Twelve bar blues

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The 12-bar blues has a distinctive form in both lyrics and chord structure. Most commonly, lyrics are in three lines, with the first two lines almost the same with slight differences in phrasing and interjections:

I hate to see the evening sun go down,

Yes, I hate to see that evening sun go down

'Cause it makes me think I'm on my last go 'round

W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues"

The chord progression is simple to identify after some study and attention as it rises and falls in a regular and very familiar pattern.

A basic example of the progression would look like this, using T to indicate the tonic, S for the subdominant, and D for the dominant, and representing one chord per measure:

T T T T 
S S T T
D S T T

The tonic is also called the 1-chord, the sub-dominant, the 4-chord, and the dominant, the 5-chord. These three chords are the basis of thousands more pop songs which thus often have a blue sound even without using the classical 12-bar form.

Hence it can be written as:

1 1 1 1
4 4 1 1
5 4 1 1

The first line takes 16 quarter note beats (4 measures X 4 beats), as do the remaining two lines (for a total of 48 beats and 12 measures). However, the vocal or lead phrases, though they often come in threes, do not coincide with the above three lines or sections. This overlap between the grouping of the accompaniment and the vocal is part of what creates interest in the twelve bar blues.

Many variations are possible. For instance, the tenth bar can stay in dominant, yielding this:

T T T T
S S T T
D D T T

Seventh chords are often used just before a change, and more changes can be added. A more complicated example might look like this, where "7" indicates a seventh chord:

T  S  T  T7
S  S7 T  T7
D  S  T  D7

When the last bar contains the dominant, that bar can be called a turnaround.

There are also minor 12-bar blues, such as Big Bill Broonzy's "Why Don't You Do Right?".

Finally, here is an example showing the pattern in the key of D, and how it fits with the lyrics of a given verse. One chord symbol is used per beat, with "-" representing the continuation of the previous chord:

D        -     -      -        
Woke up this morning with an 

G     -   -    -   D - - - D7 - - - 
awful aching head 

G        -     -      -        
Woke up this morning with an 

G7    -   -    -   D - - - D7 - - -
awful aching head

A     -        -     A7
My new man had left me 

G    -    -     G7 D - - - D - A A7
just a room and an empty bed.

From Bessie Smith's "Empty Bed Blues".

While the blues is most often considered to be in sectional strophic form with a verse-refrain pattern, it may also be considered as an extension of the variational chaconne procedure. Van der Merwe (1989) considers it developed in part specifically from the American Gregory Walker though the conventional account would consider hymns as the provider of the blues repeating chord progression or harmonic formulae (Middleton 1990, p.117-8).

Other progressions include the basic jazz blues progression:

I7  /IV7  /I7     /v7   I7
IV7 /VII7 /I7     /iii7 VI7
ii7 /V7   /I7-VI7 /ii7  C7

1 "Twelve-bar" oddities
2 See also
3 Sources
4 External links

[edit] "Twelve-bar" oddities

"St. Louis Blues" is unusual in having a bridge, the famous habanera that gave us "the Spanish tinge".
Eccentric boogie woogie pianist, Cripple Clarence Lofton frequently truncated the chord continuation, ending up with some verses at nine, ten, or eleven bars.
The blue yodels of Jimmie Rodgers, the singing brakeman, are usually of twelve bars, including the repeated first line, but the three lines of lyrics are delivered across the first eight bars, with Rodgers' trademark yodeling obbligato filling the last four lines.
Chuck Berry's "Oh Carol" is a 24-bar blues, with each line doubled in length by the addition of a guitar lick after the vocal part.

[edit] See also

[edit] Sources

Covach, John. "Form in Rock Music: A Primer", in Stein, Deborah (2005). Engaging Music: Essays in Music Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-517010-5.
Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-15275-9.
Van der Merwe, P. (1989). Origins of the Popular Style. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-316121-4. Cited in Middleton (1990).