Where Did Twelve Bar Blues Come From, Anyway?
In an interview with W.C. Handy, Dorothy Scarborough discovered that the blues songs as sung by itinerants and street musicians in the late 1800s and early 1900s, were originally 4 line verses. The first line was repeated 3 times and a final 4th line resolved the first three. Handy admits that he found the 4th line in many of the songs he heard sung back then “monotonous”, by which I think he may have meant “redundant”, and in his famous “Memphis Blues”, disregarded the traditional 4th line and wrote the song in three, thus establishing the 12-bar blues format. The song became wildly popular and the 12-bar format has influenced many artists from Charlie Patton to Robert Johnson to Eric Clapton. Many of the poems Johnson finds were written prior to “Memphis Blues”, and particularly those written by Dunbar, Harris, and Campbell seem to lend themselves to a 16 bar arrangement (for example “The Raggedy Man”, by James Whitcomb Riley). Keeping in mind that the poems were written before 1912,
