In 1912 came the first publication of that phenomenal song form, the blues. It is an old form that may have preceded the Civil War. Harold Courlander, folklorist and author of the definitive Negro Folk Music U.S.A., says, “ There is no indication that something closely akin to blues was not sung in the towns and on the plantations in ante-bellum days.”
Abbe Niles’s description and definition of this music in his book Blues is the best I know.
“The blues sprang up, probably within the last quarter century,among illiterate and more or less despised classes of Southern Negroes: barroom pianists, careless nomadic laborers, watchers of incoming trains and steamboats, street-corner guitar players, strumpets and outcasts. A spiritual is matter for choral treatment; a blues was a one-man affair, originating typically as the expression of the singer’s feelings and complete in a single verse. It might start as little more than an interjection, a single line; sung because singing was as natural a method of expression as speaking. But while the idea might be developed, if at al], in any one of many forms of songs, there was one which, perhaps through its very simplicity and suitability lor improvisation, be came very popular; the line would be sung, repeated, repeated once again; with the second repetition some inner voice would say “enough” and there would havo coine into boing a rough blues. lts tune didn’t need to be new; Joe Turner, an old three-line song was well known to and sung by Negroes all over the South and a blues verse could be and was, fitted to its tune.”
And since the emergence of the blues in published form was the work of W. C. Handy, it might be well to quote Isaac Goldberg (in his book Tin Pan Alley) on him.
“William Christopher Handy, “the father of the blues,” is not the inventor of the genre; he is its Moses, not its Jehovah. It was he who, first of musicians, codified the new spirit in African [Negro] music and sent it forth upon its conquest of the North. The “rag” has sung and danced the joyous aspects of Negro life; the “blues,” new only in their emergence, sang the sorrows of secular existence.”
And Goldberg also says, “Handy was the first to set jazz down upon paper—to fix the quality of the various ‘breaks’ as these wildly filledin pauses were named. With a succession of ‘blues’ he fixed the genre.”
W. C. Handy began with The Memphis Blues which was published in 1912 with words, though, as already noted, its instrumental version had been published in 1910. It’s in three sections, only the second of which is not in the twelve-bar blues form. This second section leaves the traditional blues harmonie pattern and is sixteen measures long. The classic blues harmony, in its basic form, is (in the key of B flat) three measures of B flat, one measure of B-flat-dominant seventh, two measures of E flat, two measures of B flat, two measures of F-dominant seventh, and two measures of B flat. Within that framework Handy wrote many famous tunes, and by three untypical “held” pick-up notes. The minor third, ƒ natural, is stressed, but not the minor seventh, c natural.
St. Louis Blues is particularly fascinating. It is in four parts, the first two identical twelve-bar sections, with different words, the third an unprecedented sixteen-measure minor section in a tango rhythm (filtered through from early Spanish New Orleans?), and the fourth a blues chorus of twelve measures. The harmony of the first and second sections is not in conventional blues harmony, as the second measure, instead of sticking to a G-major chord, moves to C major for a single measure. The minor third, b flat,, is consistently in evidence. The third, minor “ Spanish” section of the inspired lyric— “ Saint Louis woman, wid her diamon’ rings” etc.—is unlike anything in any blues, work song, country song, any song I’ve ever heard.
In the chorus there is also a variation on the blues harmony. For the ninth measure remains G major instead of conventionally shilling to Ddominant seventh. I don’t suppose any American song is better known or has had more performances than St. Louis Blues. It most certainly is one of the most notable of popular music landmarks. Handy wrote many more blues, all of them interesting, some with slight alterations harmonically as in St. Louis Blues. They are a marvelous contribution to the body of American popular song.
