Beale Street Blues

“Beale Street Blues” has been in our musical blood stream for a very long time. In fact, by the time we finally got this wonderful jazz number onto a Flood CD — it’s on our 2003 “I’d Rather Be Flooded” album — we’d been doing the song in shows for quite some time. That was in part because we were hooked on the version that one of our string band heroes, the great Charlie Poole, worked up. Poole called his 1928 version “Ramblin’ Blues.” But even then the tune was an old-timer. Composer W.C. Handy had published it 11 years later — in 1917 — and immediately all the hot new jazz bands started playing it. And, boy, has the song had a long life, recorded in the past 70 years by everybody from Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey to Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole. In 1974, writer James Baldwin used the song’s key line — “If Beale Street could talk” — as the title for one of his classic novels, which a couple of years ago director Barry Jenkins brought to the screen in an Academy Award-winning movie. Here then, from a recent rehearsal, is our revisiting of the song, with with great solos by Doug Chaffin, Paul Martin, Sam St. Clair and Vanessa Coffman. It’s “Beale Street Blues.”