An Introduction to America’s Music

TALKING ABOUT MUSIC 7

Most common, however, especially in music intended for dancing, is the four-

bar phrase. In Leon Payne’s “Lost Highway” (as sung by Hank Williams, LG 17.2),

each poetic line in the lyrics corresponds to a four-bar phrase in the music. Here

is the fi rst stanza:

I’m a rollin’ stone, all alone and lost

For a life of sin I have paid the cost

W hen I walk by all the people say

“Just another guy on the lost highway.”

The fi rst downbeat in each phrase corresponds, not to the fi rst word of each line,

but rather to the underlined syllable. W hen you listen to Hank Williams’s perfor-

mance, use the instrumental introduction to get a clear sense of where the beat

is. When Williams sings the word “stone,” start counting the beats as “one, two,

three, four, one, two, three, four,” and so on. After counting four groups of four

(i.e., four bars of music—the fi rst phrase), you should arrive at the point where

Williams sings the word “sin.”

Unlike the phrases of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” each of which begins

directly on a downbeat, each phrase of “Lost Highway” begins with a few pickup

notes, which precede and lead into the downbeat. A pickup note may coincide

with the upbeat, or it may be on any unstressed part of the bar before a phrase’s

fi rst downbeat. For example, the words “I’m a rollin’ ” are sung as pickup notes to

the downbeat on “stone.”

Equally important as a phrase’s beginning is its ending, or cadence. A cadence

may sound conclusive or inconclusive, depending on a variety of musical fac-

tors, including melody, rhythm, and especially harmony. A phrase ending that

sounds fi nal, whether or not it is actually the end of the piece, is called a full

cadence; one that sounds inconclusive is a half cadence; and one that sounds

as if it will be fi nal but at the last moment substitutes a “wrong” chord for the

expected one is a deceptive cadence.

Just as groups of beats form bars and groups of bars form phrases, groups

of phrases can form larger structural units. In different kinds of music we may

use different names to label those larger units. In “Lost Highway,” for example,

each group of four phrases constitutes a stanza: a section of music that can be

repeated over and over, with new words each time around. (This is one of many

terms music shares with poetry; we can also say that a stanza is a short section

of poetry whose metrical and rhyme scheme is repeated; when the poem is set

to music, the same music is used for each stanza.) Note the symmetry in “Lost

Highway,” which you may fi nd in many other popular songs as well: four beats

per bar, four bars per phrase, four phrases per stanza.

Now let’s shift our focus in the opposite direction: to measurements smaller

than the individual beat. In simple meters the beat is divided into two equal

halves. Try counting “one, two, one, two,” along with the simple duple meter

of “Get Off the Track!” (LG 6.4). Now subdivide the beat by counting “one-and

two-and, one-and two-and.” Note that in the introduction, the lower part in the

34

Second phrase: How I won-der what you are

1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

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