Dallas Blues

"Dallas Blues", written by Hart Wand, is an early blues song, first published in 1912. It has been called the first true blues tune ever published. However, two other 12-bar blues had been published earlier: Anthony Maggio's "I Got the Blues" in 1908 and "Oh, You Beautiful Doll", a Tin Pan Alley song whose first verse is twelve-bar blues, in 1911. Also, two other songs with "Blues" in their titles were published in 1912: "Baby Seals Blues" (August 1912), a vaudeville tune written by Franklin "Baby" Seals, and "The Memphis Blues", written by W.C. Handy (September 1912). Neither, however, were genuine blues songs.

The song, although written in standard blues tempo, is often performed in a ragtime or Dixieland style.

The blues was originally published as an instrumental. In 1918, Lloyd Garrett added lyrics to express 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 added that the title came from 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 Mississippi River, and its influence on all the blues music that followed is well documented.