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The thirty-two-bar form, often shortened to AABA, is common in Tin Pan Alley songs and, though "there were few instances of it in any type of popular music until the late teens," it became "the principal form" around 1925-1926 (Wilder 1972, p. 56, [1] (http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/hbecker/pops.html)).
"In this form, the musical structure of each chorus is made up of four eight-bar sections, in an AABA pattern...Thousands of Tin Pan Alley tunes share this scheme and Adorno is quite justified in arguing that to listeners of the time it would be totally predictable. Moreover, within the chorus, the identical music is heard" more than once: "it is, to use Adorno's phrase, 'the same familiar experience' that is emphasized (1941: 18)." (Middleton 1990, p.46)
The B section is often referred to as the bridge and sometimes as the release.
One example is "Down in Mexico Way", in which, "the A sections...are doubled in length, to sixteen bars - but this affects the overall scheme only marginally." Thirty-two-bar form is often used in jazz.
See also: twelve bar blues.
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