Handy, WC :: St. Louis Blues

Musicians Publications presents W.C. Handy s St. Louis Blues arranged for woodwind quartet by Bill Holcombe and Bill Holcombe Jr. Scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon, this flexible quartet also includes an optional bass clarinet part to replace the bassoon when necessary. This quartet is intermediate in difficulty.

In 1912, when Handy published the Memphis Blues, the word blues was used primarily to describe an emotional state depression, melancholy. Songs specifically about these issues did not come into being until something like 400 years after the first mentions of the blue devils appeared in English. Once blues songs emerged, around 1900, they had a single overriding theme: bad luck in love. There were blues about other things bedbugs, floods, and other irritants and calamities. There were virtually no blues about political matters, not even racial ones, until many years later.

In St. Louis, Handy found that his gifts as a singing guitarist had some value and he took in the nightlife of Targee Street, which gave him a taste for urban high society. Ever alert to the songs of balladeers and street singers, in 1893 he heard a despondent woman sing My man s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea. It would become the final refrain to his biggest hit, St. Louis Blues, over 20 years later.

- Elliot Hurwitt, 2018