Saint Louis Blues (song)
| "St. Louis Blues" | |
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Sheet music cover
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| Song | |
| Published | 1914 |
| Genre | Blues |
| Writer(s) | W. C. Handy |
| "Saint Louis Blues" | |
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| Single by Bessie Smith | |
| Released | 1925 |
| Format | 10-inch 78 rpm record |
| Recorded | New York City, January 14, 1925 |
| Genre | Blues |
| Length | 3:11 |
| Label | Columbia (14064-D) |
| Writer(s) | W. C. Handy |
"Saint Louis Blues" is a popular American song, composed by W. C. Handy in the blues style and published in September 1914. It remains a fundamental part of jazz musicians' repertoire. It was also one of the first blues songs to succeed as a pop song. It has been performed by numerous musicians in various styles, from Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith to Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Guy Lombardo, and the Boston Pops Orchestra. It has been called "the jazzman's Hamlet".
The 1925 version sung by Bessie Smith, with Louis Armstrong on cornet, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1993. The 1929 version by Louis Armstrong & His Orchestra (with Henry "Red" Allen) was inducted in 2008.
Handy said he had been inspired by a chance meeting with a woman on the streets of St. Louis distraught over her husband's absence, who lamented, "Ma man's got a heart like a rock cast in de sea", a key line of the song. Details of the story vary. Handy's autobiography recounts his hearing the tune in St. Louis in 1892: "It had numerous one-line verses and they would sing it all night."
The song was a massive and enduring success. Athe time of his death in 1958, Handy was earning royalties of upwards of US$25,000 annually for the song (equivalent to about $200,000 in 2016). The original published sheet music is available online from the United States Library of Congress in a searchable database of African-American music from Brown University.
The form is unusual in that the verses are the now-familiar standard twelve-bar blues in common time with three lines of lyrics, the first two lines repeated, but it also has a 16-bar bridge written in the habanera rhythm, popularly called the "Spanish tinge" and characterized by Handy as tango. The tango-like rhythm is notated as a dotted quarter note followed by an eighth note and two quarter notes, with no slurs or ties. It is played in the introduction and in the sixteen-measure bridge.
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Wikipedia