Visit our new beta site!

"Make My Getaway": The Blues Lives of Black Minstrels in W. C. Handy's Father of the Blues.(Critical Essay)

From: African American Review  |  Date: 3/22/2001  |  Author: Gussow, Adam

"The St. Louis Blues," observed Langston Hughes in the summer of 1941, "is sung more than any other song on the air waves, is known in Shanghai and Buenos Aires, Paris and Berlin--in fact, is heard so often in Europe that a great many Europeans think it must be the American National Anthem..... in a Tok[y]o restaurant one night I heard a Louis Armstrong record of the St. Louis Blues played over and over for a crowd of Japanese diners there" (144-45). If W. C. Handy's universally ...

Browse by alphabet: