Beale Street Blues (1917)

Written by W.C. Handy
O: Prince's Band 1917 - 24 - 05  Columbia

From JAZZ RHYTHM


The STORY of BEALE St. BLUES

Beginning around 1909, William Christopher Handy lived in Memphis, TN for about a decade.  By then he had traveled widely and was a pretty well established musician and bandleader.  There he quickly became a popular celebrity and flourished, launching a company for publishing his own music, due partly to the huge success of his “Memphis Blues,” which was originally conceived as a ditty for the mayoral campaign of the infamous political boss, E.H. Crump.
  
Among his favorite venues was the wildest and rowdiest section of the Beale Street district.  The original ‘Beale Avenue’ district of Memphis arose after the Civil War as a respectable, predominantly black neighborhood of churches, homes and a grand opera house.  But by the early 1900s, as Memphis became an important crossroads, it sprouted the notorious “Beale Street” section.

By 1910, around the time Handy arrived, it was a rough, sleazy, lawless collection of taverns, splendid dance halls and entertainments, brothels and dives filled with hustlers, pickpockets, lowlifes, pimps & prostitutes -- along with workingmen spending their pay, and rubes out for thrills.

And it was that Beale Street scene that seems to have oddly fascinated Mr. Handy.  When not working there, he loved to hang out, jam with other musicians or just watch the action.  In his autobiography he recounts hair-raising, appalling tales brutality, cruelty, criminality and mayhem that he fittingly memorialized in his classic “Beale St. Blues”:

    You'll see pretty browns in beautiful gowns,
    You'll see tailor-mades and hand-me-downs,
    You'll meet honest men, and pick-pockets skilled,
    You'll find that business never ceases 'til somebody gets killed!

    If Beale Street could talk, if Beale Street could talk,
    Married men would have to take their beds and walk,
    Except one or two who never drink booze,
    And the blind man on the corner singing "Beale Street Blues!"

    I'd rather be there than any place I know,
    I'd rather be there than any place I know,
    It's gonna take a sergeant for to make me go!

Some recordings:

1917 - 24 - 05 - Prince's Band - Beale Street
1917 - 08 - 13 - Earl Fuller - Beale Street Blues
1919 - W.C. Handy - Beale Street Blues
1921 - Marion Harris - Beale Street Blues
1924 - George Olsen and His Music - Beale Street Blues
1926 - Jelly Roll Morton - Beale Street Blues
1927 - Thomas fats Waller - Beale Street Blues
1931 - Eddie Lang-Joe Venuti and Their All Star Orchestra - Beale Street Blues
1939 - Jack Teagarden - Beale Street Blues
1940 - Big Joe Turner - Beale Street Blues
1940 - Guy Lombardo - Beale Street Blues
1941 - Lena Horne & Henry Levine's Dixieland Jazz Group - Beale Street Blues
1946 - Duke Ellington - Beale Street Blues
1954 - Louis Armstrong - Beale Street Blues
1988 - Peggy Lee - Beale Street
1992 - Alberta Hunter - Beale Street Blues
1999 - Red Nichols & Charleston Chasers - Beale Street Blues
2001 - Eartha Kitt - Beale Street Blues
2001 - Woody Herman - Beale Street Blues
2003 - Ella Fitzgerald - Beale Street Blues
2006 - Nat 'King' Cole - Beale Street Blues
2006 - Tommy Dorsey & his Orchestra - Beale Street Blues
2008 - California Ramblers - Beale Street Blues
2008 - Eric Bibb - New Beale Street Blues
2009 - Stephen Bennett - Beale Street Blues





You can get them if you really want