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Frank Zappa - I Am The Walrus

Another recognizable song structure in popular music is the African American blues stanza. The intention of the lyrics is to express an emotion.

Ballads, or story songs, have been around for centuries. Many of the best loved were sung first in the Middle Ages, and the tradition continues in modern songs. Ballad lyrics have a unique structure and rhythm. The traditional ballad stanza has four lines called a quatrain. The first and third lines have eight syllables, the second and fourth, the rhyming lines, have six. What we count, however, is the rhythm of the lines themselves, the beat. Most verse in ballad form is iambic. An iamb is a metrical foot in which a weak syllable precedes a stressed syllable, sounding like a heartbeat. The first and third lines of a ballad stanza have four stressed beats, and the second and fourth have three.

I'm doing all right. Good morning. How are you?
There are generally three lines in the blues stanza, the second line repeats the first, and the third line brings home the rhyme. The lyrics are usually set to twelve bars of music in 4/4 time. While the lyrics of the blues are rarely in a structured meter like the ballad stanza, the music often has a driving beat that is not unlike the heartbeat rhythm of the iamb, bum Bum, bum Bum, bum Bum, bum Bum.


Frank Zappa - I Am The Walrus
  • First release by: The Beatles
  • Written by: John Lennon, Paul McCartney
  • First recorded on: March 13, 1988

"For over thirty years Zappa composed rock, pop, jazz, jazz fusion, orchestral and musique concrète works. He produced most of the 60+ albums that he released with his bands, the Mothers of Invention."

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