Post 166: WHEN YOU TRIM THE 12-BAR BLUES

The standard, basic chord structure of a 12-bar blues (without any subtleties) is this:

I | I | I | I7 | IV | IV | I | I | V7 | V7 | I | I | 

Hundreds of tunes are based upon it.

But there are some curious variants that are arrived at by chopping out some part of the structure.

For example, lop off the first two bars and you have this:

 I | I7 | IV | IV | I | I | V7 | V7 | I | I | 

This is exactly what you get in the 10-bar tune Frisco Bound, composed in 1929 by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe.

Lop off the first four bars:

 IV | IV | I | I | V7 | V7 | I | I | 

... and you have the chord progression for The Girls Go Crazy (and many other tunes with 8-bar themes - such as the second part of Down By The Riverside).

Omit Bar 9 and you get:

I | I | I | I7 | IV | IV | I | I | V7 | I | I | 

...which is what you have with the possibly unique 11-bar blues that is Jackson Stomp, composed in 1930 by  Charlie McCoy and Walter Vincson.

Memphis Minnie

And here's a curiosity - the only 13-BAR blues I can think of. It occurs as the Interlude in Blind Boy Fuller's Untrue Blues. This is essentially an eight-bar tune, but he has two guitar links of 13 bars, which seemed to be based on the 12-bar blues, but with Bar 10 repeated. When Tuba Skinny revived this tune in 2014, they scrupulously followed the original and kept the 13-bar section.

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Footnote

The book Playing Traditional Jazz by Pops Coffee is available from Amazon.