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🦋 12 bars
Here is the structure of blues as I hear it:
| 2 bars melody, I I or I IV | | X bars fill |
| 2 bars melody, IV IV | | X bars fill |
| 2 bars melody, V I | | X - 1 bars fill, 1 bar turnaround |
I usually expect X = 2, a 12-bar pattern. (The fill is usually all I chord, turnaround is V.) I can picture a slow 15-bar blues with X = 3 -- I may have played this on occasion, not sure. I was really surprised when listening to Mountain Blues & Ballads, to hear Gene Autry's "Black Bottom Blues" -- something just seemed wrong about it and I couldn't figure out what. Come to realize, it's a 9-bar blues -- X is 1! I didn't even know that was possible! A-and later in the same collection, a fiddle blues called "Tipple Blues" (not sure just now, who the artist is -- this is essentially the same melody as "Deep Elem Blues") which unless I'm mistaken, is 10 bars -- X is 2 on the first line, 1 subsequently. So cool, the form is a lot more versatile than I had realized.
 (And funny, the thing is I'm pretty sure if I covered "Black Bottom Blues", I would play 2 bars of fill -- that's etched deeply on my brane as the correct amount.)
posted morning of Thursday, January 29th, 2009
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The structure is you describe it is pretty accurate (some other variations: flat III as the second bar of the second phrase; i.e., C if I is A). But it's important to recognize that this structure wasn't quite so set-in-stone from the start. Early blues is much freer in its phrasing (as is music influenced by it, like early Dylan: some of his phrases are half-bars long, or even weirder...like try to parse the phrasing and time signatures of "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)") - the most obvious example is a lot of Robert Johnson's stuff.
posted evening of January 29th, 2009 by 2fs
Yeah, I've noticed bits in Dylan and in older music where there is an extra half a bar hanging around and sounding just right -- I try to convince my jamming friends that we should sometimes hold a note an extra beat or two before getting back into the 4/4 groove; but have not had much luck with getting them to see things my way so far.
posted evening of January 29th, 2009 by Jeremy
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