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Not many people realise this but the Blues was actually invented in England. It was invented by Nigel (somewhat-short-sighted-boy) Crabtree in 1909 with his wonderful rendition of 'Marmalade Blues', a brief extract of which I have included below:

Oh I'm terribly fond of marmalade
I can eat it all day long
Oh yes! I'm terribly fond of marmalade
I can eat it all day long
I would even eat it for luncheon
But that would be frightfully wrong

Oh if I feel tomorrow
The way I feel today
Yes if I feel tomorrow
The way I feel today
I'll probably say to myself
Golly! I felt like this yesterday!

As you can see, it was rather a jolly genre in those days. None of this I-feel-so-bad business; just happy little songs about marmalade.

Then, in 1915, a small group of slaves from the cotton fields of Louisiana, who were on a whistle-stop tour of Europe for their vacation just happened to hear Nigel one evening while he was performing in cabaret at the Ritz, where they were staying. The rest is history.

Since then, the genre has changed considerably. It became darker and rather depressive. No more jolly songs about marmalade, although they did tend to sing about something called 'jellyroll', which sounds absolutely frightful.

Most of the songs, however, were largely about creative methods of suicide and, to illustrate this, I include an extract from 'Trouble In Mind' by Richard M Jones (1926):

I'm going down to that river
Take my old rockin' chair
I'm going down to that river
Take my old rockin' chair
If them troubles don' leave me
I'll rock on outa here

Well that puts sticking your head in the gas oven into the shade.

Blues fans may have noticed something of a fixation with a train simply referred to as 'the two-nineteen'. One verse from 'Trouble In Mind' also appears word-for-word in a song called 'Two-Nineteen Blues' and is as follows:

I'm gonna lay my head
On that lonesome railroad line
I'm gonna lay my head
On that lonesome railroad line
An' let that Two-Nineteen
Ease my troubled mind

Now, the interesting thing about the Two-Nineteen is that it was also known as the Delta Suicide Express and ran at precisely 2:19 every day (except during the Depression, when they had to put on extra trains to cope with demand).

That ol' lonesome railroad line was pretty lonesome most of the time... but between 2:15 and 2:25, you could hardly see an inch of track between the heads.

These days, it's almost impossible to write an original blues song. The musical phrasing and the style and subject matter of the lyrics have become so established that, if it aint been done before, it aint blues.

Every new blues song is basically a patchwork of plagiarised bits of all the other blues songs. New songs aren't so much written as re-assembled.

Thinking about this, I decided that, rather than plagiarise all the other blues songs, I'd write a blues song that only plagiarised one (St. Louis Blues).

Unfortunately, I didn't know the chords for St. Louis Blues so I made up my own chords. Then I thought I'd better check the chords with the melody but, for the life of me, I couldn't remember the melody either... so I made up my own melody as well. The lyrics of St. Louis Blues simply didn't pan with the chords and melody I made up so I thought, rather than change what I'd done so far, I'll make up my own lyrics too.

Well, I've been playing my plagiarised St. Louis Blues and passing it off as my own for about two years now and I seem to be getting away with it.

I'll finish up with an extract of St. Louis Blues by Lone (Hemorrhoids) Turtle:

I jumped me a freight train
Sat myself down inside
(Ooh yeah! Y'know what I'm talkin' about)
I jumped me a freight train
Sat myself down inside
It was the two-nineteen
Sure was a bumpy ride