No. Lots of blues don't repeat the first line. Even lots of old-timey blues. Take the lyrics to Robert Johnson's Come On In My Kitchen, as quintessential as blues gets, no repeated first line to the verse:
Come On In My Kitchen
©(1978) 1990, 1991 Lehsem II, LLC/Claud L. JohnsonAdministered by Music & Media International, Inc. Mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm
mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm Mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm
mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm You'd better come on in my kitchen
babe it going to be rainin outdoors Ah the woman I love
took from my best friend Some joker got lucky
stiole her back again You'd better come on in my kitchen
babe it going to be rainin outdoors Oh-ah she's gone
I know she won't come back again I've taken the last nickel
out of her nation sack You'd better come on in my kitchen
babe it going to be rainin outdoors When a woman gets in trouble
everybody throws her down Lookin for her good friend
none can be found You'd better come on in my kitchen
babe it going to be rainin outdoors Winter time's comin
its gonna be slow You can't make the winter babe
thats dry long so You'd better come on in my kitchen
babe it going to be rainin outdoors
In fact, fundamentally the blues is music, not lyrics. You don't need any lyrics. I have lots of blues records with no vocals at all, just piano or guitar or harmonica, whatever. As Johnson shows in Come On In My Kitchen, you can have blues with vocals but no lyrics, those introdocutory Mmm mmm's. You cannot have blues without music. You need, if not the pentatonic scale, then chord structures based in them, and you need the blue notes. Seth and Miles are right about the flatted third as well as the flatted seventh and fifth, I meant to write that. You also need to bend the blues notes instead of playing them dead on.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 19, 2007, at 9:56 PM, andie nachgeborenen
> wrote:
>
> > The distinctive feature of the blues
> (musicologists
> > tell us) is the "blue" note, the flatted 5ths and
> > 7ths.
>
> Also the repetition of the first line of the verse,
> no?
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