This shift in textual content is the lyrical counterpart to the electrification, urbanization, and growing formal complexity that mark the transformation of prewar blues and country music into postwar rhythm and blues and rock and roll. A second aim of this essay is to show how the de-emphasis of these same travel formulas in rhythm and blues and rock and roll reflects the relative stability of the postwar period: in these later genres, a greater proportion of blues lyric formulas relate more directly to anxiety caused by problems in love relationships, rather than to anxiety caused by movement and change. Often these formulas reflect the direct influence of blues on country music, but they also attest to the long saturation of the country music tradition itself with the same lyrical motifs. Although the compulsion for white Southerners to migrate was not connected to entrenched racism, as it was for Black Southerners, large segments of both the Black and white populations nonetheless experienced massive displacement and urbanization in the period before the Second World War, and early blues and country music reflect these conditions with lyric formulas emphasizing movement and anxiety.
One object of this essay is to show how the preference for certain formulas in prewar country music-like the preference for the same formulas in prewar blues-reflects the large-scale migrations and social disruptions of the period, and the anxiety, loss, and broken relationships that these changes left in their wake. The same lyric formulas most common in early blues also appear frequently in contemporaneous country music, in rhythm and blues, and in rock and roll, three popular genres with close connections to blues. What has received less attention is the appearance of these same lyrical conventions in other genres, and how there, too, the emphasis on certain formulas reflects social and economic conditions. Blues is the genre for which scholars have most conclusively established the widespread use of lyric formulas, and this study briefly recounts recent work that identifies the most common lyric formulas in commercially recorded blues from the early 1920s to the early 1940s-research showing that the high frequency of certain formulas reflects the societal circumstances of much of the African American population during that period.
Lyric formulas are fragments of lyrical content-usually lines or half lines-that are shared among singers and recognized by both musicians and listeners. Singers and songwriters in many genres of American popular music rely on lyric formulas for the creation of songs. Copyright © 2020 Society for Music Theory
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