Dirty Old Man

Dirty Old Man
(Delaney Bramlett and Mac Davis)
From the Delaney & Bonnie album Accept No Substitute

Unlike Home, 1969's Accept No Substitute (also known as The Original Delaney & Bonnie) featured the same backing band on the entire album. The core of this band, which included Radle, Bobby Whitlock, Rita Coolidge, and Bobby Keys, would remain with Delaney & Bonnie for the rest of the year, touring England and the European continent in late 1969 and early 1970. 

"Dirty Old Man" is kind of a modified twelve-bar blues with a bridge. (The first two verses are actually 13 bars each.) Radle's bass line is build largely on arpeggios. The root-3rd-5th-6th pattern is typical of a lot of blues songs, but this one is infused with an R&B groove. Instead of being a shuffle, which implies a triplet subdivision of each beat, the groove here has a sixteenth note subdivision. Radle plays essentially the same line for verses 1 and 2.

Radle uses lots of ghost notes to propel the song forward. Syncopations occur almost exclusively on beats 3 and 4. The following rhythmic pattern appears frequently in his line:

This is a common figure in R&B and soul music. In fact, it is not unlike the syncopation Radle uses in the choruses of "Piece of My Heart."

The bridge serves as a bit of relief from the repetition of the verses, but also allows the band to modulate up a half-step to C. Radle keeps the same type of 16th note syncopation, but his line sounds much more improvisatory than it did in the verses. 

After the bridge, the band goes through a verse in C Major. Radle keeps essentially the same groove.

The outro is just a vamp from C to F. Radle continues his verse groove, but with added embellishments, particularly on the F chords.