Like Bessie Smith, most of the other women singing classic blues had minstrel show or vaudeville backgrounds and performed with a pop sensibility that made their work more accessible to whites, who could often only see these performers through the smokescreen of racist stereotypes and degrading expectations.The great Studs Terkel, a beloved Chicago radio DJ, writer, and man-about-town, described Bessie Smith's voice and music in glowing terms:Handy eventually became "rich and famous, one of the most successful black men of the early twentieth century" (Friedwald 40), and no one can fault him for it. In any case, Rainey, already a seasoned blues singer, took Smith on the road with her and taught her everything she knew.With his combination of formal training and access to black musical cultures, Handy saw himself as a perfect mediator, a sort of ambassadorial figure bringing blues to white people on a nicely polished platter. Literally dozens of recordings of the song were made from the 1920s through the 1950s, by black and white bands and singers.
"In some versions of the story, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, considered the Mother of the Blues, picked up Bessie Smith out of one of these shows when Smith was only twelve; in other versions Smith was as old as 18 before she met Rainey. She was buried without a gravestone despite an outpouring of popular mourning. Join today and never see them again.After a brief comeback period driven by her popularity with students of jazz music, Smith was killed in a car crash in September 1937. Louis Blues” was also notable for the fact that a section of the song was recorded in a minor key. Oh, that St. Louis woman, with her diamond rings, She pulls my man around by her apron strings. According to Friedwald, "St. Louis Blues" is St. Louis Blues, a highly fictionalized 1958 biopic of Handy that starred Nat King Cole as the blues composer, was named after his most famous song. Handy is also very clear that he was not actually one of the poor blacks who grew up around traditional blues music. I got those St. Louis blues, just as blue as I can be, Oh, my man's got a heart like a rock cast in the sea, Or else he wouldn't have gone so far from me. It wasn't until 1970, when Janis Joplin chipped in, that Smith got a headstone, which reads "The Greatest Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing. I hate to see The evening sun go down I hate to see The evening sun go down It makes me think, oh On my last lone round Feelin' tomorrow Like I feel today Feelin' tomorrow Like I feel today I'll pack my dreams And make my getaway St. Louis woman With her diamond rings Pulls my man around By her apron strings Wasn't for powder And his store-bought hair The man I love Wouldn't go nowhere, nowhere I got … When he wrote "St. Louis Blues" in 1913, he formulated it as a combination of 12-bar blues and tango (tango, an Argentinian form that also had African origins, had recently come into vogue with whites in Latin America and the U.S.), creating a mildly sad but also danceable, almost cheerful translation of basic blues forms."['St. “St. The St. Louis Blues Lyrics: I hate to see the evening' sun go down / I hate to see the evening' sun go down / It makes me think I'm on my last go 'round / Feeling' tomorrow like I feel today / Feeling It was one of the first blues songs to succeed as a pop song and remains a fundamental part of jazz musicians' repertoire.