"Beale Street Blues" is a 1916 song by American composer and lyricist W.C. Handy. The title refers to Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, the main entertainment district for the city's African American population in the early part of the twentieth century, and a place closely associated with the development of the blues. The song was published by the Pace and Handy music company in 1917, but was first popularized for a mass audience when sung on Broadway by Gilda Gray in the 1919 musical revue Schubert's Gaieties.
Like many of Handy's songs, Beale Street Blues is a hybrid of the blues style with the popular ballad style of the day, the opening lyrics following a line pattern typical of Tin Pan Alley songs and the later stanzas giving way to the traditional three-line pattern characteristic of the blues.
In the Warner Bros. 1958 movie St. Louis Blues starring Nat King Cole as Handy, Ella Fitzgerald, belts out a fine rendition of this song.
"Beale Street Blues" has been recorded by dozens of noted artists, from early recordings by Fats Waller, Herb Wiedoeft, Alberta Hunter, Charlie Poole and Jack Teagarden, to more modern versions by Nat King Cole, Lena Horne, and Tommy Dorsey. The song itself is now in the public domain in the United States, due to expiration of the copyright, though most of the recordings of it are still covered by their own copyrights.
Famous quotes containing the words street and/or blues:
“Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very barroom of the mind’s inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,—the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’ shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The blues women had a commanding presence and a refreshing robustness. They were nurturers, taking the yeast of experience, kneading it into dough, molding it and letting it grow in their minds to bring the listener bread for sustenance, shaped by their sensibilities.”
—Rosetta Reitz, U.S. author. As quoted in The Political Palate, ch. 10, by Betsey Beaven et al. (1980)