Here it is, Saturday morning, and it's raining. It's been raining, with a few short remissions, since Tuesday evening. I suppose this is a side effect of the great low which has caused such terrible damage in Texas and Alabama.

One effect of this is that I'm spending much time in the house. For some reason, I got to thinking about blues music. I like it, but I've never played it. I went online and found this definition.

2. A style of music evolved from southern African-American secular songs and usually distinguished by a syncopated 4/4 rhythm, flatted thirds and sevenths, a 12-bar structure, and lyrics in a three-line stanza in which the second line repeats the first [from The Free Dictionary by Farlex]
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I'm aware that today's blues are not that simple, but with this as a starting point, I went to the keyboard and started fooling around. So far it seems that if you play a major scale and flat the 3rd and 7th, then what you've got is a piece in the Dorian mode.

What's the Dorian mode? It's a piece where the second note of the scale serves as the tonic. It's the first note and last note, and in-between in gets played often or long. (Few modal songs are that consistent, I find.)

For exmple, play a C scale but flatten the third (Eb) and 7th (Bb.) Those are the flats that make up the Bb scale. C is the second note of the Bb scale. Second note - Dorian mode. I've tried this for other scales and it works, but I haven't tried it for all of them. I don't even know all of them!

Next I tried writing a blues tune myself. It's still a work in progress. The tonality is okay, but the rhythm sounds more like a slow air. I'm still working on it.

I've discovered that I don't know that mahy blues tunes by heart. I opened the Rise Up Singing songbook and turned to "Hard Times and Blues." There are many songs there that I don't know. However, these songs fit the pattern:

Frankie and Johnnie
House of the Rising Sun
Motherless Child (starts on G, but longest, lowest notes are C)
Stagolee (what I can remember of it)
Wayfaring Stranger

A song that almost fits is "Heartbreak Hotel." Every note fits the Dorian except for "tel" in "It's down at the end of Lonely Street at Heartbreak HoTEL." TEL is an E natural. By the way, this is a good song to sing while cleaning up the kitchen. It isn't necessary to sing it (Elvis Presley style) as if engaged in bulldozing Heartbreak Hotel with loud equipment. For example, instead of plunging to the low note on TEL one could convey that the note is higher than expected.

It's still raining. Now to work on that business of syncopation.

It would be fun to hear from other people who'd like to experiment with these ideas.