Explain 8-bar blues please

Cafe Society
1

What exactly does 8-bar blues mean – and what does it not mean? I read the wikipedia page, the accompanying wikipedia discussion, as well as an old guitar magazine article, but I still don’t see much of a pattern other than the 8 bars. Is that really the only concrete part?

12-bar blues seems to be more specific, it has 12-bars and a common chord progression. Even when I hear the variations, I can still see the framework. But 8-bar blues mystifies me. I think I can recognize it when I hear it, but when I look at the chord progressions for a few songs, I don’t see much pattern. Is it just a lot more fluid?

Here are a few of progressions I have looked at:
[ul][li]Key to the Highway[/li][li]Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out[/li][li]Ain’t Nobody’s Business[/li][li]Same Old Blues[/li][li]It’s Not My Cross to Bear[/li][/ul]
Key to the Highway is pretty simple and if all of the other progressions looked similar, I wouldn’t have this question. But when I look at It’s Not My Cross to Bear, I don’t see much in common at all.

Thanks in advance!

2

Eight bar blues is simply blues that has been reduced from its standard 12-bar format to fit the more typical pop eight-bar format. There’s a million and a half different ways to do this, but generally all involve use of the I7, the IV7, and the V7 chords (although other chords may be used, these are the defining blues chords).

I don’t know most of these songs, so I can’t help you on the progressions. If you post a couple, perhaps I can explain a little more to you.

3

OK, I just had a listen to The Allman Brothers’ It’s Not My Cross to Bear.

It starts out in a slow, lazy 12/8 with a guitar line that is very clearly blues in its note selection (blues scale), phrasing, and tone. I’m sure most casual listeners would have no trouble identifying this as a blues tune.

As to the chord progression, here’s what we’ve basically got:

B7 | B7 | E7 | Em7 | B7-G#7 | C#7-F#7| B7 | B7 |

It’s eight bar blues in B. All the key chords are there: the B7, the E7, and the F#7. The harmonic motion in blues pretty much always followst his pattern: start on the I chord (in this case, the B7), then move up to the IV chord (E7). Go back to the I chord, find your way to the V7 chord (F#7), and resolve by moving back down to the I chord (sometimes directly, sometimes via a IV7).

So what do we have here in Roman numeral notation (disregarding the 7ths for the time being):

I | I | IV | iv | I - ? | ? - V | I | V

I’ll get to those question marks in a minute. So, this is starting to look like a blues progression, no? In fact, one of the chord progessions on the Wikipedia page is this:

I | I | IV | iv | I | V | I | V |

That’s almost exactly what we’ve got in It’s Not My Cross to Bear. What are the differences? Well, the only difference we have is how we get to from the I to the V in bars 5 and 6. The Allman Brothers make use of “passing chords” in order to get from the B7 to the E7. In this case, they just go around the Circle of Fifths to land at the F#7. What’s a fifth up from F#? C#. What’s a fifth up from C#? G#. Well, look at that–there’s our progression. G#7 - C#7 - F#7 (and finally down to B7).

So here’s how our progression really looks:

I | I | IV | iv | I - (V of V of V) | (V of V) - V | I | V

Why does this sound good? Because dominant 7th chords tend to want to resolve down a fifth into the tonic, so the harmonic motion is familiar and expected in Western harmony, although it’s used here in a blues context, which has its own, somewhat different rules.

I don’t know if this helps at all or further confuses, but I assume you’ll have some more questions, so feel free to ask.

4

Upon reflection, this progression would better be described as a type of “turnaround” rather than “passing chords.” Also, the standard way of notating this would be I - VI - II - V, and the progression is very, very common in jazz. I notated it as I - (V of V of V) - (V of V) - V to give a sense of harmonically where these chords are coming from, but I fear I may be obfuscating rather than elucidating the issue.

5

puly - thanks to one of our residence trained musicians for laying it out. I suspect a non-musician may be a bit whooshed but your theory in the the thread, but it makes sense to me!

I think the basic difference between 12 bar and 8 bar is - strangely enough - how many bars it takes to resolve the overall standard blues I - IV - V progression, as you lay out. I am sure there are more hard n’ fast rules, but in my experience your description holds - start at the I for a bit, go to the IV, back to the I and then V, to IV to I - with a turnaround back to the V to set up kicking off the I again in many cases. In my experience, there are many variations - sometimes you don’t stop at the IV on the way back down from the V, sometime you bounce back and forth between the I and the IV as you make transitions, etc. - but the basics are there and the 12 vs. 8 vs. 16 bars is more a matter of general timing to play the whole progression…

I am sure I have just whooshed a bunch more folks - sorry. And I am sure there are blues purists out there who will laugh at my generalizations and show that there are more clear distinctions between the different blues structures - in which case I am all ears…

6

Wow thanks puly – that really helps, particularly when you explained the turnaround and the circle of fifths. Now that I understand the logic behind the turnaround, I can just think of those two bars as “the turnaround” and the pattern starts emerging. I also wasn’t thinking of the B-A-G#m and E-D-C#m-Bm bars as simply B7 and E7 bars respectively. I’m sorry I didn’t put the chords in the OP and I appreciate you taking the time to figure them out.

Now if I take the chords to “Key to the Highway”:
A | E7 | D7 | D7 | A | E7 | A | E7

I guess these would translate to:
I | V7 | IV7 | IV7 | I | V | I | V

now comparing that to “…My Cross…”:
I | I | IV | iv | I - VI | II - V | I | V

it looks pretty much the same. I didn’t see that the turnarounds were basically the same until you explained it. And the difference in the 2nd bar threw me off at first.

So if I look at “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”:
C E | A A7 A | Dm A | Dm | F F7 | C C/B A | D7 | G7

would this be?
V | I | iv | iv | ? | I | IV7 | ?

Or am I way off?

7

Yeah, “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” is a tricky one. I’d notate it with C as the tonic. The end of the progression: “F F7| C C/B A | D7 | G7” is another common turnaround-type thing you’ll hear in blues/jazz. If you look at this way, you’ll see that it’s the familiar “I - VI7 - II7 - V7” preceded by a “IV - IV7”

So here’s what I see:

I III | VI | ii VI| ii | IV IV7| I VI | II7 V7

8

Good answers already, so I won’t try to duplicate them.

I will say that often an 8 bar blues feels ‘rushed’ to me. Not in a bad way, but just as a variation that gets where it’s going a bit quicker.

Also, great selection of songs.

9

Wait, where do you hear these chords? I hear descending bass E-D-C#-B for that third measure (which I have notated as E7), but I don’t hear four different chords, rather just a decending bass line – E7, E7/D, E7/C#, E7/B. The organ definitely holds on to that chord.

10

I got the chords from the guitar magazine article. This is the song as they list it (all as 6 note barre chords):
B A G#m / | B A G#m / | E D C#m Bm | Em D C#m Bm | B7 / G#7 / | C#7 / F#7 / | B A G#m G | F#7 / / / |

I’m listening to a live version from “The Road Goes On Forever” and I think the chords are there, but subtley for the intro and first verse. On the second verse (starts with “I sat down and wrote you a long letter”) the chords are more obvious and the two high notes of the chords ring out.

So maybe this is a silly question, but what makes this song an 8-bar blues song as opposed to a song that repeats every 8 bars? I was expecting the I, IV, and V chords to be the primary chords, but they only show up in half the bars. Is this where the definition of a blues song gets blurry?

11

OK, I hear what you’re talking about in the second verse, but my harmonic sense still tells me to call this part of the B7 and the E7 chord, especially since that Hammond chord anchors the progression. It just doesn’t sound right to me on guitar just playing B A G#m without the B7 holding it all together. If I were playing this alone on guitar and singing (hypothetically, since I can’t sing worth a damn), I would play the first four bars as B7 B7 E7 E7. Try and see if that seems to make more sense to you.

Well, more or less, yes. It’s definitely blurring the lines between blues and jazz at this point. I don’t blame you for having difficulty in identifying this as a blues tune, because it is a heavily modified blues.

12

Thanks pulykamell! All these songs sound like blues songs to me, in a qualitative way. I had been wondering if there was a quantitative aspect that made these blues songs. But I guess, in this sense, the rules are no different for 8-bar than they are for 12-bar. When I first learned about 12-bar blues, it was explained that a song that works its way through a I, IV, V pattern in 12-bars is a blues song, but that it wasn’t the only way to make a blues song. That there were many other aspects that might make a song a blues song: the key of the solo, the solo style, the selection of instruments, the lyrical pattern (call-repeat), the lyrical content, etc. I guess in the end, a lot of 8-bar blues songs explorer the boundaries a bit more, whereas 12-bar often tends to stay closer to the generic pattern.