"Blue Melody" is a short story by J. D. Salinger, first published in the September 1948 issue of Cosmopolitan. The tragic tale of an African-American jazz singer, the story was inspired by the life of Bessie Smith and was originally titled "Scratchy Needle on a Phonograph Record." Cosmopolitan changed the title to "Blue Melody" without Salinger's consent, a "slick" magazine tactic that was one of the reasons the author decided, in the late forties, that "he wanted to publish only in The New Yorker."
Famous quotes containing the words blue and/or melody:
“My Father, it is surely a blue place
And straight. Right. Regular.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)