I’m working on a book on W. C. Handy’s song “St. Louis Blues” that hinges on Louis Armstrong’s 1956 recording of it with the New York Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein conducting. The song is exemplary as a site for racial contestation in U.S. society, a site of Black innovation, virtuosity, splendor, and glory – and also of white backlash in the form of blackface minstrelsy. (It’s more than that too, which the book digs into.)
I made a Spotify playlist of Splendid and Glorious recordings of the song (which I wrote about here). I didn’t want to sully the Glorious list with the versions of depredation and degradation – so, I made another list. And here are my notes on it.
I’d long been a fan of Bob Wills when, after having begun this book project, I came across early recordings by him of “St. Louis Blues.” Like Art Tatum and Cab Calloway in the same decade, Wills recorded Handy’s song at his first recording session, in 1935, as well as again two years later.
And it doesn’t sound like most of his work. It’s not that his approach or his skills matured. In his earliest versions he was imitating the mysterious white blackface singer Emmett Miller, one of the poisonous enigmas of country music history.
I’d heard Miller, and ambivalently enjoyed his musical skills. Hugely influential, he never found much success as a singer – except with other musicians. Country stars Eddy Arnold and Hank Williams made breakthroughs with songs they learned from Miller’s repertory – Arnold with “Any Time” and Williams with “Lovesick Blues.” Williams followed Miller’s version closely but sang more robustly – and skipped Miller’s degrading blackface skit. Miller was a virtuoso yodeler and fronted an expert studio jazz band that often included future jazz stars like Jimmy Dorsey and Tommy Dorsey. His country-jazz hybrid probably influenced the entirety of Western Swing.
Wills’s imitation showed me, though, why Miller might never have made a success for himself.
He sounds ugly.
Wills, when imitating Miller, sounds wheedling and whiny – a demasculated blackface caricature. Ugly and demeaning.
Miller’s “St. Louis Blues” (which is not on Spotify) did not include a skit, but Wills did, which he got from another white singer who had performed in blackface – Al Bernard, who recorded with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band as well as on his own.
Wills stuck with the song, recording it several times over the decades. Before long – after his second version – he dropped the wheedling tone while keeping some of the skit. The changes he made in his timbre on the song traces the evolution from minstrelsy to vaudeville – the jokes could stay the same while losing the overtly degrading overlay. (The playlist includes an early and a later recording of “St. Louis Blues” by Wills.) Wills, according to his daughter, once rode a horse 50 miles to hear Bessie Smith sing, and we could surmise that he adored her music judging from his recordings of many songs that she had recorded before him. He covered Duke Ellington and Count Basie straight-up too.
Still, Wills’s early versions of “St. Louis Blues” stick poorly.
Which is why it’s shocking that Merle Haggard, when invited in 1999 by the contemporary Western Swing avatars Asleep at the Wheel to sing a Bob Wills song on a tribute album, chose “St. Louis Blues” -- with the Emmett Miller whine and the Al Bernard skit. It’s an obscure allusion, an obscure stylistic choice – but Ray Benson (Asleep at the Wheel’s leader) and Haggard himself certainly knew what Haggard was up to. The question is – Why? Why would he do that? The first several times I heard it, I didn’t understand what he was doing, but I didn’t like it. Once I understood it, I actively disliked it.
I think it was in the Ken Burns Country documentary that I saw an interview where Ray Benson included Emmett Miller in his off-the-cuff list of Black musical influences on country. My gob, it is smacked.
Listen if you wish. The list includes Miller’s “Lovesick Blues,” the only of his recordings on Spotify.