Skip to My Lou
Skip to My Lou (1800s)
folk, USA
key: F major
| Euroclassical function names: | tonic | dominant |
| Tagg: | tonic | counterpoise |
| Riemann: | T | D or D7 |
| scale degrees: | I | V or V7 |
| chord names: | F | C or C7 |
F C
|/ / |/ / |/ / |/ / |
F C F
|/ / |/ / |/ / |/ / |
mode: F major/ionian — F G A Bb C D E F
melody: Tdrmfs
form: ABAC [alternately, AA’AB]
meter: duple
suggested time signature: 2|4
other recordings:
Charlie Hope, D
Raffi, E
Pete Seeger, G.
Elizabeth Mitchell, Bb.
A classic, American song and partner-stealing dance. Lots of lyrics have been made up for this one — just compare the Pete Seeger version and the Elizabeth Mitchell one. You should definitely make up your own, too. This can be sung, of course, like all songs, in any major key you like, but F is always a good key for singing with the under-11 set.
F and C are also nice and easy to start with on ukulele, especially if you use a 3-finger F chord — then all you have to do is lift and place the same two fingers. I personally do not usually use a 3-finger F, but for the pedagogical reasons I mentioned, I like to start this way.
This song illustrates Tagg’s “counterpoise kickback” concept. Tagg suggests that a song with few harmonies doesn’t provide a sense of “dominant” in the classical sense; the chord that is not the tonic becomes simply “another place to be,” which he calls the counterpoise. This song starts off like a shuttle — oscillating evenly between two chords, tonic and counterpoise — but a shuttle like this wouldn’t end on the tonic. In order to end the phrase on the tonic, the duration of the counterpoise is halved in order to finish the phrase on the tonic. (Tagg, Everyday Harmony, 334-335) Because we are dealing with songs with only two chords, we will see this kind of structure a lot.
two chords 