Level: 3
Tuning: Dropped D

When a young and penniless songwriter and musician was wandering down a dimly-lit street in St Louis he saw a woebegone woman, who cried: "My man's got a heart like a rock cast in the sea." A while later, in a Memphis bar called Pwee, William Christopher Handy sat down and wrote a memorably sad song about the woman, one that became one of the most celebrated in jazz history. The song was first published on September 11 1914. It remains a fundamental part of jazz musicians' repertoire. It was also one of the first blues songs to succeed as a pop song. It has been performed by numerous musicians of all styles from Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith to Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Guy Lombardo, and the Boston Pops Orchestra. It has been called "the jazzman's Hamlet."

The form is unusual in that the verses are the now familiar standard twelve-bar blues in common time with three lines of lyrics, the first two lines repeated, but it also has a 16-bar bridge written in the habanera rhythm, popularly called the "Spanish Tinge" and identified by Handy as tango. While blues became often simple and repetitive in form, "St. Louis Blues" has multiple complementary and contrasting strains, similar to classic ragtime compositions. Handy said his objective in writing "St. Louis Blues" was "to combine ragtime syncopation with a real melody in the spiritual tradition." This arrangement is played in a Dropped D tuning. I first heard my friend Tokio Uchida play this. He had heard Chet Atkins's version. I guess that's the "folk process."