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Thin Lizzy - Thunder and Lightning

Blues music takes a fatalistic and noncommittal attitude when facing the future. The people
who first created the blues did not see how their lives would improve. Poor, uneducated, and above all black, blues singers did not hold out much hope that white America’s dream would ever come their way. Blues lyrics accepted their lot in life yet encouraged the struggle. As Michael Bane noted, this attitude is at the heart of most folk music.

Blues was people’s music, a shared language between those who played it and those who listened and danced to it. As the music of African Americans it held dual qualities of being truthfully fatalistic about its people’s future and containing no overt political messages, while being oppositional to and subversive of white music and culture through its sound, its expression, and its methods of performance. 

Blues music never became popular music. In twentieth century America, popular meant
mainstream and mainstream meant white and middle class. Charles Hamm defined popular song as music composed to be popularized through secular performance, then reproduced and marketed to be consumed by a wide audience. The popular song form that blues and later rock music rebelled against the most was the Tin Pan Alley songwriting style that dominated popular music from the turn of the century to the advent of rock and roll in the mid 1950s. Hamm identified the trademark style of these songs. Virtually all Tin Pan Alley songs are in verse chorus form. For the first
several decades of the new era, songs normally had three or more verses, which lay out a brief drama, the chorus follows each verse with a
commentary on the emotional situation developing in the verses. The verse is usually twice as long as the chorus, but the chorus has the more memorable music, the tune which the songwriter hopes will appeal to his listeners and stick in their minds.

Hamm chronicles the eventual standardization of the song form and its movement toward stating a single theme or emotional state and structuring the song to make that point as clear and memorable as possible. Songs were kept simple and short in order to fit into the limited length of a phonograph record, which along with sheet music were the ways by which a song made money for its writer and publishing company. In contrast to the emphasis given both individual interpretation of a standard form and circumlocution in blues music, Tin Pan Alley songs were written and performed to state a single point clearly and simply.


Thin Lizzy - Thunder and Lightning
  • Genre: Pop, Rock, British Metal
  • Recording in: 1983
  • Recording in: Boathouse, London, England

"Thin Lizzy fully came into their sound on 1975 and cracked the charts in the U.K. Lizzy's big break came in 1976, The Boys Are Back in Town. A paean to the joys of working class guys letting loose."

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Location: United States

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