The Early Bird Gets the Worm...or in this case gets to sleep :)

Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair by Stephen Foster is a very light and lovely piece. It fits the definition of Quaternary form almost to a T. The quaternary form means that the song consists of the form a a b a. Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair is made up of the form a a' b a. The b section is the bridge. Foster makes this section different by having a different feel and style. The harmonic rhythm also changes to one chord a measure, along with the general melodic line. Instead of having arpeggiations combined with descending scale times the melodies is closer just eighth notes and more stepwise motion. The listener can definitely tell that this is the bridge section because it is not closely related to the a sections.

The Chordal Analysis for measure 13 until the end is as follows.
m. 13 - V7
m. 14 - I ( I see this as a held out one with embellishments over the top )
m. 15 - I V65 V-7
m. 16 - V7/V Vadd6 IV6
m. 17 - I64 III V7 I

At first the Vadd6 chord really threw me off. I knew that the chord that preceded it had to be a secondary dominant but could not figure out how I could have a secondary dominant without a V chord for it to resolve to. In closer looking at the book I remembered the two new chords that were introduced in this chapter. Sure enough the Vadd6 solved the problem of the secondary dominant.

The phrase analysis really just follows the same break down as the overall form. The first two phrases conclude with a half cadence and the bridge as well, it is not until the final verse or chorus or whatever you choose to call it that we have a PAC.

That is pretty much all I have to say about this piece. It is very simple and there were few prompting questions. I can't really comment on how I would perform it because I'm not really dreaming of Jeanie with the Light Brown hair. I also found it interesting that when I searched for this song on youtube all of the recordings had pictures of BLONDE women in the background while the song went over it. Last time I checked blonde and light brown were in completely different categories.