"Just Those Five Notes" with Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson by Pete Welding - 2/18/1971

Now, if you talk in a certain way – in my case, like a person who spent the first 22 years of his life in a suburb of Boston, you talk in a whole different way – and, if only subconsciously, you attempt to sing the lyrics with an inflection or any other simplation of any dialect you’ve heard, it creates a situation in which the very sentence, as divorced from the music, cannot proceed in a natural, loose and relaxed way. This is why I think there’s an advantage in getting away from the traditional words and using the way you talk yourself – though I definitely would have to agree that the way they talk in Arlington, Mass., is lacking in quite a bit of poetic quality I hear in the way they talk in Mississippi. Nonetheless, there’s nothing gained in attempting to simulate that. You must have to use your own way.
I think a key to this is vowel sounds. You talk a certain way, and most of the sustained notes in blues melodies seem to occur on vowels. Say, you’re singing a melody and the last note of the melody is on the third degree of the scale, the blues note – in C it’s the E flat, E neutral or E natural, whatever it happens to be – and it’s a sustained note. If you are forcing out a certain vowel sound that sounds like the way Bukka White would pronounce “a’s” on some of his early records, it would be like the strangulation of the feeling of poetry, of the sound of your own voice. Whereas if you use your own vowel sound, any vowel sound can be sonorous and sound good if it’s hit at the right pitch level and articulated clearly; anything like that can be good...

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