St, Louis Blues (Paramount, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Shortly after 9 p.m. last night I invited my husband Charles to watch the 1958 film St. Louis Blues, a biopic of blues and jazz giant W. C. Handy featuring Nat “King” Cole playing him as an adult and a 10-year-old prodigy named Billy Preston (yes, that Billy Preston, he of later fame as a sort of “fifth Beatle” on the Get Back/Let It Be sessions who died in 2006 at age 59 after years of the usual self-indulgences) playing Handy as a child. Directed by Allen Reisner from a script by Ted Sherdeman and Robert Smith, St. Louis Blues follows the plot template of The Jazz Singer all too accurately as Handy’s father, minister Charles Handy (Juano Hernandez, nine years after he had eloquently played a lynching victim in the 1949 MGM film Intruder in the Dust), thunders from the pulpit and everywhere else his son is within earshot that there are only two kinds of music, the Devil’s and the Lord’s, and he is determined to make sure that if his kid wants to be a musician so badly, he should stick to composing hymns for dad’s church. (Charles Handy’s church is a little two-room affair in Memphis, Tennessee, but for some reason they’ve got Mahalia Jackson to direct their choir. Ah, the magic of movies.)

But W. C. Handy’s career gets sidetracked when a campaign official for a reform candidate for sheriff named John Baile hires hilm to compose a theme song for Baile’s campaign and lead a five-piece band in a parade for Baile. Handy obliges by writing the song that would eventually become “Yellow Dog Blues” (in real life it was “Memphis Blues” and the political candidate he wrote it for was Owen Crump, but the broad outlines of the story are the same as the real facts), and the parade leads to a job offer from the Red Parrot saloon, owned by Blade (a heavy-set and almost unrecognizable Cab Calloway) and featuring singing star Gogo Germaine (Eartha Kitt). Gogo rewrotes the lyrics of Handy’s composition for Baile – remember that this was a time when actual African-American participation in voting had been virtually eliminated, especially throughout the South – saying, “Who cares about Baile?” Instead she turns the song into “Yellow Dog Blues” and it becomes a huge hit, though in a slimeball business deal that happened to the real W. C. Handy as well, he sells all rights to the song for $50. (At least the real W. C. Handy learned his lesson: when he wrote “St. Louis Blues” two years later he published it himself, and it became an enormous hit and turned Handy and his publishing partner, Harry Pace, into rich men. Other Black songwriters of genius, including Thomas “Fats” Waller, continued to give their songs away for dime-store prices: there’s a famous story about how Fletcher Henderson ran into Waller at a restaurant, Waller was hungry, and he offered to write Henderson a new song in exchange for a hamburger. By the time the evening was over Waller had eaten a dozen hamburgers and Henderson’s book was richer by 12 songs.)

Handy continues to be whipsawed between the values of his dad, his Aunt Hagar (Pearl Bailey, who unfortunately does not get to perform Handy’s “Aunt Hagar’s Blues” in the film) and his girlfriend Elizabeth (Ruby Dee) to stick to the Lord’s music and write hymns, and the riches he could be making cranking out blues numbers for Gogo Germaine and the real-life Ella Fitzgerald (who’s brought out for one cabaret sequence, singing “Beale Street Blues” with her customary power, authority and musicianship). The conflict over Handy’s life literally drives him to go blind (the real W. C. Handy also went blind, but much later in life and for an identifiable medical reason, cataracts), only he regains his eyesight in the middle of his dad’s church service and he greets this as a sign from God that the Big Guy upstairs is O.K. with W. C. Handy pursuing a career singing and playing the blues.The climax occurs at a New York Symphony concert at Aeolian Hall, where Gogo Germaine is scheduled to sing “St. Louis Blues” in a preposterous orchestral arrangement and he’s invited Handy, Elizabeth, Aunt Hagar and Handy’s father Charlels to witness the performance. All approve of the show – which has been introduced by conductor Constantin Bakaleinikoff, playing himself in one of the few (in fact, I think it’s the only) times he had an actual speaking role, saying that blues music is the only art form that is a truly American creation and not one that we’ve taken over and borrowed from Europe. The concert is a huge hit and Handy’s success is assured, and Handy is singing his heart out onstage as “The End” credit comes up.

Though it’s understandable why Paramount gave this such a cheap-looking production, as if they didn’t have much confidence in the commercial appeal of a story featuring a virtually all-Black cast, St. Louis Blues emerged as a film of real authority and power. Nat “King” Cole turns out to have been a quite sensitive actor, nailing the admittedly clichéd points of the script and leaving no doubt that he could have handled more challenging dramatic roles (which of course he didn’t get). And Eartha Kitt, though saddled with a stupid character name and sequined ultra-short white dresses that make her look more like a street hooker tnan a sophisticated singer (Edith Head’s usual costume-design genius was given the week off for the duration of this project), nonetheless burns the screen with such sheer intensity that when we watched the movie together in the 1980's my then-partner John Gabrish and I realized she would have given Madonna lessonsi in how to project raw sexual power on screen. Along the way we get to hear various cast members singing some of Handy’s sacred songs as well as his secular ones, including Handy’s own “Morning Star” as well as the traditional spiritual “Steal Away” – though the last is exclusively a vehicle for Mahalia Jackson and lacks the haunting ending of the version Cole performed on his TV show to promote the film, in which he joined her on the final chorus to dazzling effect. Still,the 1958 St. Louis Blues is a stunning movie despite the obvious cheapness with which it was made, mainly because it showcases the sheer depth of talent in the African-American entertainment community at the time and gives Nat “King” Cole and Eartha Kitt the chance to showcase their talents on screen in a beautiful vehicle for them.