This date in 1958 saw the release of the film ST LOUIS BLUES, the 1958 American film broadly based on the life of blues musician and composer W. C. Handy (April 7th 1958)
The film starred jazz and blues greats Nat "King" Cole, Pearl Bailey, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, and Barney Bigard, as well as gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and actress Ruby Dee.
The film's soundtrack used over ten of Handy's songs including the title song.
The clip here features Eartha Kitt performing Handy's YELLOW DOG BLUES. I've upscaled and colourised the scene.
W. C. HANDY - MEMPHIS BLUES
In 1903 William Christopher Handy was leading a band called the Colored Knights of Pythias based in Clarksdale, in Mississippi's Delta country, when one day he paid a visit to the little town of Tutwiler.
Handy wrote in his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues, that he was joined by a man who "commenced plunking a guitar beside me... His face had on it the sadness of the ages."
"As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularised by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars... The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard."
The music was "weird" because it was new.
Handy described the 12-bar form "with its three-chord basic structure (tonic-subdominant-dominant seventh)" as one widely used "...honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of their underprivileged but undaunted clan from Missouri to the Gulf [of Mexico]".
It had become, he said, "a common medium through which any such individual might express his personal feelings in a sort of a musical soliloquy".
Handy himself was from a very different world. A skilled, musically-literate, and well-travelled band leader from northern Alabama, he nonetheless saw the possibilities in this form of music, and when in 1909 he moved to Memphis, Tennessee, he took some of the music he had heard in Mississippi and rearranged it for his band.
"It did the business too," wrote Handy. "Folks went wild about it."
In 1912, with the recording industry still in its infancy, Handy published one of his compositions on paper as Memphis Blues. It was a hit.
"Handy's Memphis Blues was hugely significant," says Elijah Wald, author of The Blues: A Very Short Introduction. "It started the blues craze and made the blues a key marketing term."
Memphis Blues became the song of 1912, the song people were asking to hear in dance halls nationwide.
"Memphis Blues was spread by the sale of sheet music and by the fact that every dance band in America was being asked to play it, and was playing it," said Wald.
For Handy, writing in the late 1930s, Memphis Blues "was the first of all the many published 'blues' and it set a new fashion in American popular music and contributed to the rise of jazz, or, if you prefer, swing, and even boogie-woogie".
As originally published, Memphis Blues is an instrumental piece, about three minutes long in the earliest recording.
It contained both 16-bar melodies that the audience was used to, and innovative 12-bar sections, and mixed regular two-four time with the Afro-Cuban habanera dance rhythm.
As for the melody, it uses "what have since become known as 'blue notes'," said Handy, "the transitional flat thirds and sevenths."
From the moment it emerged into US mass culture, blues was popular music for both blacks and whites.NAT KING COLE & EARTHA KITT - YELLOW DOG BLUES (1958, in colour)
Celeberating the birth of the MEMPHIS BLUES.
108 years ago, on this date in 1912 (September 27th), an African-American musician by the name of WC Handy published a song that would take the US by storm - Memphis Blues. It launched the blues as a mass entertainment genre that would transform popular music worldwide.
To celebrate this anniversary I've colourised a scene from 'St. Louis Blues', the 1958 American film broadly based on the life of W. C. Handy.
It starred jazz and blues greats Nat "King" Cole, Pearl Bailey, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, and Barney Bigard, as well as gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and actress Ruby Dee.
The film's soundtrack used over ten of Handy's songs including the title song.
The clip here features Eartha Kitt performing Handy's YELLOW DOG BLUES.
W. C. HANDY - MEMPHIS BLUES
In 1903 William Christopher Handy was leading a band called the Colored Knights of Pythias based in Clarksdale, in Mississippi's Delta country, when one day he paid a visit to the little town of Tutwiler.
Handy wrote in his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues, that he was joined by a man who "commenced plunking a guitar beside me... His face had on it the sadness of the ages."
"As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularised by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars... The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard."
The music was "weird" because it was new.
Handy described the 12-bar form "with its three-chord basic structure (tonic-subdominant-dominant seventh)" as one widely used "...honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of their underprivileged but undaunted clan from Missouri to the Gulf [of Mexico]".
It had become, he said, "a common medium through which any such individual might express his personal feelings in a sort of a musical soliloquy".
Handy himself was from a very different world. A skilled, musically-literate, and well-travelled band leader from northern Alabama, he nonetheless saw the possibilities in this form of music, and when in 1909 he moved to Memphis, Tennessee, he took some of the music he had heard in Mississippi and rearranged it for his band.
"It did the business too," wrote Handy. "Folks went wild about it."
In 1912, with the recording industry still in its infancy, Handy published one of his compositions on paper as Memphis Blues. It was a hit.
"Handy's Memphis Blues was hugely significant," says Elijah Wald, author of The Blues: A Very Short Introduction. "It started the blues craze and made the blues a key marketing term."
Memphis Blues became the song of 1912, the song people were asking to hear in dance halls nationwide.
"Memphis Blues was spread by the sale of sheet music and by the fact that every dance band in America was being asked to play it, and was playing it," said Wald.
For Handy, writing in the late 1930s, Memphis Blues "was the first of all the many published 'blues' and it set a new fashion in American popular music and contributed to the rise of jazz, or, if you prefer, swing, and even boogie-woogie".
As originally published, Memphis Blues is an instrumental piece, about three minutes long in the earliest recording.
It contained both 16-bar melodies that the audience was used to, and innovative 12-bar sections, and mixed regular two-four time with the Afro-Cuban habanera dance rhythm.
As for the melody, it uses "what have since become known as 'blue notes'," said Handy, "the transitional flat thirds and sevenths."
From the moment it emerged into US mass culture, blues was popular music for both blacks and whites.
