Category: Song
St. Louis Blues
Bessie Smith (1925)
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Writer: W. C. Handy
Producer: Uncredited
Label: Columbia
Album: N/A
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“St. Louis Blues” was, and remains, a phenomenon — a fully composed (rather than traditional hand-me-down) blues song that became a massive hit. W. C. Handy wrote it in 1913, at a time when there were no charts to register a song’s popularity. Yet some measure of its success comes from the income it generated through sheet-music sales. For more than forty years, the song brought in an annual sum of around $25,000, making Handy a multimillionaire by today’s reckoning.
The song has been recorded by many blues and jazz musicians, but no finer version exists than the one by Bessie Smith. Accompanied by just Fred Longshaw on harmonium and a magisterial Louis Armstrong on cornet, Smith mournfully relates the tale of how her love has run away with a chic St. Louis woman. Handy said he was inspired to write the song after meeting a woman in St. Louis bemoaning the absence of her husband. “Ma man’s got a heart like a rock cast in da sea,” she remarked — a line Handy wrote into the song.
Handy’s skill is evident in the way in which he alters the traditional twelve-bar blues structure by introducing a sixteen-bar bridge in the habanera rhythm — an irregularity accented beat known as the “Spanish Tinge” — after the second verse. It adds contrast to the song into one of the most heartfelt laments of the century.” (SA)
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