A guide for building your piece, step by step.
The Blues Song option asks you to write a short piece using the 12-bar blues form, one of the most foundational structures in American music. You don't need to know how to play guitar or piano. What matters is that you understand the form, write something personal using the AAB lyric pattern, and connect your piece to the cultural history it comes from.
The materials below give you everything you need to get started: a chord chart, the blues scale, a lyric template, and a worked example. Use as much or as little as feels right.
Blues music is built on a repeating 12-bar harmonic pattern. Each box below is one measure. The pattern uses three chords: the I chord (home), the IV chord (a step away), and the V chord (tension before returning home). In the key of A, those are A, D, and E.
You don't have to play these chords. You can hum a melody over them, write lyrics that fit their rhythm, or simply reference the pattern in your written reflection. What matters is that you understand how the form moves.
If you want to write or sing a melody, these are the notes that will sound at home over the blues form. The blues scale is a modified minor scale: it uses the same intervalic framework as minor but omits two notes and adds one note that doesn't appear in either major or minor. That added note, E♭ (sometimes called the "blue note"), sits between the fourth and fifth scale degrees. It gives blues music its characteristic sound, slightly bent away from the major or minor pattern, which is part of what makes it so expressive.
The red note is the "blue note." Try using it at an emotionally charged moment in your lyric.
Blues lyrics traditionally follow an AAB pattern: the first line states something (A), the second line repeats or slightly varies it (A again), and the third line responds, resolves, or turns it (B). This structure is ancient and effective: the repetition builds tension, and the final line releases it.
The example above is deliberately ordinary. That's the point. Blues has always been about real, lived experience, not grand tragedy or poetry for a grade. Write about something that actually happened to you.
Use the space below to draft your AAB lyric. You can write as many verses as you want; one complete verse is the minimum for your submission.
If you're staring at a blank page, these steps can help you get something down.
Your written reflection is 1-2 pages and should use course vocabulary. Use the space below to jot down initial thoughts; you can develop these into your full reflection later.
What musical ideas did you use? (Think about form, rhythm, scale, melody.)
Where does the blues come from, and what does your piece connect to in that history?
What does your piece mean to you personally? What were you trying to express?