Everything about Dallas Blues totally explained
"Dallas Blues", written by Hart A. Wand, was the first true blues song ever published. "
Oh, You Beautiful Doll", a Tin Pan Alley song whose first verse is twelve-bar blues, had been published a year earlier. Also, two other songs with
blues in their titles were published in 1912; "Baby Seals Blues" (August 1912), a vaudeville tune written by Arthur "Baby" Seales, and "
Memphis Blues", written by W.C. Handy (September 1912). Neither, however, were acutally true blues songs.
The song, although written for standard blues tempo
(Tempo di Blues. Very slowly)
, is often performed as
Ragtime or
Dixieland.
In 1918, Lloyd Garrett added lyrics to reflect the singer's longing for Dallas:
» There's a place I know, folks won't pass me by,
Dallas, Texas, that's the town, I cry, oh hear me cry. » And I'm going back, going back to stay there 'til I die, until I die.
No date is found for the actual composition of "Dallas Blues" but
Samuel Charters, who interviewed Wand for his book,
The Country Blues (1959), states that Wand took the tune to a piano playing friend, Annabelle Robbins, who arranged the music for him. Charters futher states that the title came one of Wand's father's workmen who remarked that the tune gave him the blues to go back to Dallas. Since Wand's father died in 1909, the actual composition must have predated that.
In any case, within weeks of its publication it was heard the length of the the Mississippi River, and its influence on all the blues music that followed is well documented.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Dallas Blues'.
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