Do you remember the first time you heard that old campground classic, Found a Peanut? I'll bet you don't. I'll bet you feel like you were born already knowing that song. It's a meme, a sound virus that lives in the software of your brain, and it will fulfill it's purpose by planting itself in the brains of your children some fateful car trip in the future as you infect them with its easy-to-learn form and simple, repetitive melody.
The melody is stolen from My Darlin' Clementine. which is an AAA form song, the A referring to the melody chunk which repeats. It's also a verse/chorus song, which means that every other melody chunk has completely new words, followed by a lyric chunk you've heard before.
Verse:
In a cavern, in a canyon
excavating for a mine,
lived a miner, forty-niner,
and his daughter Clementine.
Chorus:
Oh my darlin', oh my darlin'
oh my darlin', Clementine,
You are lost and gone forever,
dreadful sorrow, Clementine.
Verse:
Light she was, and like a sparrow...
Chorus:
Oh my darlin', oh my darlin'...
It's called a verse/chorus song because everyone joins in at the repeated chunk. If you never heard the song before, you could still sing the chorus every time it came around. The new information is in the verse.
It's a participation song because... well, what else is it good for? It's meant to get the group coyote-ing the chorus. In the old days of the wandering-minstrel-I, the tavern would fill up with eager fans dying to hear a new story. and the minstrel would oblige them, and keep them engaged, by giving them a repeating chorus. These days, even AABA (more on that later) or more complicated structures can be participatory if everyone in the room knows them. Think of Jada's song fests. Most of those old songs didn't start out to be participatory, but after hearing them a hundred times, it's fun to sing them in a group because everyone knows them, mostly.
A participation song like Found a Peanut doles out new information so slowly that only children can stand to sing it. Instead of a whole new verse with a repeating chorus, the new information is in the first line. So the kid who has never heard the song either stops singing for the first line, or mumbles, because after he's heard it he can sing the whole rest of the chunk.
Participation songs are deadly to an audience there to listen rather than to kareoke. The only saving grace with Found a Peanut is that it is a circular story, although it takes ten minutes to tell this little tale:
Found a peanut
Cracked it open
It was Rotten
Ate it anyway
Got a stomach ache
Called the doctor
Penicillin
Operation
Died anyway
Went to heaven
wouldn't take me
went the other way
didn't want me
Was a dream
Then I woke up
Found a peanut
Oh my god! Sixteen choruses! Is the irony of the ending really worth it? Well... it pays off better than 100 choruses of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, another participation song whose only new information is a single digit. Only evil children intent on grinding an adult's patience down to their last nerve would sing down to the last bottle. Is it engaging to an audience? No. Don't write this kind of song for a musical. Duh.
The verse/chorus song is another matter, especially where the verse is different musically than the chorus. Technically,that kind of song is really ABAB, the letters referring to musical chunks that repeat. 99% of all pop songs today are in this form or a slight variation of it. One of the reasons for this form's popularity, is the desire of the song writer to have her audience learn the song and sing it after only a couple hearings (as opposed to learning it right off the bat). Repetition helps the learning process.
And the reason I bothered talking about boring old participation song form is that sometimes there is too much information in a song. Sometimes, repetition is good. It's all because the brain processes music as sound, and when you add words to music the brain gets confused. It processes the words as sound, too. Then it realizes its mistake, and sends the words to the other part of the brain where language is decoded. This inserts a time delay. You hear the sounds and THEN you extract meaning. If the lyrics are clear, and their meaning is logical, no problem. The delay is slight. If the lyrics require special decoding to extract the
meaning, then the delay is longer and pretty soon the music, and the other words attached to it have already moved on and the brain has to skip that chunk just to get back in sync. Information is lost. Meaning is lost.
Ted and I hardly used intense repetition. But in Abyssinia, when we needed a big number for the chorus, I gave him a verse, and then a chorus which only said:
What are you doin', brother?
I'm pickin' up the pieces.
What are you doin', brother?
I'm pickin' the pieces up.
Then we repeated the same four lines and that made up the chorus. This form was not in our usual style, but we went with it. And Ted came up with a C section that was nothing but repetition!
Pickin' the pieces, pickin' the pieces, pickin' the pieces up!
Pickin' the pieces, pickin' the pieces, pickin' the pieces up!
This started with the basses added, then repeated with the tenors added, then repeated with the altos added, then repeated with the second sopranos added, then repeated with the first sopranos added, then FINALLY a return to the original chorus. Six two-line repetitions. No new information. That was ballsy. Click here to listen.
Only a good composer could pull that off, and make the build both logical and emotional, and Ted is a good composer.
ASSIGNMENT
Ok, enough lecture. Here's what I want you to do. I told you that we're going to improv a show, and that's exactly what I want you to do. Grab some index cards and corner a friend. Put an X on one of the cards and ask your friend to write down on that card:
a container
Put an O on one of the cards and ask for an occupation.
On the other cards, have them write down:
a mood
a color
an action
1. Don't look at the cards yet. Go back to your room, or a private area. Put aside the O card. Hold the X card and the other three cards. Now, imagine yourself filling in for Wayne Brady on “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”, and your bit is to improvise a bouncy drinking song. You have to do three verses with a repeating chorus. Each chorus is about the container suggested on the X card, so start off with a chorus. Repeat a lot so you can remember it. Don't look at the other three cards until just before you do each verse.
Go for it! Remember it and write it down. Or use your camera to record it so you can write it down later. Improv it. Don't worry about how good or bad it is, you can clean it up a little bit when you write it down.
2. Give me the names of two songs you like that are verse/chorus. Tell me which part of the song is the verse, and which the chorus.
3. Give me the name of a song you hate, but everybody else loves. It can be any form or style. We'll give it a good examination next time.
4. This has nothing to do with what I've talked about, but everything to do with what I want to teach you. Take the O card. Write lyrics for the Ice Cream Truck (Mr. Softee) melody and incorporate the suggestion on the card. Do your best. Do NOT make it about ice cream. Click here for song
Next session: Introduction to AABA
JIM
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