What is the most ripped-off blues song of all time?
As an art form, the blues is in constant conversation with itself.
Like jazz before it and hip-hop afterwards, the blues is a kind of music that evolves in a very specific fashion. It doesn’t erase the past and strive for a new future; instead, everything that the genre has been is interpolated into what it is today. A riff or chord sequence might inspire another artist to adapt it and put their own spin on it, which in and of itself might inspire someone else to do the same.
However, rather than claim it as their own the way that some acts inspired by the blues did (shout-out Led Zeppelin), this is a knowing tip of the hat to a fellow traveller rather than an act of musical thievery. After all, the blues came from a scene where the very idea of royalties and copyright was utterly ludicrous. One might as well have hoped for universal healthcare and a winning lottery ticket, too. No, the blues scene was a touring circuit made up of bars and clubs at best and barns at worst, where reputation was king.
Reputation was what mattered since reputation got you your next gig and thus, if your act was good enough to crib from, then you could be (mostly) sure that you’d be booked for the foreseeable. Thus, it’s difficult to pin down who did things “first” in the blues scene, especially the further back you go. The records are pretty thin on the ground, so take everything with a pinch of salt; however, we can be all but certain of which song popularised the 12-bar blues.
As a piece of cultural history, this is legitimately up there with discovering new works by Vincent Van Gogh. The 12-bar blues is arguably the foundation that modern pop music is built on, filtering as it did into rock ‘n’ roll songwriting, then pop songwriting, and thus, into every modern form of music you can think of. With this song, there’s a key argument to be made that we’ve found the Rosetta Stone for modern songwriting as a whole.
What was the first blues hit?
Born in Florence, Alabama, in 1876, WC Handy referred to himself as the ‘Father of the Blues’ and while that’s one hell of a moniker to lend yourself, he more than earned that title. A jazz trumpeter and band leader in his youth, his life changed in 1903. While waiting for a train in Tutwiler, Mississippi, he overheard a Black man busking on the same train platform, playing a steel guitar with a knife as a slide.
This was one of several formative experiences that caused him to leave the rigid world of jazz music—one that found him playing exclusively to white audiences most of the time—and immerse himself in the early days of the blues. Now, the key thing to note here is that by no means is Handy the man who “invented” the blues. It was thriving long before him, and this is actually where he becomes something of a controversial figure. He popularised the medium by being the first to publish the blues.
This is a major development. As mentioned, the blues was a grassroots scene of performers; it had more in common with an underground rave scene than anything to do with the pop music of the day. Then he had two hits that blew the underground scene above ground. The first was ‘Memphis Blues’, a jaunty marching band song, and the second was ‘St Louis Blues’, which was the first 12-bar blues song to ever hit the big time due to it being published in 1925.
Within ten years of the song’s existence, people began to strike back at Handy, accusing him of exploiting the blues scene to make a buck. Jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton was the first to go public about this in a 1938 article he wrote for Downbeat, noting, “Mr Handy cannot prove anything is music that he has created. He has taken advantage of some unprotected material… [because of] a greed for false reputation.” Strong words indeed. The kind of words that Handy had to answer to, but did so in a way that, read in a certain way, was more an admission of guilt.
How did this song shape modern pop?
He said that he was guilty of nothing more than having “vision enough to copyright and publish all the music I wrote, so I don’t have to go around saying I made up this piece and that piece in such and such a year… Nobody has swiped anything from me.” This is little more than a way of saying, “You’re just sorry you didn’t think of it first,” at least to me.
‘St Louis Blues’ was one of the biggest hits of its time, covered by the likes of Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Eartha Kitt, and everyone in between. However, perhaps it’s a fitting fate for a man who made so much money off such a grassroots scene that his lasting creation was adapted into pop music as we know it today. Something he will never make a dime off ever again.
