After talking about the King (B.B.) I think it’s a good time to switch gears. I covered many of the Delta greats, Charlie Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson and more. I hope you have seen that all of these artists had a great amount of influence on others from many genre. There are many more names to talk about, more of the Chicago Blues, Buddy Guy, and Stevie Ray Vaughn for example.

So, as I tried to say in the title, it’s the end of talking about the Blues, for now. So many more names and places to go even though over the past six years I have probably done just shy of 100 posts dedicated to The Blues in some way or form. So, as I said for now, no more of the Delta or many of the other Blues greats. But I got to thinking a bit more, what exactly are The Blues?

We can look up any number of “text book” definitions such as this from The Library of Congress; “The blues” is a secular African-American musical genre that has had broad influence in popular music. Blues songs deal with a variety of topics and emotions, though it is often mistakenly thought that they deal almost exclusively with sorrow and protest.

There is some debate on what constitutes a ‘Blues’ song. So my earlier use of the adverb inaccurately suggests we can stick a pin on a map and say, there’s The Blues! The topic runs deeper than anything I can fathom let alone cover in one post. I mean how many books have been written by people who know what they are discussing. That said, I want to try and give a summary. It has to do with everything I have written about the Blues genre. Whether it’s Delta, Chicago, Memphis, Texas, Folk, Country, String Bands, or Big Bands, is it all The Blues?

I don’t have an answer for you but I did want to sort of talk it out a bit.

Most of you have heard the name of W.C. Handy. Songwriters certainly know him as he gets a mention in Marc Cohn’s, “Walking in Memphis”, Rodney Crowell’s “Bring it on Home to Memphis” and Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues” and more songs no doubt. In my quest to learn more about the genre, I do try and get to the source in my research. So I wondered how did Handy get the moniker of The Father of the Blues?

I did not read his 1941 autobiography called The Father of the Blues but I also can’t find any reference to the term before he published his book. So maybe someone called him that before, for instance his publisher? Maybe he just named himself. “Father” sort of implies the first, so I’m not sure it’s an entirely legitimate title. Now, this is not a post on Handy per se but he was born in the South, Alabama actually and he traveled a lot in the Delta area. His legacy is central to what I am attempting to get at here.

W.C. Handy was not alone in his efforts, for example Hart Wand of Oklahoma wrote a 12 bar song called “Dallas Blues” that was published in 1912. The first recorded version is by Maggie Jones in 1925.

There are some even earlier songs such Anthony Maggio’s “I Got the Blues” in 1908 and a couple more songs in a 12 or 16 bar format. These works come before or concurrent with W.C. Handy’s initial compositions.

The person getting the most attention is certainly W.C. Handy. His first published composition as in the clip above was, “The Memphis Blues”(1912) and it is miles away from the Delta Blues, but apparently, it was close in a structural way. He says that the Delta area is precisely where he learned what he translated into the now common 12 Bar Blues format. And perhaps he has been somewhat incorrectly credited as the first to put the musical notes on paper. Given the earlier examples.

There’s no evidence to suggest people did not create this independently. For Handy’s part, he discovered making a change in key while playing at a dance for Blacks in Mississippi. When he upped the tempo, people started really started to move. Being an educated man, a musician, and a teacher, he had the tools to put the puzzle together. He was serious about his music, and by all accounts worked hard for any success he had.

I am quickly getting out of my league here but as I understand, by ‘key’ most all Delta Blues songs were sung and played in G Major with insertions of minor keys and of course the unique bending of the notes. The now famous “Blue Note“. Among other things that make it the Blues. If you learned anything about the Delta Blues there’s not a lot of dance music in there.

If we jump ahead a couple years, in 1914 W.C. Handy published “St. Louis Blues” a song with those Minor key insertions, inspired in part by the Ragtime sounds he heard in Memphis. Ragtime was more piano-based and had been around for at least 20 years. Add in the recent import of Tango Dance music, and you have the predecessors to Jazz. Handy was creating a dance tune. Did you know that at the turn of the Century in England at least, when performing the then very much vulgar Tango, women had to wear bumpers on their dress so as not to actually touch their dance partners’ bodies? Sorry getting back to “St. Louis Blues”, just because it’s got “Blues” in the title, does that make it a Blues song?

From the book The Devils Music by Giles Oakley there’s some quotes from Texas Blues legend T. Bone Walker. He said “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”.

So here we have a divide, Delta Blues was based on oral tradition, some song lyrics were written down but most were not and before Handy and a few others, Blues songs never had a musical note put on paper. What we learned about the Delta Blues is that it was a very localized creation, outside of any influence from W.C. Handy. Having said that when it came to the recording studio, having some sort of notation was helpful.

So along comes this fancy stuff, with horns and piano and where is the guitar? So how can W.C. Handy’s music be called the Blues? The music is connected, as I understand it, getting back to that written down/structured idea. There’s little doubt he had captured the music of the Delta and put notes to it. It just so happens it worked for dance tunes and, it works for Jazz music. Oh and R&B and Rock and Roll. Ok, I won’t go down that rabbit hole.

I will tell you that Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” is the tenth most recorded song (excluding Christmas songs) ever. It is primarily recorded by Jazz but also Blues and other genres performers. I refer you to the Blue Note that is integral to both genres. There are many vocal versions, but the majority of the now 1154 recordings are instrumental. The first release was the instrumental by Prince’s Band, recorded in December of 1915, released in February, 1916. Poor Hart Wand’s “Dallas Blues” I mentioned earlier only warrants 71 versions.

The vocal release was in 1918 but the first notable recording was from Marion Harris in 1920.

This song put the more formal ‘Blues’ on an upward trajectory. Now, no one is saying Handy invented the Blues. Nor did it become what it is based solely on one song. You can listen to a few hundred plus different Blues singers that had nothing to do with Handy. Apart from the Delta Blues, for example, doing her own thing at about the same time we had Blues Legend Ma Rainey (“Mother of the Blues”) from Georgia, on the fringes of the Delta, and as far as I know never ran across Handy. But there is quite a remarkable convergence.

Now to try and bring this to some kind of a salient point, Ma’s protégé Bessie Smith (The Empress of the Blues) did meet Handy but I believe it was only after she recorded his “St. Louis Blues”. What the now legendary Smith did with her vocal performance of the song sent it into a new orbit and on the way to international recognition. And W.C. Handy agreed.

I should point out that the recordings by both Ma and especially Bessie and others were most often done in studios, with seasoned musicians, producers, arranged music scores, etc. It was the music business, not the more quaint solo singing Blues singer you may have envisaged. Though that’s how it all started.

The “St. Louis Blues” itself as a musical score was groundbreaking stuff. But sung by Bessie Smith I guess we could say the ‘formal’ Blues song had it’s voice.

Just to keep matters as confusing as possible, many think that what Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were doing, and in particular with her “St. Louis Blues” is close to ground zero for Jazz Vocals as well. Given the distance from the Delta Blues this I think, it probably closer in nature. And as I mentioned when quoting the number of cover versions, there are more Jazz-type recordings of “St. Louis Blues” than there are Blues ones. Jazz music was in its infancy at this time as well. The sounds of New Orleans were already percolating and spreading quickly.

As I pointed to in one or more of my posts on the Delta Blues, there was a Gospel connection. So perhaps now is not a good time to bring up the those early connections. I thought not.

As you can imagine there is much more of a story attached to “St. Louis Blues”. For Bessie, it also includes her appearance in the first of two movies of the same name. I have mentioned Bessie Smith several times in past posts, but I am doing more research on all the Ladies of the Blues for a future series.

In the meantime there is an excellent post on Bessie Smith, just follow this link.