This (extremely cool) song isn’t an example of a song that repeats exactly the same material over and over again…read the lyrics, it’s got a few different verses…
I lack the requisite music knowledge to make this claim, but isn’t the idea of a chorus that’s set apart from the verses foreign to the blues in general? By its very nature, old-school blues is always the same thing over and over again (at least musically, it’s always the same sequence of chords, over and over again, with no variation, right?).
The following song is burnt into my memory from grade-school music class:
Let’s play a rondo
How does it go?
A-B-A-C-A-D-A
R-O-N-D-O
and on and on, with different groups of kids chiming in at different moments of the song, like “Row Row Row Your Boat” is often sung…
Now that I’m looking at the lyrics, the song seems to spell out rules for a rondo (an A-B-A-C-A-D-A structure) that we violated by singing it in this fashion…
Not necessarily. Consider a construction like “Born Under a Bad Sign,” which follows 12-bar blues form musically. Lyrically, each stanza begins with a unique couplet, with the four lines that follow (beginning with the title phrase) acting as the repeating chorus. (Pre-emptive nitpick: this particular song starts with the “chorus” alone, so that first stanza is only eight bars.)
However I think a ‘round’ is where one person sings the song, while a second starts exactly one line later, then a third one further line later…
An example of this is 'Row, row, row your boat, Gently down the stream … ', which I remember Kirk, Bones and Spock singing in one of the Star trek films.
If there isn’t a name for these songs, there ought to be. Perhaps we should take nominations and vote to choose one.
Anyone else familiar with the variant link:
Second verse, same as the first
Maybe little louder, maybe little worse?
or that archaic classic: Oh, the cow kicked Nellie in the belly in the barn . . . ?