Did Blues other than 12-bar exist?

The other 'standard' aspect of the blues is the line/repeat line/payoff verse format. This fits into the 12-bar compositional structure, but it can fit into others too, and was/is violated frequently.

There, now I'm acting like an expert, but there are definitely people who can express this better and with more evidence.

Going to Chicago, gonna wear my ball and chain (2 bars + 2 bars, add your own blues lick)
Going to Chicago, blah blah blah blah blah (2 +2)
Going to Calumet, cause that place is all the same (2 +2)

You can add or drop any number of bars in this. The key is not the number of bars but the pattern of vocal/instrumental alternation. The cool thing about the structure is that it's got a built-in section for instrumental embellishment of the vocal.

It is a compositional form. Guys like Robert Pete Williams and Skip James went beyond it or behind it. There's a tonality implied along with the form. It's infinitely flexible, as the '40s jump-blues and Texas guys like Saunders King and T-Bone Walker proved with all their 9th chords and so forth, but it's still the basic I-IV-V. You can go to the V without going to the IV, you can go back down to the I without going back up to the V. "Mannish Boy" is based on a two-bar riff. It's got an implied triplet feel. The riff implies the I-IV-V thing. It's just a riff and that's it, so calling it a whatever-bar blues doesn't really make sense.

Some of the blues players might fuck with the format but they weren't aware of what they were doing too much, and a lot of that was simply the fact that they were playing without a band. Howlin' Wolf was good at seeming to come in at the wrong time, actually he did come in at the wrong time a lot, but it works because he had such a sense of dramatic and of rhythm, as on the great mid-'60s "My Mind Is Ramblin'."

What a run-on sentence.

The series is a lot to get through, and some parts aren't so great, but it does leave a lasting impression. The best single part is Wim Wenders' Skip James segments, where he uses an actor and an old handcrank camera to essentially film faked-up performance footage (with source soundtrack) of Skip in his day. It sounds goofy, but it really works.

it's not only lay people that need to understand, it's also the other musicians in your band. if a particular composition happens to be a 12-bar blues, it can be extraordinarily helpful to be able to tell your drummer and your bass player and whoever else that "it's a 12-bar blues in A." if you don't have that basic shorthand, it's ok, everybody else will figure out what you're doing soon enough anyway. but the plain fact is, about 98 percent of the time in popular music, you're following some stylistic rule or another, whether or not you know it.

Actually, using the disco beat as an example, there are plenty of rules for rhythmic patterns, so there's something.

we all mess with the basic structures in our own ways, but in the end 98 percent of us are doing variations on the same basic thing. if anything, i'd argue that the 98 percent figure is low.

Charlie Patton's music certainly didn't always adhere to the 12-bar format.

then again, charley didn't always adhere to any particular way to spell his name.

But yeah, 8-bar is the other biggie. Think of "Sittin' On Top of The World" and its variations (or predecessors, I guess), that's 8-bar.

Most gospel is eight-bar.

hill country blues (mostly northern mississippi) = 1 or 2 chord drony blues stomp

there is a pretty wide difference in how these styles are performed.

I don't actually have much blues (actually only heard howlin' wolf and a chess comp), and never got round to checking much more of it, quite diff to get a handle on the form for some reason, but I'm always looking at ways to get into it bcz its in so many things I love.

I'll actually go back to the book and try and look that quote bcz it was some specific bar range.

orbit and gygax!- any good comps out there with this stuff?

http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&uid=UIDMISS70404071016000126&sql=Anwz8b5m49sqs

mick jaggers performance on "you gotta move" is almost obscene. i bet he had blackface on in the studio...when you get into reverend gary davis its usually much closer to a ragtime type thing. its hard to draw lines for any sort of folk music.

nate, the exact same thing happened to me. for the longest time id say "i dont like chicago blues, just the prewar stuff" but now i get it. thank god for the anthology. i was just thinking of blueshammer type stuff i think. mississippi john hurt is a real charmer. im in love with him.

this is the part when i say son house is a motherfucking maniac.

Mark--

Well, it certainly is a blues. The riff implies what a more stretched-out "bar" structure would make more explicit. You could say it's a two-bar blues, actually.

I have big problems with most discussions of blues. Someone above mentions Skip James, whose best work isn't exactly blues. "I'm So Glad" is one of the most amazing things ever recorded, and what in the hell is it? It anticipates so many things--Beefheart, the Byrds...you name it. On the other hand, "Devil Got My Woman" is certainly pretty much a standard blues.

The other thing I like to remember is that early blues and "ragtimey" chord progressions were sort of married. The guys from the Carolinas and Georgia were more in the vein of that slightly more complex rag thing...the riff-based and somewhat, these days, hackneyed style came about a bit later and you can hear it in the great Howlin' Wolf recordings of the early '50s, with Willie Johnson on guitar. Muddy Waters basically invented the stop-time riff style exemplifed on "Mannish Boy." This is where the Kinks and the Who and, name them, got their shit from. "You Really Got Me" is such a great example of this. What people call "modalism" enters into it during the Brit Invasion, just listen to "Tired of Waiting" for ex. That seemed to be in the air around 1960 and you can hear it in things as diverse and as seemingly far the "the blues" as "Kind of Blue" and the cool little coda of Jobim's "Desafinado." Same thing with George Harrison's "If I Needed Someone." The interesting thing in my opinion is that the kind of perhaps unintentional modalism found in those recordings was implied by men like Furry Lewis, who never truly went to the IV chord, but who played it like a suspended fourth. I have seen Mississippi blues players do exactly that; it's a "mistake" since it violates the blues structure (on a piano, play a blues in E and then instead of going to the IV just keep the E in the bass and play A and B, you'll hear what I'm talking about, or listen to Furry Lewis play "I Will Turn Your Money Green" and you can hear it, an unintentional but affecting effect.

Basically, I think the key to blues is not the structure, which is surely important, but the velocity and the drive. When people go on about dropping bars and the 13 1/2 bar blues, they're talking about a way of hitting it that comes from a desire to rock out...velocity and timing. It's such a flexible structure that you can do almost anything with it. Somehow or another Latin rhythms enter into this; the stuff I really like post-war often has a backwards or turning-in-on-itself quality that comes from a fucked-up approach to what are diluted Latin rhythms. In New Orleans you have the tango and cha-cha happening too and that's what gives it its remarkable lightness. I'm thinking of things like Benny Spellman's "You Got to Get It' and Earl King's "Trick Bag." Which are "blues" but with a tightened-up quality that make recordings like these the bridge between "blues" and funk. Or even Elmore James on "Rollin' and Tumblin," a one-chord blues that swings like drunken Latin music.

I myself like the Stones doing "You Got to Move." It's authentic in its own way and it moves me. I'm a big proponent of the whole Memphis approach to all this, there's a certain obliquity and a certain desire to fuck things up, what I've heard referred to as "the twist," as in twisting people's heads around, a hard, dry approach, that for me is what the blues is all about. And Van Vliet and his band certainly do something similar in the awesome "Click Clack" from '71, where they play a Wolf-style blues in 3, very simple but hard to catch until you just pat your foot, then it's so obvious.

Sorry to ramble, but I'm working on some writing about this very thing...

Quite a few tracks to check out from yr post.

Been stuck on Elder Curry's "Memphis Flu" lately. Uptempo 15-bar gospel-blues recorded in 1930.