I am looking for the one that is sung by Bessie Smith with cornet fills by Louis Armstrong. It sent his car careening into Bessie Smith's overturned Packard, completely wrecking it.
Handy hit the popular music market with the intention of making the blues into a popular and accessible form, writing things down was a part of his game plan—after all, you can't sell a song you don't copyright. When W.C.
Within each verse, however, the structure of the blues is present: the first two lines are repeated, followed by a conclusively sad and drifting third line, and the A and C sections also follow the bluesy 12-bar structure starting and ending on the major It may seem a little eclectic next to the simplicity of 12-bar blues, but the little extravagances of "St. Louis Blues" were part of the appeal. So, he wrote a song about a man leaving a woman, a woman feelin' down, and, well, that's about it.
The only other instrument on the song is a harmonium played by Fred Longshaw which wheezes along as if itWithout ever over-emoting or losing sight of the character shes playing, Smith wrings every last bit of sting from Handys lyrics, which depict a woman whose man has left her for a lady with Each sunset seems to remind her anew of her disappearing happiness, so that her plans to make a By the time Smith gets around to that famous line about the ultimate heart of stone, with Armstrong wailing all around her, she has transcended Handys potent creation and taken the song to another realm, one of inexhaustible sorrow.
Handy himself was African American, but he doesn't pretend to have grown up with sounds of the blues. View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 1923 Shellac release of St. Louis Gal / Sam Jones' Blues on Discogs. I tricked the dancers by arranging a tango introduction, breaking abruptly into a low-down blues. "If Bessie had been old enough, she would have gone with him," said Clarence's widow, Maud. It was sung by Theresa Harris and played several times, including in the opening credits, in the 1933 movie Baby Face. Favorite Answer. Handy got a little flashy, but the effect ultimately stayed simple: "Handy threw anything he could think of—every aspect of African-American vernacular music—into 'The St. Louis Blues.'
Public Domain, Library of Congress.
The third verse is in 16 bars coupled with a subtle shift to a minor key and a tango beat, and the fourth concludes in 12 bars that differ only slightly from the first two. Handy's attempt to reconstruct the lyrical feel of black-composed blues songs to make them imitable by white voices (and thus, popular with white audiences)? Login to reply the answers Post; ardra. In 1929, Bessie Smith made her only film appearance, starring in a movie titled St. Louis Blues that was based on this song. Dr. Smith dressed her arm injury with a clean Time passed with no sign of the ambulance, so Hugh Smith suggested that they take her into Clarksdale in his car.
Armstrong seems to answer Smiths every phrase with flourishes that up the ante on the hurt and defeat in the lyrics.
It was one of the first blues songs to succeed as a pop song and remains a fundamental part of jazz musicians' repertoire. Bessie Smith starred in a short film called St. Louis Blues in 1929 that took this statement to an extreme. Nicknamed The Empress of the Blues, Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s. Just two years before her take on she scored the first of many hits for Columbia Records with the coupling of She was a headliner everywhere she sang and earned the nickname for her commanding performances.