"And My Baby's Gone"

Yester-day, I was thinking about the guitar solo in "And My Baby's Gone."  I think it's something like:

Note that since the guitar is played through a volume pedal and the notes fade in and out, the values here are approximate.

Since I figured out the part earlier this year (and perhaps even before then), I thought it odd that the last two measures have no notes.  (Admittedly, there may be one note there that I'm missing, but it's so faint that it's basically negligible.)  I realized yester-day that this lack of notes may be significant.

Because the second line had been following what the first line established (the fifth and sixth measures have the same rhythm and the same intervals as the first and second), the omission of the longer notes in the seventh and eighth measures is conspicuous.  This prominent musical absence mirrors the narrator's prime concern:  "My baby's gone."

"And My Baby's Gone"

Yester-day, I got a volume pedal for my guitar, and I was trying it out with the few bits I know of "And My Baby's Gone."  While doing so, I figured out the rest of the lead guitar part and the chords.  I also noticed a small feature in the lyrics:  there's a slant rhyme between "All my treasure's a stone" and "My baby is gone," and this illustrates the narrator's unhappy condition.

"And My Baby's Gone"

"Anymore" in "And My Baby's Gone" ("Without your heart / Anymore / I'm like a room / With no door") is sung with a melisma (Gb Ab Ab Gb Eb Gb Eb B Db C, I think), so there's a musical sense of that "-more" even though there's something of a negation:  "Without [it] anymore."

"And My Baby's Gone"

On Friday afternoon I was thinking about "And My Baby's Gone" (because it features electric guitar controlled by a volume pedal and I've been thinking about getting one), and I realized something about the first verse:

Without a love
Anymore
I'm like a rich man
Gone poor

"Gone poor" is sung to a phrase something like:

(I guessed on the key based on the song's resolution.)

"Gone" is sung to that first Ab, and "poor" is sung to the rest of the notes, which generally descend a fifth from Ab to Db.  This descent in pitch musically mirrors the descent in status that the lyrics describe ("a rich man / Gone poor").

"And My Baby's Gone"

When I listened to The Magnificent Moodies yester-day, I noticed something new about "And My Baby's Gone" (a bonus track on the edition I have).  In the second iteration of the chorus, there's the repeated line "When I'm walkin', I fall."  The first time, that "fall" is sung to a descending melody (Ab to F), and after each time, there's a descending phrase played on guitar (Ab G F).  Both of these musically illustrate that "fall[ing]."