Here’s a song that I loved for many years just for listening and grooving out to, but then I started to love it even more as a music theory teaching example. It’s emblematic of blues tonality, one-chord changes, and groove structure.
The released version is edited down from its original arrangement, which is longer and has a free-rhythm blues intro:
Don Covay wrote “Chain of Fools” for Otis Redding, but producer Jerry Wexler thought Aretha would be a better fit. The tremolo guitar on the intro is by Joe South. (He’s also the bass player on Blonde on Blonde!) Jimmy Johnson, a ubiquitous session cat, plays the other guitar part. Spooner Oldham plays Wurly, Tommy Cogbill plays bass, Roger Hawkins plays drums, and Cissy Houston is one of the backup singers. That is a lot of musicianship in one room!
I transcribed some of the tune. Western notation is too coarse to convey all the pitch nuances, but it gives you an approximation. I left out the piano part because it’s buried in the mix and I would have been guessing at a lot of it.
Before we get to the fascinating harmonies, let’s talk about the groove. It’s a great one! Roger Hawkins’ drums play a straightforward rock pattern: kicks on one and three, snares and two and four, hi-hats ticking on the eighth notes. There are occasional embellishments and deviations from this pattern, but it’s mostly square. The thing that makes the song so funky is Tommy Cogbill’s bassline. A rock bassist would play on every downbeat, but Cogbill anticipates them, consistently playing an eighth note earlier than you expect him to. After the first bar of the first chorus, he doesn’t hit a single downbeat! Otherwise he’s playing a standard minor pentatonic riff, but that anticipated downbeat makes the entire groove feel unstable, like a house only resting on three corners of its foundation. Everyone else in the band is riding the energy of that instability. For example, Aretha’s lead vocal carefully avoids the downbeat as well.
I didn’t write any chord symbols in the tune because it has no chord progression. You could say that the whole thing is in C minor, and conventional transcriptions of the tune write Cm7 throughout. However, the very first complete chord in the song is a C7. The tune is mainly in C Dorian mode, but the lead guitar keep playing E natural, and Aretha sings it several times too. These moments imply C Mixolydian mode. There are also several F-sharps in the vocals. Taken together, this all adds up to C blues tonality, not C minor.
Check out the line “I ain’t nothin’ but your fool” in the verse, at 0:41 in the recording. Listen closely to the word “fool”. It starts on F, steps down to E-flat, and then slides up until it ends on an unmistakable E natural. Aretha has exquisite pitch control and is doing this deliberately. She knows that E natural sounds great over a C minor backing if you set it up correctly, and does she ever set it up correctly! The song also has a lot of blue notes in it, pitches that fall between the piano keys. Aretha sings the blue note between F and F-sharp quite a few times. There’s no standard way to notate blue notes, so I just wrote them as the closest piano-key pitch. But if you leave the blue notes out, the melody sounds wrong (as you will hear from listening to the Noteflight rendition).
This arrangement of “Chain of Fools” for school choirs by Greg Gilpin is a fascinating artifact. Click on the speaker icon to hear it. Gilpin carefully and lovingly attends to many nuances of the song. But there are absolutely no E naturals in his arrangement. For example, he writes the guitar chord in the intro as a Cm7. In other words, he conveys all the aspects of Aretha’s recording except for the blues. My friend Chad puts it best.
I'm really enjoying living on this new planet, which has been an amazing place to explore! The only thing it's missing is a breathable atmosphere. ;)
— Chad Topaz (@chadtopaz) June 4, 2021
Gilpin is a well-trained, experienced professional! His web site is loaded with impressive credits. How could he just get that first chord so wrong, not to mention the basic harmonic structure of the entire song? I can think of two possibilities. Either he heard the blues tonality of the song and thought, you know what, this is too hard for high school kids to sing, I’m going to simplify it for them. That would be an understandable if regrettable choice. But I don’t believe it’s the case. The arrangement is a pretty sophisticated one! The more likely scenario is that Gilpin didn’t even hear the E naturals. He learned his music theory in school, and they don’t teach you blues tonality in school. Gilpin had a preconceived idea that the song is in C Dorian, and so he thought he was just hearing a lot of out-of-tune E-flats.
Gilpin isn’t alone. This arrangement by Doug Adams steamrolls out all the major/minor ambiguity too (though at least he gets the sharp fourths in there.)
This arrangement by Dallas Burke and Carl Major similarly uses the blues scale (and some hip rhythms in the percussion parts), but it also omits the major thirds. And I really don’t like that they felt the need to insert a bunch of V-I cadences. They dress them up with 7#9 chords, but they are still putting Western functional harmony where it doesn’t belong. You can just hear Burke and Major going, bluesy, bluesy, how do we make it bluesy. I know, V7#9! And they’re right, that’s bluesy. But you know what’s even bluesier? No functional harmony at all. Like in the real song! There are so many pitches in “Chain of Fools” and not one of them is a leading tone. What makes a person hear that and think, I know better than the Muscle Shoals Swampers, I’m putting V-Is in there. Is this Schenker’s fault?
Or maybe it’s Walter Everett’s fault. He thinks that blues consists of minor pentatonic melodies lying atop functional diatonic harmony. He acknowledges that not all blues songs use structural dominants, though. So he proposes that even when the V7 is absent in blues, it is nevertheless implicit because “it is of structural value in the major system that is inhabited by that blues” ([18]). No, Walter Everett, it is not. You are a great musicologist but you are dead wrong about this. Where are the implied structural dominants in “Chain of Fools”? In “Spoonful”? In “Smokestack Lightning”? In “Boogie Chillen”? In any funk or rap or techno song for that matter?
Music theory is important because it sets your expectations for what’s possible. I have been listening to blues and blues-based music my entire life, but I didn’t know to listen for neutral thirds until fairly recently. Once I learned that they were a thing, I started hearing them all over the place. To be clear, I had been hearing them all along, but I had been misunderstanding them as minor or major thirds being bent sharp or flat. Now that I have this new conceptual category, I can hear the difference between an expressively bent minor third and an intentional neutral third as clear as day.
Standard music theory pedagogy hardly ever mentions the blues. Jazz theory covers it, but in a cursory and shallow way. Meanwhile, the blues is a central pillar of the past hundred years of American music (and probably much more than that, but we don’t have recordings to go on.) I self-taught music theory for many years before I did the Western tonal theory sequence in grad school, and this omission was shocking to me. It’s emblematic of music theory’s white racial frame. The end result is that you get people like Greg Gilpin who are trying to be “inclusive” and “diverse” but who end up doing inadvertent violence to the music. How many kids are playing “Chain of Fools” wrong in ensembles? University-level music theory teachers, you need to nip this white nonsense in the bud. Teach the blues, teach it early, teach it in the required classes. Aretha Franklin deserves better.