Beale Street Blues (song)
Beale Street Blues is a blues and jazz song that WC Handy wrote in 1916. The title became a jazz standard .
Historical background
WC Handy came to Memphis in 1909 , where he met with local musicians at Pee Wee's Saloon on Beal Avenue. In 1912 he founded the Pace & Handy Music Company with Harry Herbert Pace in New York City as his own music publisher , which managed his compositions. The Beale Street Blues , which was first published in 1916 under the title Beale Street , was part of its repertoire.
Beal Avenue - without the "e" at the end - is already on the map of the city in 1841; possibly it was named after the soldier hero Edward F. Beale, a lieutenant and sniper in the Navy . It was originally a street inhabited by the white middle class, but after 1890 it gradually turned into an area inhabited by Afro-Americans and then turned into an entertainment center. Handy claimed he wrote the song right in one of the bars on the street. When Cellphone's song Beale Street Blues became known, it was renamed Beale Street . Contrary to what Edward Crump , Mayor of Memphis, later claimed, the blues was not written for his 1909 campaign. Crump confused the composition with the Memphis Blues , which Handy had written for his candidacy, but later rewritten.
Features of the song
The original composition was arranged and published for piano and voice. The three-line stanzas written in blues style on the actual (twelve-measure) blues theme are each preceded by a stanza ( verses ) in tin-pan-alley- style with 16 bars. The melody of the blues verses is played by the left hand and was inspired by the play of the pianists from the club "The Monarch" on Beale Street. The right hand anticipates the boogie woogie with an “eight-to-the-bar” rhythm , but also uses interpolations from jazz. The text of the song "portrays a street of traders and artists where money, love, crime and music rule". Handy draws in the text of the verse, which initially compares Beale Street with Broadway , the Prado and other well-known streets and neighborhoods and recommends that you be the first to see them, a "rough moral picture"; a blind blues singer is also mentioned, who then sings the actual blues (in a twelve-measure scheme) and is satisfied with the place on Beale Street: "I'm more here than in any other place I know". The text was changed many times by later performers.
First recordings
The composer WC Handy did not initially record his work himself. On May 24, 1917, Charles Prince's band played the Beale Street Blues on Columbia Records under the number 2327; this first recording placed fifth on the pop hit parade. It was played in the line-up of Charles A. Prince (conductor), Bohumir Kryl and Vincent C. Buono (trumpet), Leo Zimmerman (trombone), Thomas Hughes (clarinet), Marshall P. Lufsky (flute), Charles d'Almaine and Walter Biedermann (violin), Ed Rubsam and Howard Kopp (percussion).
On August 13, 1917, the Famous Jazz Band of Earl Fuller (with clarinetist Ted Lewis ; Victor 18369) recorded the first cover version ; it brought in Handy Music Publishing royalties of $ 1,857 and was listed eighth on the pop charts. Handy Memphis Bluesband recorded the title in September 1919 for the small label Lyric (# 4209); In 1922 the band played a remakes for Paramount and Black Swan .
popularity
In 1919 the title was popularized by the Broadway musical Shubert’s Gaieties of 1919 , sung by Gilda Gray . After its premiere on July 17, 1919, the musical ended after 87 performances on October 18, 1919 (after it had already been on strike from August 9 to September 8, 1919). Nevertheless, the short performance time was enough to make the Beale Street Blues better known.
Other recordings were made by Art Hickman (recorded on September 20, 1919) and George Olsen (July 25, 1924). Alberta Hunter recorded the song on May 20, 1927, only accompanied by Fats Waller on the organ. Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers immortalized the title in an instrumental version on June 10, 1927, published November 1927. The original Memphis Five picked it up on April 5, 1929; Benny Goodman went to the studio on February 9, 1931 with singer Jack Teagarden and the Charlston Chasers to devote himself to the song (Brunswick 7645); Ben Pollack followed on March 2, 1931, Joe Venuti's All Star Orchestra (with Eddie Lang , Jack Teagarden and Benny Goodman) on October 22, 1931. Teagarden later made the title his signature tune .
In 1935 a cover version of Bob Crosby appeared . Tommy Dorsey (Victor 25767) recorded the title with his orchestra on May 26, 1937; Duke Ellington first played the blues on August 26, 1946. Lena Horne was accompanied in her version by the Dixieland Jazz Group (October 1946); finally followed by Louis Armstrong (July 12, 1954). In July 1956 the song appeared in a version by Chris Barber with singer Ottilie Patterson on the EP That Patterson Girl Vol. 2 . Even Johnny Hodges (1959), Johnny Maddox (1959) and Eartha Kitt (1990) interpreted the piece that then especially in Dixieland was maintained repertoire.
meaning
There are at least 33 versions in total. In the US, the Beale Street Blues is now public domain . Along with Handy's St. Louis Blues and his Memphis Blues, it is one of the compositions that are now considered to be the original blues title, although they all also contain Habanera elements.
The song is used in two feature films: In The I Don't Care Girl (premiered January 20, 1953) it is one of 13 music tracks. On April 7, 1958, the film St. Louis Blues about the life of the recently deceased Handy with Nat King Cole in the leading role premiered. Cole sings his version of the Beale Street Blues here .
James Baldwin gave his fifth novel a title relating to the Beale Street Blues . The English book title If Beale Street Could Talk is taken from one of the verses of the song.
literature
- Hans-Jürgen Schaal (Ed.): Jazz standards. The encyclopedia. 3rd, revised edition. Bärenreiter, Kassel u. a. 2004, ISBN 3-7618-1414-3 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b William S. Worley / Ernest Withers, Beale Street: Crossroads of America's Music , 1998, p. 40
- ↑ a b Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, I Got Rhythm , 1990, p. 62
- ^ A b Carlo Bohländer Reclams Jazzführer Stuttgart 1970, p. 811
- ↑ Miriam DeCosta-Willis, Notable Black Memphians , 2008, p. 8
- ↑ The Commercial Appeal of February 28, 2011, Theories Hit Dead End How World-Famous Beale Street Got Its Name ( Memento of the original from August 24, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Schaal Jazz standards , p. 54 f.
- ↑ See G. Wayne Dowdy Mayor Crump Don't Like It: Machine Politics in Memphis Jackson 2006, pp. 101f.
- ^ A b William Christopher Handy: Father of the Blues. To Autobiography by WC Handy . Da Capo Press, New York 1991, ISBN 0-306-80421-2 , pp. 155 (American English, first edition: 1941).
- ↑ "I'd rather be here, than any place I know"
- ↑ Tim Brooks / Richard Keith Spotswood, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry , 2004, p. 424
- ↑ Talking Machine World, November 1919
- ^ Internet Broadway Database via Shubert Gaieties of 1919
- ↑ The line-up was George Mitchell (cornet), Gerald Reeves (trombone), Johnny Dodds (clarinet), Paul "Stump" Evans (alto saxophone), Jelly Roll Morton (piano), Bud Scott (guitar), Quinn Wilson (bass tuba) and Warren "Baby" Dodds (drums).
- ↑ See CoverInfo
- ↑ Johannes Feldmann Bürgers Tango and Jazz: Cultural Interrelationships? Münster 1995 p. 46
