St. Louis Blues
Also known as Saint Louis Blues
A historically rooted but somewhat slippery style label, St. Louis Blues points most directly to W.C. Handy’s 1914 classic and the urbane, band-friendly blues world that grew around it.
Origins and context
The sound
Characteristics
- Syncopated rhythms
- Piano
- Brass
- Small combos
- Large bands
- Expressive vocals
History
The label is closely tied to W.C. Handy’s 1914 composition “St. Louis Blues,” which became one of the most recorded songs of the pre-rock era and helped carry blues language into mainstream popular music. Handy described the song as drawing on blues forms while mixing in ragtime and other popular dance rhythms, and later histories of the style place it in an urban, band-oriented stream rather than a country-blues one. Because of that famous title, “St. Louis Blues” is used more as a style tag than a single neat school, and sources treat it as a regional, urban variation with small-combo or piano-led settings. The phrase points back to St. Louis as a cultural reference point in early blues and jazz, but the genre name itself is less a formal scene with a fixed canon than a descriptive way of hearing Handy’s song and its descendants.
Notable artists
- WHW.C. Handy
- BSBessie Smith
- LALouis Armstrong
Essential listening
- 1
- 2
- 3
St. Louis Blues: The "St. Louis" Blues (Arr. C. Norman)
W.C. Handy, Marion Harris, Charles A. Prince Orchestra
