.” So you bring back the main material. So lyrically, there is enough contrast for me to fit it into my general category there, right? But, on the other hand, it is very much the case that the prosody of the song is utterly constant. We could talk about what Hank Williams adds with his phrasing. But every section of that, every phrase of that, is 4 notes, 4 syllables, ending on the downbeat. It’s 3 quarter notes to the downbeat. It’s bone-simple in a good way. And the only contrast is created, well the melody changes, with the support of a different order of chords at the bridge at the B section “Where tears come down.” There we IV I II V. And that’s the only section that ends on the dominant.

And as you say, it has a V of V or an applied dominant, right, a D or maybe a D7, so you get this little bit of a circle of fifths gesture going back into the A section or main section. You get a II V I. And notice this is by adding just one chord. It flies right by and it doesn’t violate our sense that country music is supposed to be out of elemental musical materials, right? It’s crafted, but it’s not drawing attention to itself the way that say, Gerome Kerr, making some enharmonic turn in the end, in the middle of “Smoke gets in your eyes.” And this is why, by the way, I’m not in any way, mocking or making fun of the fact that the bridge chords in “We are never getting back together” are the same as the rest of the chords. This is just the harmonic idioms of the period. The way that certain chord loops and progressions have been the harmonic idioms of other periods or that the 12-bar blues template determines a huge chunk of a genre, or what have you. There’s no criticism implied in terms of simplicity or complexity or anything like that.

I took a class once about sonata form. And we talked about the kind of details about all these 19th-century debates among scholars of that time about sonata form and what was significant about it. And you found some people privileging thematic repetition and/or variation and contrast. And then you found others privileging harmonic variation or repetition or contrast as the drivers of significance in that form. That makes me think of this issue of bridges. Thinking about the Hank Williams case with that slight harmonic variation on the bridge as opposed to the Taylor Swift tune where, as you say, the chords remain the same, even though there’s other variation happening. And so, I guess, would you say, is it just a matter of opinion in terms of what a person as a listener or critic is privileging?

I’m tempted to say that people with a certain kind of musicological or an especially music theoretical ear are maybe likely to start getting excited about the fact that there’s interesting harmonic variation or a modulation or something like that, right? There’s a little bit of a prejudice in favor of that, and look, we know that there are contemporary debates about what that privileging means right? So that’s something I’m careful not to, I think it has to be part of the story, or harmony has to be part of the story, but yes, you could focus more on melody. You could focus more on texture and timbre. Different tools for different songs and different styles because if you listen to “Your cheatin heart” and you’re looking for a drop at the bridge, or looking for a big production change. No! There’s a band playing in front of a mic.

Although something that happens is that, in the bridge, I believe it’s the lap steel that’s answering him, and then when he goes back to the A section, the main response instrument is the fiddle. So, the most general things I would say without trying to privilege any particular parameter is that the way that a bridge works is that some elements are going to be contrastive and some are going to continue or be held constant. Except in the most extreme cases where’s there’s almost a song within a song. Or an edit like “In a day in the life” or Joni Mitchell’s “Harry’s House” which has a whole other jazz tone as a cover of Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross song, in the middle of the song, and then goes back to her thing. Yes. You can do that. You can change everything. But most of the time, you’re going to change some things. And since you brought up different parameters, this isn’t a topic I don’t think we’re going to be able to get into deeply today. I mean, you may say “what about rhythm?”

Well I mention that stop-time, rhythm arrangements, there’s a different type of syncopation in “Tracks of my Tears.” Another large category that you could talk about is the breakdown. And maybe this part of the history leading to what we now call the drop. I mean a breakdown sort of classically in a funk tune being where almost everything except the percussion and drums leaves, harmonic content is not the point. Usually instrumental, maybe you get chanting or exhortation in James Brown, and then eventually maybe the bass comes back. And, if it’s a break down, it builds back up. You wouldn’t call it a break down if on the other side of it you weren’t going back to the original groove. So, for me, there is some sort of broad continuity in terms of being a contrasting middle section, even though the techniques being used for a harmonically modulating bridge, the bridge of like I said a Jerome Kern, or for that matter Beatles song, as opposed to a break down in the funk sense.

Or a bridge like “Sex Machine” by James Brown, which is of course is one of the most famous bridges. And I do spend quite a bit of time on it. He asks the band “Should I take them to the bridge, should I take them to the bridge?” like 4 times. And then the groove suddenly changes. There is a key change. The guitar riff goes from E9 to A9, there’s a difference in the patterns, and eventually he says, “hit it like you did at the top” I think are the exact words. And then you get some horn hits and you go back to the A groove. So, he calls it a bridge. So I’m going to call it a bridge. But it’s not an AABA song. And it’s not exactly a Verse/Chorus/Verse song either.

Franklin, could you tell us about an early instance of bridge in song form?

Sure, I am nervous about being someone who makes claims about the first of something, right? I think that the first rock n roll record is kind of parlor game, it’s a silly question. So similarly, with the first bridge, I will say that I think you can find the structure before the term is in use. It really starts as a sort of professional shop-talk, and in fact, my understanding, is that songwriters were calling the same secyion the “release” earlier on. Whether the song writer called it a bridge is not the only issue here, and also you have the English “middle eight”, which is an English synonym, whether it’s 8 bars or not. I mean there’s AABA form in folk ballads. In some versions of melodies such as Cecil Sharp took down, or Greensleeves, or hymns or Christmas carols and all that, right?

But, I think that the innovation, the moment that’s important in American popular music, and gets the story I’m talking about started, is the combination of some degree of harmonic contrast, somewhat different chords, and different prosody, different rhyme scheme. Maybe some sections are a lot like each line rhythms with the rest of it, except in the middle it’s a couplet. Like a limerick. A limerick is often something I use to get people on to this AABBA is the rhyme scheme and the BB is shorter. That’s kind of what a lot of early bridges are. And you could find this in folk forms. You can find this at 16-bar length. For me the 32-bar song, and especially among songs that there’s some chance that you might have heard today because it has long performance history, is a song “I ain’t got nobody.” Let’s play a couple versions and I do want to say something about the weird publication history of this song.

[2 versions of “I ain’t got nobody” playing]

So, Franklin, is this a case of this song form that you talked about earlier where you have an AABA chorus that would have been preface by a verse?

Yes, on both of those recordings, if you played them from the start, yes, if you played either of those records from the start, you’d hear a long fairly wordy verse about the romantic situation and why the singer is so lonely and so on. And then you get that AABA chorus. And I think on at least of them, you hear another verse, then another chorus, and that would be the typical teens or 20s style. To get clear on what we just heard. We just heard the first recording of “I ain’t got nobody” at 1916 by a white singer named Marion Harris, who at the time, would’ve been understood, in the record industry as a “blue’s singer” and you can’t see my scare quotes. She was actually the first person to record a vocal rendition of WC Handy’s “St Louis Blues.” And then we heard Bessie Smith’s version of the same song from 1925.

And we can say whatever we like about the difference in vocal approach and what you think is expressive and how those things function. What I want to focus on is what both song they are singing is, and the fact that they’re not singing it exactly the same way. “I ain’t got nobody” it has this tangled history. A pair of song writers. It’s easy to get confused about. Charles Warfield and David Young. Charles Warfield was a ragtime pianist who had been around since Scott Joplin days. They copyrighted a song called “I ain’t got nobody and nobody cares for me” apparently in 1914. And then Spencer Williams and Dave Peyton wrote a song called “I ain’t got nobody much” in 1915. Okay. That one was published with a credit to the white publisher. All 4 of these musicians, by the way, I forgot to say, are African American. This is an African American popular song.

It would have been categorized at the time as popular blues. It would have been sung in black vaudeville or in black musical theatre. In fact, it was published in Chicago. It’s not directly a product of Tin Pan Alley. It’s certainly a professional and commercial product but it’s not coming out of the world that we think of AABA form as being associated with it. It’s a little bit earlier. It’s noticed, like I said, 1915, Gershwin is not publishing yet. Irving Berlin is but Alexander’s Ragtime Band is in a different form ABAC form, no bridge. So that’s why I focus on this song. It’s really interesting early example of an AABA song, by professional African American writers associated with jazz and ragtime that also has this quality of combining melodic and prosodic or rhythmic contrast at the bridge. The lyrics to the original Warfield Young version, the first publication, is just “I ain’t got nobody and nobody cares for me.” That’s 8 bars. That’s A.

And the hook of the song, is the sings: “I ain’t got nobody” is the descending chromatic thing. That’s the memorable thing in the song. And then, that’s why, sings “I’m sad and lonely”, speaks: “say won’t you get a chance with me” second A section. Then you get this shorter couplet, sings/speaks: “Cuz I’ll sing sweet songs all the time if you will be a pal of mine.” And then you just repeat, kind of like “In your Cheatin’ Heart”, you repeat the first line. Sings/speaks “Cuz I ain’t got nobody and nobody cares for me.” So, the contrast, the denser rhyme scheme, the different syllable count, is corned off in the B section or bridge. The Spencer Williams song, that was also published, and both songs were published, (laughs) in fact both copyrights were bought by the same publisher so no one would sue each other. And Spencer Williams, because he stayed in the business, now tends to be credited with the song. But who knows, right?

In that version, if you look at the sheet music, the bridge becomes “I’ll sing sweet” and then there’s a rest, “I’ll sing sweet” (pause) “Love songs honey (pause) all the time (pause) if you’ll (pause) come and be my (pause) sweet baby mine.” There’s these gaps in the melody that aren’t present in the other publication. And my theory about this is that it’s less regular, it’s less metrically regular, and I think it’s a kind of notational devise for indicating what might have been a more improvisatory approach. It’s very mild. It’s not heavily syncopated. But it is indicating “oh put some breaths in this line, don’t sing it lyrically, start on the second beat, and so on.” And what’s interesting is that if you listen to those records closely and you know the publications, neither Marion Harris nor Bessie Smith sings the song exactly as written.

Marion Harris sings “my sweet *daddy* mine” a couple times, which is not in the printed lyric. And this is obviously a racialized white blues kind of gesture. And Bessie Smith, on the other hand, sings “I’ll sing good songs” instead “sweet songs all the time,” and at the end she says “if someone will be a *pal* of mine.” She sings a “pal of mine”, which is in the more obscure version of the song. And the point I want to make about that, it’s not to be pedantic about different details, although I’m certainly capable of that, is that in this case, the bridge, is sort of fungible. There are all these possible variations about how it’s approached, both as to what the exact lyric is, how it’s treated, what the rhythmic approach is. It’s not radically different.

There’s a sense in which we want to say, “same song,” right? To sing “I ain’t got nobody” you gotta sing the chromatic descending thing in the middle section, otherwise no one knows what song it is. But this bridge, you could do a whole lot with it. And if we played other versions by Louis Armstrong, or Fats Waller, or maybe even more famously at this point, Louis Prima’s melody with “Just a gigolo” and then David Lee Roth’s cover of the Louis Prima’s version in the 80s, you will hear even more dramatic, you might say distortion or improvisations about what this written bridge is. So it’s been a really fecund vehicles for performers.

Let’s take a listen to the Fats Waller version and hear what he does with it.

[music playing]

Characteristically Fats Waller plays fast and loose with the lyrics. And notice, I want to say 1933, it might be 1935, but notice the song is already 15-17 years old at this point. Everyone knows it. Songs had longer shelf lives. Songs as songs as opposed to particular recordings, they were recorded many times. And so, no one was confused, what is Fats Waller singing, right? He sings, “providin’ providin’ providin’”, very syncopated- and then crams in “you’d be a very good personal friend of mine,” or whatever it is exactly. By the way, I will point out, that when he gets back to the A line, he sings, “I ain’t got nobody” and then he interjects, “nobody much,” seemingly to me to refer to the title of one of the early publications that nobody sings, right? So I feel like, for him and Bessie Smith, I think there must’ve been awareness of multiple versions of these songs. It fascinating to know. We don’t know who sang these songs in vaudeville either.

So, I’ve never heard, did you say it was popular blues.

People use different terms. Some people say vaudeville blues. Which is to say, published blues based on notated songs, usually, in the WC Handy tradition that were commercially recorded first by white bands and singers, and then after 1920, after starting with maybe Smith’s “Crazy Blues”, by black singers, mostly women, this category is often differentiated from country blue, acoustic blues, the 12-bar tradition, that however long it existed orally, begins to be recorded, you know people like Blind Lemon Jefferson in the later 1920s. And this is a kind of urban, rural divide. And of course, 12-bar blues, well there’s bridge-less form, right? It’s strophic.

You sing the structure several times, maybe more times live, than on record. And it does contrast with these AABA forms that are more associated with the popular and urban traditions. But the only point I’m pressing is that this shouldn’t be seen in my view as entirely something like an African American versus Anglo American approach to song form, given that some of the pioneers of AABA form, and some of the great practitioners of that form and the bridge in general, from Spencer Williams to Monk, from whom my title comes, to Smokey Robinson, have obviously been important African American contributors, creators, innovators, in the history of the bridge.

So thinking about the bridge in the context of the early music industry in the United States, encompassing these different genres: blues, vaudeville blues, country blues- and the way that these song forms get record and packaged and sold, and referred to, to my understand, by the 20s getting referred to as “jazz,” jazz meaning hits and popular music in the Tin Pan Alley context. I’m curious, in these years to my mind in the early 20s as the music industry grows in the US, what happens to the bridge? Because we can see from these examples that you’ve just brought to us with “I ain’t got nobody”. We hear the bridge as this kind of almost free wheeling moment, when people can play with the conventions and nod back to prior versions, and once we start, once the music industry starts packaging these songs and recordings, does that kind of playfulness get lost or disbanded in new ways?

On the one hand, any given bridge, you don’t know how it’s exactly going to go, necessarily. There’s some surprise about how the retransition is going to work. But in certain genres, in certain context and periods, it’s almost de rigueur that there will be one. And also, look, the fact that the English term “middle 8”, in this whole 32-bar tradition, it’s 8 bars, you know it’s getting there. It might be interested in the way that it does, it might surprise you a little bit, but ultimately there’s a template. Increasingly, it became almost a commercial requirement. Music publisher, if someone came in off the street with a song, and they didn’t know what a 32-bar AABA song was, and where you repeat the title and where you don’t, uh, that song’s not gonna get published. So, the craft issues become issue of professionalization and commercialization. If you start looking at “how to write a hit song” guides for amateurs. It’s about, make sure you have an A section and a B section, and they’re both the same length, then you know, really about that mechanical.

So, now, this makes me curious. What would Adorno infamous critic of pop dribble, what would he say about bridges, or what did he say about bridges.

Well, you can’t see my “what would Adorno say” charm bracelet from here. What would he say, what did he say in the kind of infamous article on popular music, the one written in English with, I think a student or collaborator that no one seems to talk about much, sadly. Anyway, in that surprisingly he spends quite a bit of time on AABA form. And of course, he’s writing in, like I say, 1941, and he’s making an argument that the conventionalization of form, he says standardized form, is just one of many signs of the sort of bankruptcy of pop music and what’s its social meaning is. The fact that this form is so transparently structured, 8 bars, repeat that, do something different, go back to the first thing, it pre-digested for him, I think he says, the composition listens for the audience, right? You don’t have to do any work. And you might, we’ve been saying that “Oh the bridge is this moment of freedom, of difference, of contrast.”

Well, okay, but he points out, as I think in various ways I’ve pointed out throughout this conversation, in that form, in AABA, it always goes back, like whatever key it goes to, whatever modulation there might be, you always get back, virtually always through the dominant to the last A section. So it’s 8 bars that sort of portend, oh, there is another option, there’s another path, there’s freedom, there’s development, there’s autonomy, right? No. It’s only there to lead you back to the commercial hook. That’s essentially what he says. And, what’s interesting to me, I’m not so concerned “what did Adorno mean by jazz?” I’m interested in what he said about popular songs. As many things as you can criticize about Adorno’s sort of narrowness and Euro-centrism, he wasn’t describing the popular song form of his day incorrectly. He is seeing something that is actually there. And is frequently there, in songs that people think of as sort of the best of their period.

Cole Porter songs. They’re working a little but more cleverly with the formal model. But they are participating in it for commercial reasons. And the other thing that I would say, is that another popular music studies take on Adorno as traditionally been “oh, he was right about popular music before rock n roll but then Elvis happened, or the Beatles, or the Velvet Underground, or JZ,” Fine. Maybe you can say that. But I think it ought to be countenance that some of the things that he’s talking about, even formally, still have some continuity in genres after rock n roll, including R&B and country and soul and maybe the bridge isn’t always 8 bars, but the structure where you do something, you repeat something, you do something different, and then you do the first thing again, is not something that died out the moment that Sam Phillips flipped a switch in some studios.

And I guess it seems what’s at stake with this is whether that return of the material that already happened is exactly the same or refreshed in some significant way.

Sure. Refreshed is good. There’s a jazz credit who talks about the bridge, I think it’s Henry Martin, who talks about the bridge in “I got rhythm” or so-called rhythm changes in many jazz contrafacts as refreshing the form. It prepares you for the return. Is it the same or is it different? Well, those are almost metaphysical questions that I hesitate to get into. But I do think that what Adorno thinks is that what follows the bridge, the repetition, is just redundancy. And you do see, notice in a couple of the songs that we talked about, not only is it AABA, the first line is the same as the last line of the song “Your cheatin’ heart, I ain’t got nobody.” And that’s a commercial thing too. It’s like, you want to sell the title.

People have known that since Irving Berlin. But I think in many cases, it’s reasonable to say, look is all repetition mere repetition? Don’t you get a different feeling affect from Taylor Swift finally going into the last chorus? You know, the shout along chorus, “We’re never getting back together” after she’s been on the phone with you, right? And said that “This is exhausting” Right? That’s the last straw, and she can’t take it anymore and you really believe her when she sings it after that. And you can have relationships like that. I don’t want to be like “Well if Adorno had just heard Taylor Swift, you’d understand…” But I do think a more nuance, or I think a word I use a lot is iterative conception of repetition in general, has to be in play if we’re going to talk usefully about how it function in popular music. The second time you hear something, just isn’t the first time you’ve heard it.

And to close I’d love to hear you talk about the most important thing that you’ve learned in the course of listening to these different bridges and what do they tell us about popular music?

I think one lesson for me and I suppose it confirms something that I believed, is in some ways the degree to which there are continuities in 20th and early 21st century, and maybe going back a little into the 19th, you know, popular music that, yes, there are stylistic changes, there are moments that people have, for better or worse reasons, called revolutionary, but almost nothing that’s happened is not built on something that happened earlier. And that isn’t necessarily even such a happy thing to say, because I do think that all of this music, however much we love or make Spotify playlists, or admire it a great deal of it, including some of the music that people want to put forward as having a resistant quality.

It does take place at least in the context of the capitalist music industry, and the commodification of music, and even the division of music into works like songs or records and the way the copyrights system has functioned. I guess the lesson I want people to take from that, and maybe also the Adorno, or my reading of the Adorno, maybe don’t be so smug about the past. What you think has been overcome. Maybe the music of your generation, and I’m talking both to Boomers and anyone here, right? Maybe it’s not the only moment when something interesting and meaningful to its audience was happening. And don’t suppose that nothing that happened before this date is worth your attention or that nothing that happened after this date is worth your attention.

We'd like to give a huge shoutout first of all to Robert Fink for sharing thoughtful and insightful feedback on our topic. Big thanks as well to Bryan McPherson and to Chris Malenfy for their helpful advice. And finally, thank you to Jennifer Beavers, Megan Lyons, Katrina Roush, and the rest of the SMT-Pod for producing this awesome series.

Visit our website for supplemental materials related to this episode at smt-pod.org. And join in the conversation by tweeting us your questions and comments @SMT_Pod. SMT Pod's theme music was written by Zhangcheng Lu with closing music by David Voss. Thanks for listening!