The Birth of the Blues

Written: 1926

Music by: Ray Henderson

Words by: B.G. Buddy De Sylva
and Lew Brown

Written for: George White's Scandals (revue, 1926)

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"The Birth of the Blues"

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George White's Scandals taken together constituted a series of revues appearing on Broadway in most years from 1919 through 1939. Grand revues of this type were modeled on The Ziegfeld Follies and many of the stars of the American musical theater of the early and middle Twentieth Century got their start in them. George White's Scandals featured, in various years, Ray Bolger, Ethel Merman, Ann Miller, Helen Morgan, and Eleanor Powell among many others.

"The Birth of the Blues" was introduced in the 1926 Scandals by Harry Richman, who sang it as part of the first act finale, a "debate" between the blues and the classics that also included a version of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" (with Lyrics, no less), and W. C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues (1914)." The 1926 Scandals was the longest running of the series (June 14, 1926 - June 18, 1927) and introduced one of the great dance numbers of The Roaring Twenties, "The Black Bottom."

Click here to read the lyrics for "The Birth of the Blues" as sung by Frank Sinatra
on the album The Columbia Years 1943-1952. (This version includes the verse.)

Many listeners to this song have heard the "new note" that came from the "whippoorwill out on a hill" as having been "pushed . . . through a horn / 'Til it was born / Into a blue note!" instead of what De Sylva and Brown wrote: "'Til it was worn / Into a blue note!" "Worn / Into a blue note" is not only what the lyricists wrote but makes the sense required for understanding the line. A "blue notes" is a note that has been altered by lowering its pitch a touch below the key it's being played in. Jazz and Blues musicians are said to have bent the note or worn it down to create the desired bluesy effect-- hence the use of "worn."

The complete, authoritative lyrics for "The Birth of the Blues'" can be found in:

Reading Lyrics, Edited and with an Introduction by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball, New York: Pantheon Books, 2000.

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