Introduction

Abstract

This chapter introduces the “Sweet Thing” scheme through postwar popular music, and defines a scheme as a shared musical structure with predetermined constraints and allowances. The “Sweet Thing” scheme is the result of the intertwining of various musical components of many different sources, some with very deep roots in the past, which penetrated many genres of American vernacular music. With the advent of radio and the phonograph in the early twentieth century—and especially with the widespread circulation of blues, country, and gospel records—the various components of these older forms grouped together and intertwined in different ways, resulting in a number of hybrids and variants. It is this cluster of twentieth-century variants that I call the “Sweet Thing” scheme. Defining its musical characteristics in a way flexible enough to accommodate its substantial variation and exploring the historical sources for its musical attributes are the subjects of this book.