‘I Think You’re Misunderstanding Blues Theory’ — Student Told This To KEITH RICHARDS By Mistake
Emma Dawson has a first class degree in music theory from Leeds Conservator. Emma Dawson wrote her dissertation on blues harmony. Emma Dawson corrected Keith Richard’s understanding of blues theory in front of 22 of her classmates in 2009 and was technically correct about the specific point she made. Emma Dawson has never once mentioned being correct about the specific point she made.
What Emma Dawson mentions every time she tells the story is the moment the professor walked through the door and said, “I see you’ve already met Keith Richards.” Emma Dawson’s face, according to the 22 people who witnessed it, has never been described with fewer than three separate colors. The 22 witnesses have described it consistently across 15 years.
Leaded’s conservatire in 2009 was one of the most respected music education institutions in the north of England. The conservator’s music theory program was rigorous in the specific way that programs become rigorous when the people running them care deeply about getting things right. Detailed, demanding, and staffed by lecturers who had spent their careers thinking carefully about the relationship between theory and practice and who communicated that relationship to their students with the patience that good teaching requires. The students who
enrolled in the music theory program at Leeds Conservatire in 2007, the cohort that would graduate in 2010 were, by the assessments of the people who taught them, one of the strongest cohorts the program had produced in a decade. Emma Dawson was the strongest student in that cohort.
This was not a contested assessment. Emma Dawson had arrived at Leed’s conservator at 18 with the specific combination of natural facility and disciplined preparation that produces exceptional students. Someone who had been thinking seriously about music since childhood and who had been studying theory formally since she was 14 and who had arrived at university with more foundational knowledge than many students acquired in their first two years.
Emma Dawson did not coast on that foundation. Emma Dawson built on it with the focused industriousness of someone who understood that what she already knew was the beginning of the work rather than the work itself. Emma Dawson’s particular area of passion was the blues. Not the blues as a style, though Emma loved the music, but the blues as a theoretical system, the specific harmonic architecture that had developed from the African-Amean musical traditions of the Mississippi Delta and had spread through jazz and rhythm and blues and rock and roll and had become
the foundation on which the majority of popular western music of the 20th century was built. Emma Dawson had been studying this system since she was 16 and had written her second-year dissertation on the evolution of blues harmony, a 28,000word document that her supervisor had described as the most sophisticated piece of undergraduate work.
She had written 15 years of supervising undergraduate work. Emma Dawson knew the blues scale. Emma Dawson knew the pentatonic scale and its relationship to the blues scale and the specific ways in which blues musicians had used and subverted and extended the theoretical framework. Emma Dawson knew the dominant seventh chord and its function in blues harmony and the reason that the blues characteristic sound depended on specific tensions that conventional western harmonic theory found uncomfortable.
Emma Dawson had strong views about all of this. And Emma Dawson was not the kind of student who kept strong views to herself when she believed someone was getting something wrong. Professor David Hartley had been teaching music theory at Leeds Conservatire for 14 years. Professor Hartley ran the third-year advanced harmony module, the module that Emma Dawson’s cohort was taking in the spring of 2009 with the combination of intellectual rigor and practical enthusiasm that had made him one of the most respected lecturers in the
department. Professor Hartley also had a habit of arranging occasional informal guest appearances, inviting practitioners to speak to his students not in formal lecture contexts, but in the more casual setting of the regular classroom, where the conversation could go where it needed to go, rather than where a prepared presentation directed it.
On the morning of March 4th, 2009, Professor Hartley was running 7 minutes late. The reason was a parking situation that Professor Hartley has described in subsequent retellings as uniquely and specifically infuriating. A situation that required four separate trips between his car and the parking permit office and that consumed exactly the 7 minutes that changed the morning’s dynamic entirely.
Professor Hartley had arranged for his guest to arrive at 9:00. Professor Hartley had expected to be there to introduce the guest at 9:00. Professor Hartley was not there at 9:00. The guest was Keith Richards was in Leeds because Keith Richards was in Leeds. The specific reason need not be detailed. Keith Richards moved through cities for various reasons and this particular visit to Leeds in March of 2009 had produced through a chain of connections that involved Professor Hartley and a mutual acquaintance in the music industry. An informal agreement to
speak to Hartley’s students for an hour about the blues. The agreement had been made 3 weeks earlier over the telephone in the specific casual way that informal arrangements are made between people who share enough context to not need formal documentation. Professor Hartley had mentioned the class.
Keith Richards had said it sounded interesting. An arrangement had been made. Keith Richards had done this kind of thing before. informal conversations with music students, not as formal lecturing, but as the kind of exchange that happens when someone who has spent 50 years making music sits down with people who are spending several years studying it.
Keith Richards found these conversations genuinely useful. The students generally found them more than useful. They found them the kind of experience that shifted something in how they understood the relationship between the music they were studying on paper and the music that actually existed in the world.
Keith Richards liked that shift. Keith Richards had experienced a version of it himself 60 years earlier when he had first started understanding what the records he was listening to actually contained. Keith Richards arrived at room 14B of Leeds Conservatire at 9:00 on the morning of March 4th, 2009 and found 23 students and no professor.
A student near the door showed Keith Richards to the front of the room. Keith Richards sat on the edge of the demonstration desk. Not behind it, on the edge of it. The way Keith Richards sat on surfaces when sitting formally behind them felt like too much structure for the kind of conversation Keith Richards intended to have.
Keith Richards looked at 23 students. 23 students looked at Keith Richards. Keith Richards was 65 years old in March of 2009. Keith Richards was wearing a dark jacket and had rings on multiple fingers and had the face of someone who had been living an interesting life for six decades. Keith Richards looked like someone who knew things.
Keith Richards did not look like a rock legend to 23 music theory students at 9 in the morning who had not been told who their guest was because the information about who the guest was had been in Professor Hartley’s introduction and Professor Hartley was in a parking permit office 7 minutes away.
Read More
Keith Richards said, “Your professor asked me to talk about the blues for a bit. Shall we get started?” 23 students opened their notebooks. Keith Richards talked about the blues the way Keith Richards always talked about the blues from the inside with the specific intimacy of someone who had been living with this music since he was a teenager and had spent 50 years learning its structures not from textbooks but from recordings and from musicians and from the accumulated experience of playing the music himself and feeling how it worked from the
inside out. Keith Richards talked about Robert Johnson in Muddy Waters. Keith Richards talked about the specific quality of the dominant seventh chord and how blues musicians used it. Keith Richards talked about the relationship between the melody and the harmony and the rhythm in the blues tradition and how those three elements created the specific emotional texture that the music was capable of producing.
Keith Richards had been talking for 11 minutes when Emma Dawson raised her hand. Emma Dawson had been listening to the guest with the focused attention she brought to everything in this classroom. Emma Dawson had been following the argument. Emma Dawson had found most of it interesting and some of it genuinely illuminating.
The guest clearly had a deep and personal familiarity with the music and was talking about it with a specificity that textbooks could not replicate. But 11 minutes in, the guest had made a characterization of the relationship between the blues scale and the dominant seventh chord that Emma Dawson believed was not quite right. Not wrong in a way that would matter to most listeners.
wrong in a specific theoretical sense that Emma Dawson had written 28,000 words about. Emma Dawson raised her hand because Emma Dawson always raised her hand when she believed something in this room was not quite right. That was what you were supposed to do in a music theory classroom. That was good academic practice.
Emma Dawson was doing her job. The guest stopped talking and looked at Emma Dawson. Emma Dawson said, “With the confidence of someone who had a first class grade average and a 28,000word dissertation on this exact subject, I think there [snorts] might be a slight mischaracterization there. The blues scale doesn’t function in relationship to the dominant 7th the way you’re describing.
The tension in blues harmony comes from the flattened third and seventh operating simultaneously against the major chord structure, which creates a specific kind of ambiguity that isn’t fully captured by the way you’re framing the relationship.” The room was quiet. The guest looked at Emma Dawson for a moment. The guest said, “Go on then.
” Emma Dawson went on. Emma Dawson explained her point with the precision of someone who had been thinking about it for 4 years and had written it down carefully in a document that her supervisor had called the most sophisticated undergraduate work she had read in 15 years. Emma Dawson’s explanation lasted approximately 90 seconds and was by the assessment of the 22 other students in the room who later discussed it technically correct and impressively argued. The guest listened.
The guest nodded. The guest said, “That’s a fair point. I was simplifying.” The door opened. Professor David Hartley, slightly out of breath from the parking situation, came into room 14B and looked at the front of the room and looked at his 23 students and looked at the front of the room again. Professor Hartley said, “I see you’ve already met Keith Richards.
Emma Dawson looked at the guest. Emma Dawson looked at the rings. Emma Dawson looked at the face. Emma Dawson’s face did the thing that the 22 other students in the room would spend the next 11 years describing. A sequence of expressions that witnesses have consistently required at least three colors to characterize, beginning with the specific white of sudden comprehension and moving through several intermediate stages before arriving at a red that one classmate described as the most complete red she had ever seen on a human face.
Emma Dawson said nothing for approximately 8 seconds. Then Emma Dawson said, “I just corrected Keith Richards.” Keith Richards said, “You were right, though.” Professor Hartley, who had gathered the situation with the speed of someone who had been teaching for 14 years and could read a room in three seconds, set his bag down and said, “Perhaps we should continue from where you left off.
” Keith Richards continued from where they had left off. The conversation that followed for the remaining 49 minutes of the hour was described by everyone present as the best music theory discussion any of them had been part of in 3 years of study. Professor Hartley, who had been teaching at Leeds Conservator for 14 years and had arranged many guest speakers across that time, said afterward that it was the most productive informal session he had ever witnessed in that room, not because of the famous name, but because of the quality of the exchange. Keith
Richards engaged with the theoretical framework seriously and specifically, not as a practitioner condescending to academics, but as someone who had spent 50 years thinking about the same things from a different angle and who found the conversation with people who had been thinking about them from the other direction genuinely interesting.
Emma Dawson, once she had recovered from the 8 seconds, participated in that conversation with the same precision and confidence that had produced the correction in the first place. Emma Dawson asked three more questions during the session. All three questions were good questions. Keith Richards answered all three with the specific engagement that good questions produce in people who have been thinking about a subject for a long time and are glad to be asked about it properly.
Professor Hartley watching from the side of the room later said that the dynamic between Emma Dawson and Keith Richards in those 49 minutes was the most interesting pedagogical exchange he had witnessed. two people from entirely different relationships to the same music finding across the distance between them the specific common ground where theory and practice were not opposing things but the same thing described in different languages after the session as students filed out Emma Dawson remained behind Emma Dawson stood in front of Keith
Richards with the expression of someone who has something to say and is not entirely sure how to say it she said I’m sorry for Keith Richards said, “Don’t apologize for being right.” Emma Dawson said, “I didn’t know who you were.” Keith Richards said, “Would you have said it if you had known who I was?” Emma Dawson thought about this honestly.
Emma Dawson said, “Probably not.” Keith Richards said, “Then it’s better that you didn’t know.” Emma Dawson graduated from Leeds Conservator in 2010 with a first class degree and the prize for outstanding achievement in the theory cohort. Emma Dawson completed a master’s degree in musiccology at the University of Edinburgh the following year.
Emma Dawson has worked in music education since 2012, teaching theory and harmony at several institutions in the north of England and developing curriculum materials that are used in conservatars across Britain. Emma Dawson has a career in music education that has been informed, she says, by everything that happened in room 14B on the morning of March 4th, 2009.
Emma Dawson has told the story many times. Emma Dawson has never once led with the fact that she was technically correct. Emma Dawson always leads with the rings and the face and the 8 seconds and Professor Hartley coming through the door. The correct point is the least interesting part of the story.
The most interesting part is what Keith Richard said afterward. Would you have said it if you had known? Emma Dawson knew the answer immediately. Emma Dawson still knows the answer exactly. Emma Dawson teaches her own students now and tells them the answer on the first day of every single academic year because it contains a lesson about intellectual honesty that no textbook has managed to express as efficiently as the question Keith Richards asked a 20-year-old student in Leeds in 2009.
Say the true thing, she tells them. Say it even when you think you might be wrong about who you’re saying it to. Say it especially then. The alternative is a classroom full of people who know something is not quite right and have decided that the cost of saying so is too high. Emma Dawson knows what that cost actually is.
Emma Dawson paid it in 8 seconds in room 14B in Leeds in 2009 and has never once considered it too high since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said the true thing without knowing exactly who you were saying it to? Tell us about it in the comments. Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that being right matters more than knowing who you’re talking to when you say it.
Ring the notification bell for more untold and remarkable stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
