Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form

Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form

Stoia, Nicholas

Hardcover

Series: Oxford Studies in Music Theory

Pop/RockMusic Theory

ISBN10: 0190881976
ISBN13: 9780190881979
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Jan 28 2021
Pages: 276
Weight: 1.50
Height: 0.90 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.10
Language: English
As children, many of us learn to sing, If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. But despite the familiarity of this tune, few of us realize that what we're singing is actually part of a pervasive - and centuries-old - musical scheme. This particular pattern, the Sweet Thing scheme, has generated a large group of songs spanning a broad range of topics, genres, and time periods, but all related through a specific stanzaic form. Early twentieth-century blues songs My Babe and Motherless Children, country songs Peg and Awl and Crawdad Song, and gospel songs Pure Religion and This Train use this form, along with popular songs like Ray Charles's I Got a Woman, The Beatles's One After 909, and the Velvet Underground's I'm Waiting for the Man.

Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form studies one of the most productive and enduring shared musical resources in North American vernacular music. Author Nicholas Stoia offers the most comprehensive examination to date of the long history of the Sweet Thing scheme, exploring how it made its way from sixteenth-century Scotland to eighteenth-century British broadside ballads to nineteenth-century American ragtime. Stoia also examines the form in various contexts, including early blues and country music, and moving forward to rhythm and blues, soul, and rock music, connecting these modern forms to their ancient roots. Through this close look at a ubiquitous musical from, Sweet Thing shows us how it has linked listeners and musicians alike across the boundaries of genre, race, and even time.

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