 The three-line structure I employed in my lyric was suggested by a song I heard Phil Jones sing in Evansville ...While I took the three-line stanza as a model for my lyric, I found its repetition too monotonous...Consequently I adopted the style of making a statement, repeating the statement in the second line, and then telling in the third line why the statement was made.Regarding the "three-chord basic harmonic structure" of the blues, Handy wrote that the "(tonic, subdominant, dominant seventh) was that already used by Negro roustabouts, honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of the underprivileged but undaunted class from Missouri to the Gulf, and had become a common medium through which any such individual might express his personal feeling in a sort of musical soliloquy."