Why are the I IV and V chords Major
In the process of learning music theory, I’m wondering why the chords I, IV and V are major when major chords are happy and blues are supposed to be sad. I’m surprised blues doesn’t use minor chords.
Which brings me to my main question: Are minor keyed harps better for sad songs because they have minor chords?
That song sounds really happy to me. Are those major chords? What you wrote was interesting but I’m going to have to read it a couple times to digest. I’m actually just mainly learning blues to understand fundamentals, but I’m more interested in playing a fusion of folkish/rockish/bluesy/acoustic music on the harmonica. I like a lot of meloncholy songs and am wondering if that sound would have been more natural to obtain had I focused in a minor key harp instead of a major key tuning. It’s actually a bit more complicated for me since I play exclusively on Powerbender (and love it). Never used a Richter in my life. But both these tunings seem a bit limited as happy harps because the 1st octave chords are major. But I giess they wouldn’t be as good for blues if those chords were minor. Just trying to wrap my head around it all.
I was just thinking - it would be really interesting to hear the blues being played on a minor keyed harp. Perhaps that would be the saddest sound music could possibly have!
The main chords are A minor (the I chord), D minor (the IV chord), and E7 (the V chord - in minor songs, the V chord is very often a major or a 7th chord), and fleetingly, Bb7.
The happy feeling comes from the rhythm and overall character of the tune. The fact that it's minor adds to the feeling, but not in a sad way. That's why I posted it - the sad=minor thing is a cliché that is often not true.
Here's another uptempo, non-sad minor tune, my own Saskatchewan Crossing. It's in D and the main chords are D minor and A minor, though there's lots more going on, and the coda section at the end is in C major. I'm playing it on a C chromatic.
The first octave of standard tuning does have two major chords, but you can lower the third of the draw chord (draw 3) to make it sound bluesy or even minor - blues harmonica players do this all the time. howeer, they do it either as a single note or in combination with Draw 4, but not as a full chord.
There are plenty of melancholy major-key tunes. For instance, here's the Scottish song The Parting Glass intertwined with Paul McCartney's Blackbird - all major key and pretty melancholy. I'm using a country-tuned G-harp in second position, accompanied by Tuula Cotter on violin.
Minor blues are relatively rare. Junior Wells and Buddy Guy played a few in the mid-1960s, and there are a few pop-blues hits in minor keys, like BB King's "The Thrill is Gone." But rural, homegrown blues uses major chords even when the melody focuses on those not-quite-minor blue notes - again that combination is part of what gives blues its unique flavor.
By the way, here's a minor key blues instrumental, Blue Rant. based on the chord progression of "The Thrill is Gone." Here I'm playing a C chromatic in A minor, using mostly the notes of the C major scale (which is also the basis for the A minor scale. I guess that puts me in fourth position, though chromatic players tend not to think in positions. Blow C and E give a partial A minor chord, while the IV chord, D minor, is fully available in the draw notes. Two-note fragments of the F7 and E7 chords in the last 4 bars are also available, and I use them all.
Tell me if this sounds sad (Django Reinhardt's Minor Swing). More like jaunty.
Now, blues uses notes we call blue notes, that lie outside the major scale. They don't replace scale notes - which are the notes that the chords are drawn from. Rather blue notes, add new colors to the scale.
But blue notes don't come from minor notes. The lowered blue third and blue 7th are "in the cracks" between major and minor, coming from West African singing. The flat fifth, the third "blue note," is neither major not minor, as a fifth can't be either one - it's either perfect, diminished (lowered by a semitone) or augmented (raised by a semitone).
However, when you go over to the piano, the only way to distinguish the blue notes from the major notes is to play them a semitone lower - which means minor in the case of the third and seventh.
Now, let's say you lay those lowered notes on top of major chords. You get a contrast, and that's a big part of the blues sound. There are various ways to rationalize these in music theory as altered extension notes, but they weren't placed there by scientific investigation, they just happened when African and European music started colliding and melding in the American South over the last few centuries.
So the characteristic sound of the blues includes floating those blue notes over chords where they don't seem to belong, and creating a whole new set of tone colors in the process.