St Louis Blues features on this Tuesday’s annual 2SER radiothon Phantom Dancer. Time to subscribe and support 2SER community radio. Now is your moment to win great prizes when you pledge your support to 2SER which has been bringing you The Phantom Dancer with Greg Poppleton since 1985.

You’ll hear W.C Handy himself talk about St Louis Blues and play it on trumpet on a radio broadcast from 1940 on this week’s Phantom Dancer.

St Louis Blues with Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars (Edmond Hall clarinet solo, Trummy Young trombone) and the Lewisohn Stadium Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein With W.C Handy (composer in hat) watching. From 1956…

The Phantom Dancer is your weekly non-stop mix of swing and jazz from live 1920s-60s radio and TV every week.

LISTEN to this week’s Phantom Dancer mix (online after 2pm AEST, Tuesday 18 October) and two years of Phantom Dancer mixes online at, at https://2ser.com/phantom-dancer/

W.C Handy playing St Louis Blues on the Ed Sullivan TV Show in 1948…

BIG BANDS

“The Saint Louis Blues” (or “St. Louis Blues“) is a popular American song composed by W. C. Handy in the blues style and published in September 1914.

It was one of the first blues songs to succeed as a pop song and remains a fundamental part of jazz musicians’ repertoire (including mine).

The song has been called “the jazzman’s Hamlet“.

Here’s the St Louis Blues featured in the 1929 short ‘St Louis Blues’ starring Bessie Smith…

W.C. Handy said he had been inspired to compose the song by a chance meeting with a woman on the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, distraught over her husband’s absence. She lamented, “Ma man’s got a heart like a rock cast in de sea”, a key line of the song.^[7] Handy’s autobiography recounts his hearing the tune in St. Louis in 1892: “It had numerous one-line verses and they would sing it all night.”

The form of St Louis Blues 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, characterized by Handy as tango. The tango-like rhythm is notated as a dotted quarter note followed by an eighth note and two quarter notes, with no slurs or ties.

The first audio recording of “Saint Louis Blues” was by the house band at Columbia Records, directed by Charles A. Prince in December 1915. You can hear it below…

2SER RADIOTHON

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From Oct 7 to 21 the station takes a break from regular programming to celebrate everything that makes 2SER great! The music, the talks and, most importantly, the 2SER family! Under the theme of We Are Family, we’ll be asking everyone to become financial subscribers or to donate.

2SER Breakfast presenter, Danny Chifley, said ”Subscribers and donors are so important for the station – they help us maintain our independence and provide us with some stability in an ever-shifting cultural and economic environment”

“When sponsorship of events abruptly evaporated at the start of the pandemic, our subscribers helped us stay afloat. When lightning struck our antenna three years ago, our donors got us right back on air”, said Danny. “So we love our family and we’re really excited to be reconnecting again”

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Here’s that first recording of St Louis Blues from 1915…

18 OCTOBER PLAY LIST