"The Saint Louis Blues" (or "St. Louis Blues") is a popular American song composed by W. C. Handy in the jazz style and published in September 1914. It was one of the first blues songs to succeed as a pop song and remains a fundamental part of jazz musicians' repertoire. Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Bing Crosby, Bessie Smith, Mildred Bailey, Billy "Uke" Carpenter, Eartha Kitt, Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Guy Lombardo, Peanuts Hucko, Art Tatum, Paul Robeson, and the Boston Pops Orchestra (under the directions of both Arthur Fiedler and Keith Lockhart) are among the artists who have recorded it. The song has been called "the jazzman's Hamlet". Composer William Grant Still arranged a version of the song in 1916 while working with Handy.
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 Red Allen) was inducted in 2008. The 1922 version by W.C. Handy and his Memphis Blues Band was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2023.
History
Handy said he had been inspired by a chance meeting with a woman on the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, 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. 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."
Analysis
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, which Jelly Roll Morton called the "Spanish tinge" and characterized by Handy as tango.
While blues often became simple and repetitive in form, "Saint Louis Blues" has multiple complementary and contrasting strains, similar to classic ragtime compositions. T-Bone Walker commented about the song, "You can't dress up the blues... I'm not saying that 'Saint Louis Blues' isn't fine music you understand. But it just isn't blues".
Performances
Handy wrote about the first time "Saint Louis Blues" was played in 1914: