"Play that Walking Bass!": The 12 Bar Blues Simulacrum in Music Education
Throughout the course of this semester at university, I've been having some increasingly agitated (and by that I mean I was getting agitated and everyone else was confused as to why) conversations with my peers and lecturers about the "12 bar blues", an extremely popular topic (second only to instruments of the orchestra) in the mandatory Year 7-8 music course. It is, in my opinion, one of the most poorly taught topics in the whole music curriculum. My experiences as a high school student and prac teacher, my discussions with my peers at university, and even one incident with a guest lecturer who brought in charts for the "12 bar blues", have led me to question why the "12 bar blues" is such a popular and yet musically impoverished topic. I contend that there is a 12 bar blues 'simulacrum' that exists in many music classrooms. I've borrowed the concept of the simulacrum both from Lucy Green (n.d.), who talks about the classroom simulacrum, and Adam Kruse (2016), who talks about the hip hop simulacrum. In both cases, the authors are talking about the invention of an alternate reality that exists in a specific context, but that makes no sense outside of it. Let me explain a little further.
The "12 Bar Blues" Simulacrum
In Green's paper, Why 'ideology' is still relevant for critical thinking in music education, she talks about the problems of authenticity in the classroom, warning against teachers creating a music education context that does not exist in the real world. For example, if students studied the Sex Pistols through analysing a score of one of their songs, this would be an alternate reality from how popular music is learnt by actual popular musicians i.e. primarily through aural learning from recordings (Green, 2002). In Kruse's case, while advocating for the inclusion of hip hop (or rap) in music education, he notes how many teachers have extremely adverse reactions to hip hop, in part because of the hip hop simulacrum created by record companies, an alternate reality whereby it seems that all hip hop artists glorify violence, misogyny, and materialism. Kruse argues that the hip hop simulacrum is used by record companies to sell exotic stereotypes of the urban poor to white youth, who are the largest market in hip hop album sales. In contrast to this simulacrum, Kruse names a huge number of 'conscious' hip hop artists (e.g. Common, Lupe Fiasco, A Tribe Called Quest, and Rapsody) who don't conform to any of the stereotypes of the hip hop simulacrum. Ultimately, both Kruse and Green warn about the simulacrum, and the way this distorts music education.
My argument is that the way the blues is taught in many high schools represents a comparable simulacrum. This simulacrum consists partly in the very specific teaching of the elements of the "12 bar blues": a walking bass, a specific chord progression involving chords I, IV and V, the 12 bar form, and improvised solos using the blues scale. Now technically, all of these elements are common in actual blues recordings. But my issue is that these musical elements, which exist in a wide variety of recordings, forms and genres, have been essentialised and reduced into compulsory elements, and then packaged together to teach the "12 bar blues".
Getting a Bit More Specific
So I've made the claim in this post that the elements understood to exist in the "12 bar blues" (as it is taught in many high schools) are the collection of essentialised characteristics that have created a classroom simulacrum. Hopefully by the end you will see how this is the case, but my basic yardstick of how the classroom genre is a simulacrum is this: If someone learned the "12 bar blues" as it is taught in many high schools around Australia, and then walked into a blues club to play in a jam session, what they would get up to play would probably not line up with what anyone else was playing, other than perhaps the chord progression. (Food for thought: If students are taught "the blues" or "the 12 bar blues", and then when they go to play it in real life they find that it isn't the blues, what did they actually learn?)
Speaking of the chord progression: I have been using quotations marks for "12 bar blues" because it is taught as though it is a genre unto itself, when really it's just a chord progression that is used in genres as diverse as jazz, folk, boogie woogie, blues, rock'n'roll, rock, (yes there is a difference between the two) R&B, rockabilly, soul, pop, funk and hip hop. It is certainly really useful to learn about chords I, IV and V, because these chords are extremely ubiquitous and influential to many forms of music. But people playing the blues will sometimes use 8 or 16 bar forms, and even if you limit the topic to the 12 bar form, the actual chords that people play while playing a 12 bar blues will vary enormously depending on the context (see here, here and here for examples). But that's a minor quibble.
My major concern is with the term "walking bass". When I quiz people who studied non-elective music in high school about what the "walking bass" is, they invariably sing me something along the lines of this:
One of the things I find most fascinating about this bass line is the consistency with which people remember this exact collection of notes as "THE walking bass". But for me, as someone who plays jazz and the blues for professional gigs and functions, I'd never heard someone play this bass line in my entire life outside of the classroom, until I did my own research (see below).
The difficulty I have with this curious bass line is that even though what is written above is technically a walking bass line, in that the bass notes change every crotchet beat (though sometimes walking bass lines change notes every quaver; ergo stop essentialising this music plz), it is certainly not "THE walking bass" and it's not a bass line that works stylistically in the two most common musical contexts where a 12 bar blues is played today i.e. jazz and blues.
(Caution: rant territory ahead).
If we are going to study one walking bass line and call it "THE walking bass", why not this nice walking bass by J.S. Bach? What about this chorus bass line from John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin? Or this riff from Muse? Or perhaps we could use the greatest guitar solo of all time from Shannon Noll, since guitar is just like bass anyway. That guitar solo really walks! (Okay time to rein it in).
Let me rephrase my questions slightly.
Why is one particular bass line that is not played in the blues genre the one bass line that students learn at school as the archetype, "THE walking bass"? And why does it seem that all high school music teachers in Australia teach this group of notes specifically, as though it had the same canonic authority as what the Romantics gave to original Mozart scores? I genuinely wonder if this particular bass line was taught at one music education conference one year, or appeared in a text book one time, labelled as "the 12 bar blues walking bass: don't ever play anything different", and has subsequently caught on all over the country ever since.
Walking Bass and Boogie Woogie
I was intrigued (and frustrated) by this unique bass line that had made its way into the classroom, and so I eventually tracked it down and found it in boogie woogie bass lines (Credit to James Humberstone and Michael Webb for pointing me in the right direction). Boogie woogie music covers a diverse range of forms (as do most genre labels), but many boogie woogie songs use the 12 bar blues form. And, sometimes, you can hear variations on the bass line that is written above (e.g. here, here and here). But I still have not found one recording that uses that exact bass line. This is the closest I've got (but notice that the chords actually have a II-V-I ending at the end rather than a V-IV-I).
So, I guess to my own relief, "THE walking bass” that potentially thousands of students around the country have learned is actually a real thing. It is legitimate music that can be fun to play in the right context. Just to make it clear, that context is BOOGIE WOOGIE. (Do I sound mad?) During my research I also found recordings of many jazz and blues artists playing these boogie woogie bass lines, though they were always in compositions called “[Something] Boogie”. And before you jump up in the air and say, “See, it is a walking bass from jazz and blues!”, if you can deal with Pink Floyd playing a 12 bar blues on one of their albums without calling them blues musicians or calling the elements of the track key aspects of prog/psychadelic rock, you can understand how jazz and blues musicians can also play boogie woogie without the boogie woogie elements being “THE walking bass” that all students everywhere must learn.
Stepping Back For a Second
I’m going to take a deep breath now that my rant is over. I can totally understand that for some of you reading this, particularly if your own musical background is a long way from jazz or the blues, you might find my issues with current 12 bar blues pedagogy to be petty, hair-splitting, or overly negative. Shouldn’t I be happy that at least it’s being taught in schools? Isn’t it better that kids learn one walking bass rather than none?
There is a part of me that agrees with that kind of sentiment. Perhaps I’m being overly pedantic. But when you think about it, the invention of the "12 bar blues" for the classroom simulacrum is somewhat analogous to cobbling together Baroque counterpoint, concepts from program music and Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition and teaching it as a single unimpeachable entity called "classical music". And if you were a classical music aficionado, and you raised your fists at me and bemoaned the watering down of several hundred years of musical innovation into a few cold and disconnected theoretical concepts, I could merely shrug my shoulders and say "Well they’re all dead white men anyway. At least the kids will know who Messiaen is even if they hate him."
Now I’m pushing the analogy to prove my point. You could argue that "THE walking bass", I/IV/V chord progressions and the blues scale are more related than Bach and Messiaen, but here’s my real point:
We send people to university for four years to study music education. If you’re a classical major (which is everyone in my year other than me), you will do four semesters of classical music history, where you learn about the minutiae of a huge number of composers, works, stylistic trends and related historical events. You gain expertise on top of what you already have learnt as a student of classical music, so that you can teach with expertise. Hopefully, if classical music is music that you love, you can give rich musical experiences to your students based on your own passion for a musical form that you thoroughly understand. But when it comes to other areas like jazz and the blues, they basically all just get mangled together into one unidentifiable (black) mess. And if you think I'm being provocative by adding the word "black", have a read of Kofi Agawu's Representing African Music. The history of white musicologists mythologising music made by black people around the world is hardly surprising, but the scope of misunderstanding is quite incredible. And I would argue that the same colonial framework that led to the invention of 'African music' (as though the music of one billion people could be homogenous) is at work when we are willing to argue about why people rioted at the premiere of The Rite of Spring, but we don't mind conflating jazz, the blues, boogie woogie, R&B and soul.
In writing all this, my aim is not to point the finger at any of my music education peers for not knowing enough about jazz or the blues. But what I am saying is that we need to give respect to musical forms that are not studied heavily at university, by putting in the hours to learn about them ourselves. I think that whatever level of understanding you would expect in a classroom for your favourite kind of music, that should be the level that you teach all other kinds of music.
References
Agawu, K. (2003). Representing African music: Postcolonial notes, queries, positions. New York, NY: Routledge.
Green, L. (n.d.). Why ‘ideology’ is still relevant for critical thinking in music education. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/12122218/Why_ideology_is_still_ relevant_to_music_education_theory
Green, L. (2002). How popular musicians learn: A way ahead for music education. Hants, UK: Ashgate.
Kruse, A. (2016). Featherless dinosaurs and the hip-hop simulacrum: Reconsidering hip-hop's appropriateness for the music classroom. Music Educators Journal, 102(4), 13-21.