The Red Thread: 12 Bar Blues Part 2:B
Lesson 2, Part B: Modern Influences
and Genre-Bending
Walking Bass and
a Discussion on Genre Crossovers
Walking Bass
Stepping outside of strictly the elements demonstrated in the unnamed backing track that inspired this lesson series, another cross-genre technique originating out of the blues is a walking bass line. While more advanced for a elementary-aged general music ensemble, it is by no means out of reach with thoughtful scaffolding, and adds a rich sonic and rhythmic dimension to their arrangement. In the spirit of the Red Thread of 12 Bar Blues, this is another pedagogical point of discovery to access techniques that students can master and identify in contemporary music.
Not solely belonging to blues - and difficult to pin down historically because of recording technology being unable to capture the timbre of upright bass prior to the 1920's - a walking bass pattern is traced to Delta blues music and early New Orleans jazz through the varied and diverse accompaniment patterns of the 1920's, practiced by various bassists including but not limited to Bill Johnson, Pops Foster, and Milt Hinton. A walking bass pattern is achieved by playing scale and chord tones one at a time in driving quarter notes, much like the four-on-the-floor bass and kick drum pattern heard in our backing track. This serves as forward momentum and harmonic definition for any song it is used in, and can be equated to the steady rhythm of walking feet, lending the term to the accompaniment pattern.
Walking bass is also defined as outlining the scales and chords with minimal stepwise movement chord to chord, finding the most direct pathway between the harmonies. The difference between the four-on-the-floor tonic of our backing track and a walking bass line would look like this:
Notice how the pentatonic scale tones transition by a whole step or less from chord to chord, and how the direction of the scale inverts depending on where the next chord will land? This adds to the cyclical, hypnotic forward momentum that 12 Bar Blues is indicative of, and this an accompaniment pattern that is prevalent in blues, jazz of every era, and rock music. Although we think of walking bass as a “jazz thing,” you can hear it in as wide ranging examples as All My Loving by the Beatles, Crazy Little Thing Called Love by Queen, and Time Bomb by Rancid.
Prepping students to play a walking bass line has actually already begun by this point in the lesson series - all the way back in Lesson 1 with the marching-in-place body percussion - feeling quarter notes when first exploring the 12 Bar Blues progression. It continued by mapping out the chord changes on the Orff instruments, feeling and physically internalizing the distance between the I/IV/V tonic notes. To stretch into a walking bass line, starting with just the one chord is a manageable beginning. Set up in D major pentatonic, have them start practicing sticking do, re, mi, sol, sol, mi, re, do over two measures. I like to use a tonic drone and a metronome to give them an anchor during practice time. This exercise is notated like this:
This is the best time in the process to reinforce R/L/R/L sticking, and dial that in before they are trying to navigate chord changes. I also highly recommend marking the D/G/A bars with orange/blue/purple color-coded label dots as quick visual reference points as they begin to explore the walking accompaniment. Next, have them practice that exact set of notes but inverted:
This inversion will prime them for the flexible nature of the full bass line, and is a good talking point on scales, inversion, and tonality. This will also do wonders for improvisational language, which will be explored in the next lesson.
The next spot to work on is playing through the IV chord and returning to the I chord, or the 5th - 8th bars of the 12 Bar Blues Progression. This will introduce playing up and down the middle range of the xylophone, and then continuing down into the range of the I chord. Set up in D Pentatonic, this is notated thus:
Combining the two chords at this point knits together the three main objectives of a walking bass line - steady quarter note rhythms, outlining chordal harmony, and minimizing transitional intervals between chords. Notice how the scale of the I chord is in the same inversion as Version 2 of the last exercise, which now creates a stepwise transition between the IV and the I chord? Plenty of time should be given to explore, label, and master the transition between chords.
At this point, I like to provide a manipulative activity giving students some time to problem solve the changes and options of getting between the I/IV/V chords. The activity below outlines the color-coded 12 Bar Blues progression, and manipulatives are cut out and arranged to assemble a walking bass line. The objective in this activity is to match the scale pattern that belongs to each bar of the harmonic progression, and then to arrange each variation of that measure to line up with as little intervallic space between it and the measures before and after.
**Note: you will need to make two copies of the cut-out manipulatives, some examples in the I and IV chords are used more than once
After the initial instrument prep work at the instruments, exploring how to play and connect the I and IV chords, the final step is to dovetail off the discoveries from the Mix n’ Match and finally connect all chords and all measures. Give plenty of time to isolate each of the changes, and to master the different variations that link the changes together. Your strong, independent players should take charge of this role, and following up on the rhythm section discussion from Lesson 2:A, walking bass players should be anchored with the bass bar playing tonic whole notes notes right in the middle of the ensemble.
The full arrangement with percussion tresillo, the banjo-inspired glockenspiel part, and the walking bassline can be found here:
Additional Research in Genre-Bending for Consideration and Discussion
Traditional blues conventions are still alive and well in the 21st century music world. One of the most poignant examples, summed up in a single track, is Shemekia Copeland’s The Other Woman. In just the introduction and first verse, we are given a front row seat to the iconic 12 bar progression, the Delta-style B.B. King-influenced blues guitar, the emphasized back beats, the soulful, mournfully powerful command of vocal range and affectation in Shemekia’s voice and lyrics, and the stop-and-turn-around 12th-bar figures. This is traditional blues holding its ground in the modern era, but crossover elements still creep in with the use of a B-3 Hammond organ patch, which symbolizes an earlier genre-bend from the 1960's, as blues branched out from it’s Delta origins.
The intersection and crossover between blues, jazz, gospel blues, and soul and its efficacious blurring of genre lines in the 1960's seems to stem in large part from the crossover of the B-3 Hammond organ. One of the Hammond B-3 organ’s first big moves out of church and into jazz was with organist Wild Bill Davis who, inspired by the work of Fats Waller, started using the Hammond in innovative ways in the early ’50s. But it was Jimmy Smith, the master of the Hammond B-3 organ, that really served as a guiding force in the birth of a new genre. Smith and his Hammond are in full view in his blazing 1965 version of Got My Mojo Workin, a song popularized by Muddy Waters in 1957. My own indulgent research for this series of articles confirms that Smith carved out a bold new path for the soul jazz genre - and the use of the organ in jazz - with this rippin track, which is best enjoyed cranked way up while cooking dinner. The sacred sound of the Hammond infused into jazz was in and of itself a bridge and a novel link between secular and sacred, but R&B performers had already been pulling from their church roots to find pop success before the crossover of the organ. Clara Ward, a popular and influential pop and gospel singer, told Ebony in a 1961 interview, “Gospel songs are sermons in rhythm. Call them blues with a message.” This was a whole realm of Black musical forms and traditions, distilled.
At the same time in history that gospel blues and soul jazz was evolving out of Delta Blues, so too was the sound that we consider country music being etched out into genre-specific and marketing labels. A distinctly-American style of twangy string instruments like guitar, fiddle, banjo, and pedal steel, simple harmonies, repetitive and often narrative and/or confessional lyrics depicting rural, and Southern American lifestyles and cultural idioms has dominated its market since its inception coming out of WWII. That Red Thread weaves right through this tradition as 12 Bar blues is the frame work of famous country songs as wide ranging as Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash, Give Me One Reason by Tracy Chapman, and our unnamed backing track.
And if your ear needs just a bit of support to hear the 12 Bar Blues alive and well in country music, listening through this simple guitar tutorial that layers a 12 Bar progression with lots of cross picking and country rhythmic techniques will peel back the thin veneer that lives between these two traditions.
If diving into the analysis of country singles and finding it to be rooted in historically Black blues and R&B, and also sharing all the same characteristics of strictly blues songs (twangy string instruments like guitar, fiddle, banjo, and pedal steel, simple harmonies, repetitive and often narrative and/or confessional lyrics depicting rural, and Southern American lifestyles and cultural idioms) has you confused on drawing the line between genres, it is because the line is superfluous and artificial - a construction of racial marketing. The original distinction between blues and country was the invention of record company executives, and their racial motivation wasn’t exactly a sneaky subterfuge. The era when country music was called “hillbilly,” and blues and jazz were sold as “race music” - a term coined in 1922 by Okeh Records - was at the height of segregation practices in the American cultural and judiciary practices. After World War II, hillbilly was renamed “country and western,” and race music became “rhythm and blues”, or just “blues,” in an effort to provide white music to white people, and keep Black musicians off the airwaves. The actual pedagogical and compositional differences between the categories is a shaky argument at best, mirroring the vague definition differences between the Bo Diddley Beat and the Son Clave Rhythm.
An even deeper rabbit hole into the very blurry lines between country and blues could be explored by listening to the differences between Dolly Parton’s iconic Jolene and Beyonce’s newly-debuted cover, also released with Cowboy Carter in 2024. The use and instrumentation of iconic funky backbeats, country-style rhythm guitar, and straightforward blues form all mixed in with southern soul-style vocals in both versions is a fascinating cross section of what is considered country, blues, or pop.
It is important to recognize that beyond the form and style of Blues, many of the most ubiquitous characteristics of what we consider American music, regardless of genre, are widely considered to be based on and steeped in Black musicality. For a more comprehensive outline of Black presence in American music, check out Episode 3, The Birth of American Music, from the critically acclaimed podcast 1619.
And of course, returning to strictly “country” in definition, racial politics and label segregation can not contain the infectious qualities of the music created by prominent Black country musicians throughout the music’s history. Despite the efforts of segregating “country” into separate categories like “bluegrass/hillbilly” and “blues/r&b,” the first million-selling country album was by Blues-Master Ray Charles. It is important to understand the difference between blurry lines in genre, which countless creatives across generations have explored and mastered, and hard lines in cultural, judicial, and monetary gatekeeping. The idea of an artist “staying in their lane” (a discussion very present in the conversation around the release of the album that our backing track hails from) in regards to genre often boils down to marketing and an unspoken consensus in what a genre’s intended audience is comfortable listening to. This phenomena continues today, like how in 2019, Lil Nas X’s hit song “Old Town Road” topped country music charts, until Billboard pulled the song from it’s ranking, stating it didn’t “embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart,” despite being a clearly cross-over country track that enjoyed immense popularity before country marketing got involved.
Beyoncé herself shared a similar sentiment in an Instagram post revealing the ultra-Americana cover art for the album: “My hope is that years from now, the mention of an artist’s race, as it relates to releasing genres of music, will be irrelevant.”
Moving away from music that holds clear ancestry in the Southern Blues traditions, the presence of 12 Bar Blues in modern pop and rock music can be easily found as well. That I-IV-V cyclical harmony can still be found Jon Batiste’s Freedom and Duffy’s Mercy, and River by Leon Bridges. In fact, the characteristics of Blues can be stretched into all kinds of other genres, as evidenced in this playlist alone. The White Stripes use the progression in Ball and Biscuit, and Norah Jones uses it in In the Morning. None of these tracks are blues songs, all of them belong to different rock and pop sub-genres, and yet the Red Thread of 12 Bar Blues persists through them all.
The list of artists, tracks, and projects that source the 12 Bar Blues is overwhelmingly enormous and varied, and will be continuously added to in the decades to come. The 12 Bar Blues, like the tresillo rhythm, is one of those things that, once your ear is tuned to recognize, you start to recognize all over the place. The characteristic elements of blues-based musical expression are likewise pervasively utilized across time, across genre definition, and across the societal dividers we have societally created and evolved over the many decades since the blues emerged in the Mississippi Delta at the turn of the 20th century. Perhaps it is the versatility of the 12-bar format, perhaps it is a subconscious link to a distinctly American past, or perhaps there’s just something magical and inspiring in the template.
Justine Marie Sullivan is an elemental music and movement educator from Denver, Colorado. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Music Education, Performance, and Composition, as well as Orff-Schulwerk Certification. She splits her professional career between instructing in classroom and studio settings ranging from kindergarten through undergraduate music education courses, and in marketing/social media/design projects for local and national music education professional development and advocacy groups, including ACEMM.