Saint Louis Blues

The story

W. C. Handy published "The Saint Louis Blues" in September 1914. He said it began with a chance meeting on the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, with a woman distraught at her husband's absence, whose lament gave him a key line of the song. In his autobiography, Father of the Blues, he tells of hearing the tune in St. Louis in 1892: "It had numerous one-line verses and they would sing it all night." His aim, he said, was "to combine ragtime syncopation with a real melody in the spiritual tradition."

The form is unusual. Its verses are standard twelve-bar blues, three lines with the first line repeated, but it also has a 16-bar bridge in the habanera rhythm, the "Spanish tinge", as Jelly Roll Morton called it, and the tango, as Handy called it. Where blues was often simple and repetitive, the song has several contrasting strains, like classic ragtime. Not everyone counted it as blues: T-Bone Walker called it fine music, "but it just isn't blues". Handy described the first time it was played for dancers in 1914: the tango was in vogue, so he gave it a tango introduction that broke abruptly into "a low-down blues", and "the dancers seemed electrified".

The singer and actress Ethel Waters was the first woman to sing it in public; she learned it from Charles Anderson and featured it during an engagement in Baltimore in 1917. William Grant Still arranged a version while working with Handy. It became one of the first blues songs to succeed as a popular song. Bessie Smith's 1925 recording, with Louis Armstrong on cornet, entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1993, and Smith sang it on screen in the 1929 film St. Louis Blues; the 1929 recording by Louis Armstrong & His Orchestra, with Red Allen, joined it in 2008, and Handy's own 1922 recording with his Memphis Blues Band was chosen for the National Recording Registry in 2023.

It remains a standard of the jazz repertoire, recorded by Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, Bing Crosby, Count Basie, Art Tatum, Paul Robeson and many others, and has been called "the jazzman's Hamlet". George Gershwin borrowed Handy's themes for his own music, including Rhapsody in Blue, and sent Handy a signed copy of the score acknowledging that his early blues were "the forefathers of this work". Herbie Hancock's album Gershwin's World (1998) paid homage to that debt with a version sung by Stevie Wonder, which won two Grammy Awards in 1999. In June 2026 CBS News included the song in its list of the 250 essential American songs of the past 250 years.

What it says

A woman's blues for the man who has left her: she grieves his absence, resents the St. Louis woman who drew him away, and, told by a fortune-teller not to wear black, resolves to go after him and win him back. The mood is mournful and bitter, eased by the swing and the tango rhythm of the music.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition of them has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory. “What it says” above tells what they are about.