Topic: Talkin' 15-bar blues

[MissouriTiger]

I recently picked up my guitar again after not playing for a year (I know, shame on me!). While reacquainting myself with my repertoire, I?ve discovered something that I probably noticed in the past, but it has me curious. It is this:

Both ?Boat?s Up the River? by John Jackson and Mississippi John Hurt?s ?Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor? have a 15-bar structure. I confirmed this after repeatedly listening to recordings and counting bars. I find it curious, but not shocking. What has me kinda mystified is that Google searches don?t turn up any discussion of 15-bar blues. I see it mentioned in passing here & there that a particular tune is unusual in that it has a 15 bar structure, but I can?t find any mention of these two songs in connection with 15-bars.

Why do these two songs have a 15-bar structure? My first thought is it takes what it takes. You play around and come up with a song and it sounds good, and that?s that. It is possible that neither of these guys even noticed how many bars their respective songs had. Did either of them have other 15-bar songs?

Or is there actually an elusive 15-bar blues category that has thus far evaded discovery by musicologists? Lol!

I then recalled that John Hurt first recorded the same basic tune as Pallet in 1928 as "Ain't No Tellin'", so I listened to that one, counted the bars, and I?ll be darn if it isn?t a 20-bar blues! Once again, I find little in the way of discussion of 20-bar blues by Googling and searching Weenie.

I?m interested in anyone?s thoughts on this mysterious subject of 15-bar blues, as well as 20-bars. Other examples, reasons behind it, etc?

But the mystery gets even deeper folks?

I swear last night I searched the Weenie site for ?15 bars? and found a single entry where someone had mentioned a Robert Wilkins song that had a 15-bar structure. Today the same search turns up nothing. Is that weird? Have I inadvertently uncovered a global conspiracy to keep knowledge of the 15-bar blues from us? And have they even managed to hack Weenie? What evil masterminds are behind this plot to bury the truth and erase history? I remember hearing of someone called the ?Folk Nazis.? Perhaps they are behind it??? If this post mysteriously disappears from the site, I will know to pack my bags and go into hiding, lest I be next!  Lol!

[Rivers]

Hi MT, I count 16 bars, mostly, in 1928's Ain't No Tellin'. I say mostly because he cuts most of the turnaround bars in half, so 15 and a half for those. I don't know about the other songs, I'll have a listen.

[Johnm]

Hi Missouri Tiger,
In "Ain't No Tellin'" and "Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor", John Hurt played a song that is normally played as a 16-bar Pop Song, not really a blues, and did it as a 15-bar song by virtue of compressing the final two bars of the form, normally played with four beats each into one bar of six beats, thus ending up with a 15-bar form.  As the song is normally played, it resolves to a I chord in the fifteenth bar and goes to a I7 chord in the sixteenth bar, to set up movement to the IV chord, which the song begins on; John Hurt instead chose to, in the fifteenth bar, play four beats of the I chord and two more beats of a I7 chord, getting the same kind of chordal momentum into the next verse, but not giving the I7 chord a bar to itself.  Mystery solved.

Similarly, in "Boat's Up The River", John Jackson plays the form like so:

   |   II    |    II    |    I    |    I    |

   |   II    |  II  I  |  V (six beats)|

   |  III7  |   III7 |   IV    |   IV   |

   |  I       | II7 V |    I     |    I    |

He winds up with fifteen bars because he is short two beats in what would have been the seventh bar, had he played it with four beats like the other measures.  Instead, he just gives it two beats, and goes right into what would have been the eighth bar, which has the pick-up notes to the bridge, that portion of the form that goes from III7 to IV.  So what would have been a 16-bar song becomes a 15-bar song by virtue of compressing two four-beat measures into one six-beat measure.

So maybe the reason you don't hear about fifteen-bar blues is that there are none, or at least none in which each bar contains four beats, from the beginning to the end of the form.  And as to the question of the possibility of whether John Hurt and John Jackson had not noticed how many bars their songs had, I would say it is not only a possibility, but a virtual certainty.  Neither player thought of songs in terms of bar structures, I believe it is safe to say.  And if you always play as a soloist, what does the bar structure matter?
All best,
Johnm   
   

[MissouriTiger]

I appreciate the explanation. I could be 2 beats off in the Vanguard recording of Pallet, which would agree with your explanation, but I slowed a video of John Jackson playing Boats Up the River to half speed and studied it meticulously tabbing out the entire first measure note by note, and I counted 15 4-beat bars exactly. 60 beats takes it exactly to the same starting spot in the next measure. Nonetheless, I could be mistaken.

As for the 1928 recording of "Ain't No Tellin'" I did count 20 4-beat bars in the first verse.

In all cases I only counted the first verse (the intro verse) in the recording. Maybe the intros aren't representative of the rest of the verses, but they sound like they are to my ear.

[Johnm]

Hi Missouri Tiger,
It's not a matter of counting beats and dividing by four, but parsing phrase lengths, which for "Boat's Up The River" are definitely not all four beats long per measure.  I realized after my first post, though, hearing the song back in my head, that John Jackson in addition to being short in the G chord at the end of the second phrase is also short in the F at the end of the third phrase, combining what would normally be two four-beat measures into one six-beat measure in which he did the pick-up notes back to C at the end of the F phrase as a two beat add-on to the first measure of F.
So what he ended up with is actually a 14-bar blues that has twelve four-beat measures and two six-beat measures, for a total of sixty beats, like so:

   |    D   |    D    |    C    |    C    |

   |    D   |  D  C  | G (six beats)  |

   |    E   |   E7    |  F (six beats)  |

   |   C    | D7  G  |   C    |    C    |
All best,
Johnm

[Rivers]

Thanks Johnm, I see. What I described as a half bar (2 beats, making for a quick change) actually counts as an elongation of the previous bar, i.e. six beats in the bar. Have I got that right?

Ain't No Tellin' (Hurt 1928) has several of these going on, in different places, in both the instrumental and lyric verses. But surely that would reduce the overall bar count?

Actually I'm going to answer my own question. This is folk music, not close order drill. If Lawrence Welk & Orchestra was playing it it would come out as a strict 16 bar melody! It's the unevenness that provides the feel that helps to make it individual and distinct.

[Johnm]

Hi Rivers,
Doing pick-up notes as add-ons to an earlier measure does result in the six beat bars, as you describe them--spot on.  Bar count is reduced by combining what would have been two measures into one measure with a total number of beats less than two times four.  You're right, too, that for "Ain't No Tellin'", John Hurt does not maintain a consistent form throughout the rendition.  A couple of times, mostly on solos, he does it exactly as he did "Make Me A Pallet On The Floor" on "Mississippi John Hurt--Today!"  Other times, he plays the form ending with two bars of four beats per bar each.  He never plays a 20-bar form, but rather begins with an instrumental intro that gives a one bar turn-around followed by a version of the first four bars of the form.  Once he starts singing, the form is substantially the same as the '60s recording, though he varies it quite a lot, as you say, and is moreover short in different places in the form in subsequent passes through it.  Several times, he's short on the C chord that precedes the E.  What's really amazing is what pace and flow he maintains throughout the rendition, despite altering the form as he passes through it; he didn't need to have it go just one way, he was comfortable playing it and altering it as he felt it.  In this respect, John Hurt, despite having an altogether different sound and feel, had more in common with musicians like Lightnin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, or R. L. Burnside than we might have thought. 
The thread "Vocal Phrasing: The Long And The Short of It" has analysis of a host of songs with regard to phrasing that varies from a "12 bars, each of 4 beats" model.  Metric consistency was relatively rare in Country Blues, as it turns out.   
All best,
Johnm

[Rivers]

Absolutely clear analysis, thank you very much. This has always been a grey area for me, I tend to count bars sometimes and it throws me every time.

[Rivers]

I've moved this topic to Licks & Lessons.

[Johnm]

Hi all,
In re-listening to "Boat's Up The River", I found that John Jackson approached the song very much as John Hurt approached "Ain't No Tellin'" in his 1928 recording, that is, changing the form slightly in different passes through the form.  For his solos, he most often (but not always) plays the form as outlined above, with single six-beat measures of G and F, respectively, at the end of the second and third lines, but in his singing, he most often does only the six-beat measure of G at the end of the second line, choosing instead to phrase two four-beat measures of F at the end of the third line.  Then there's the whole portion of the song that begins, "I'm going away to leave this old country", which is different yet.  Suffice it to say that John Jackson changed the form up as he went, and was perfectly secure and grounded in how he did that.
All best,
Johnm

[MissouriTiger]

Wow, moving the post kinda freaked me out for a minute. I thought maybe my joke in the original post "If this post mysteriously disappears from the site..." had come true.

Once again, I really appreciate John's in-depth explanations. I'll be looking for this from now on. Until now I had no idea that any such thing as 6-beat bars existed. I had always thought the division of the measures was simply dependent on a time signature and didn't vary. I don't recall seeing anybody tab a song any other way.

I'll be looking/listening for it...

[Rivers]

Me too, exactly. This has been a very helpful discussion, glad you brought it up.

[Johnm]

Hi guys,
I'm glad you found the explanation helpful.  For a much more in-depth discussion of the same topic, with many songs discussed with different phrasing issues, go to the thread "Vocal Phrasing--The Long and the Short of It", at:  https://weeniecampbell.com/yabbse/index.php?topic=951.msg7166#msg7166 . 
I just went back to that thread and added performances of all of the songs under discussion that I could find versions of on youtube, so you won't have to track down the versions yourselves to hear the songs that are discussed.  I think that in terms of being able to hear and feel when phrasing is short or long and a form goes away from simply using four-beat measures, it is really helpful to listen to a number of songs where that happens.  And this thread, by its very nature, focuses on such songs.  Anyhow, folks may want to check out that thread if you're interested, as I am, in the particulars of how different musicians phrased their blues.
All best,
Johnm