Lyrics

Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often with the singer voicing his or her "personal
woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white
folk, hard times". Many of the oldest blues records contain gritty, realistic lyrics, in contrast to much of the
music being recorded at the time. One of the more extreme examples, "Down in the Alley" by Memphis
Minnie, is about a prostitute having sex with men in an alley. Music such as this was called "gut-bucket"
blues. The term refers to a type of homemade bass instrument made from a metal bucket used to clean
pig intestines for chitterlings, a soul food dish associated with slavery and deprivation. "Gut-bucket"
described blues that was "low-down" and earthy, that dealt with often rocky or steamy man-woman
relationships, hard luck and hard times. Gut-bucket blues and the rowdy juke-joint venues where it often
was played, earned blues music an unsavory reputation. Upstanding church-going people shunned it, and
some preachers railed against it as sinful. And because it often treated the hardships and injustices of life,
the blues gained an association in some quarters with misery and oppression. But the blues was about
more than hard times; it could be humorous and raunchy as well:

Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,

Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me,
It may be sending you baby, but it's worrying the hell out of me.

Author Ed Morales has claimed that Yoruba mythology played a part in early blues, citing Robert
Johnson's "Crossroads" as a "thinly veiled reference to Eleggua, the orisha in charge of the crossroads".
However, many seminal blues artists such as Joshua White, Son House, Skip James, or Reverend Gary
Davis were influenced by Christianity.

The original lyrical form of the blues was probably a single line, repeated three times. It was only later that
the current, most common structurea line, repeated once and then followed by a single line
conclusionbecame standard.

Musical style

Though during the first decades of the twentieth century blues music was not clearly defined in terms of
chords progression, the twelve-bar blues became standard in the '30s. However, in addition to the
conventional twelve-bar blues, there are many blues in 8-bar form, such as "How Long Blues", "Trouble in
Mind", and Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway". There are also 16-bar blues, as in Ray Charles's
instrumental "Sweet 16 Bars". The basic twelve-bar lyric framework of a blues composition is reflected by
a standard harmonic progression of twelve bars, in 4/4 or 2/4 time. The blues chords associated to a
twelve-bar blues are typically a set of three different chords played over a twelve-bar scheme:

I I or IV I I
IV IV I I
V IV I I or V

where the Roman numbers refer to the degrees of the progression. That would mean, if played in the
tonality of F, the chords would be as follows:

F or
F F F
Bb
Bb Bb F F
C Bb F F or C

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