West End Blues/Sugar Blues

This is Louis Armstrong on West End Blues, also a clip from Ken Burns’ PBS series Jazz, with beautiful images of the town which has slipped away.

This is a very famous song, and that should be Earl Hines on piano. I am not a great jazz expert, but I did write a paper on jazz and literature once for school. I spent hours in an excellent music library where they had all of these Okeh records.

Now this clip is unusual, and it is worth putting up with the muddy quality of the video for that reason. Eva Taylor (Irene Gibbons), the “Dixie Nightingale,” performs the Sugar Blues with the Peruna Jazzmen in Copenhagen (1975).

Have you heard these blues
that I’m gonna sing to you?
When you hear them they will thrill you
through and through
They’re the sweetest blues you ever heard
now listen and don’t say a word

Sugar blues
everybody’s singing the sugar blues
the whole towns ringing
My loving man sweet as can be
but the doggone fool’s
turned sour on me

I’m so unhappy
feel so unhappy
I could lay me down and die
You could say what you choose
but I’m all confused
I got the sweet, sweet sugar blues
more sugar
I’ve got the sugar blues.

Axé.