Rich DelGrosso

The Unique Phrasing of Johnny Young

Music for this workshop

Of all of the mandolin players who have influenced my music, Johnny Young has had the greatest impact. And that is hard to admit considering the time that I spent with Yank Rachell and my friend Howard Armstrong. But, growing

up in neighboring Detroit, Michigan, I have always been a Chicago bluesman at heart and Young was all Southside Chicago, Illinois!

Like his compatriot Muddy Waters, he was a Mississippi native, and after migrating to the Windy City he frequented

the Maxwell Street market and played the clubs, often mixing it up with Robert Nighthawk and Otis Spann. Like me, Young was a guitar player who often adapted guitar sensibility to his mandolin

playing and I immediately fell in love the first time I heard his music.

Without question I will be bringing out his music often, both in this column and in my workshops. I did so as recent as my column last summer. Young's music is very rich, a goldmine of "new" ideas, and, with this issue I would like to expand on that column by introducing some different phrasing in a different key.

Moanin' and Groanin' is a "quick-to-the-four" twelve bar blues in the key of D. The twelve-bar blues is a blues standard, and the "quick-to-the-four" is a common variation. It means that the arrangement, instead of holding on the root for four bars, switches to the IV chord in measure two and then returns to the root in measure three. If you have any blues or rock and roll in your soul you will recognize this change.

The rhythm of Moanin' and Groanin' is a Chicago shuffle: a pulse created by coupling a dotted eighth note with a sixteenth, four to the bar. It's blues, so the emphasis is on the back beat. These duplets are often substituted with triplets.

The key is D. Young's music was not complex. He centered himself in G or D on mandolin and in E on guitar. These keys make use of all of the strings of the respective instruments, including the lowest bass notes and the open strings that fill out the sound of the chords.

What makes Young's music unique is his phrasing, and that is the focus of this column. Start with the opening phrase, with pickup notes leading into the first full measure (hence the measure numbers don't add up to twelve, but you get the idea). Then, in shifting to the "quick-to-the-four," I alter the phrase lowering the F-sharp to F-natural, a blue note in the G blues scale.

Returning to the root in the next measure, I break the rhythm with triplets, using a smear between the F-natural to F-sharp on the third string followed by a D. This phrase is inspired by the piano players who often searched for that dissonant tone that lies between the two Fs and can only approximate it with a quick smear. Guitar players bend a string to get the same effect.

In measures six and seven the progression shifts to the IV7, echoing the phrasing from the "quick-to-the-four" bar. When it resolves back on the root (in measure eight) you find double-stops that move in a sequence: D/F-sharp, to C/A (D-seven) and then back to D/F-sharp. The seventh chord is played with your fingers spanning four frets, from the C-natural (third fret) to the A (seventh fret). I love the sound of this phrasing as it breaks up the monotony you might encounter with two bars on the root.

In measure ten the progression moves to the V7 (A-seven) and the melody is all about the A, played with a heavy fisted tremolo. The A carries over into the next measure, adding a "ninth" harmony, a sweet dissonance" to the IV7 chord change. And the twelve bar ends on the root as it began.

I love this music. It has a force, an energy that I can't resist. So you can expect more in the future!

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