Eight bar blues
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An eight bar blues is a typical blues chord progression, taking eight 4/4 bars to the verse. "How Long Blues", "Ain't Nobody's Business" and "Cherry Red" are examples. One variant is to couple an eight-bar blues with a different eight-bar blues bridge to create a blues variant of the standard 32-bar song. "Walking By Myself", "I Want a Little Girl" and "(Romancing) In The Dark" are examples of this form. See also blues ballad.
A basic example of the progression would look like this, using T to indicate the tonic, S for the subdominant, and D for the dominant, and representing one chord per beat:
T T S S T T T T S S S S T T T T T T T T S S S S T T D D T T T T
(The same chord progression can also be called a sixteen-bar blues, if each symbol above is taken to be a half note in 2/2 or 4/4 time -- blues has not traditionally been associated with notation, so its form becomes a bit slippery when written down.) Ray Charles's jazzy instrumental "Sweet Sixteen Bars" is an example.
Many variations are possible. For instance, seventh chords are often used just before a change, and more changes can be added. A more complicated example might look like this, where "7" indicates a seventh chord:
T T S7 S7 T T T7 T7 S S S7 S7 T T T T T T T7 T7 S S S7 S7 T T D7 D7 T T T D7
When the last bar contains the dominant, that bar can be called a turnaround.
A common eight-bar blues progression is:
T T T T T7 T7 T7 T7 S S S S Sm Sm Sm Sm T T T T D D D D T T T T D D D D
where m designates a minor chord and 7 a seventh.
