Birth of the Blues New York Performances

“Birth of the Blues” is a 1926 popular song by Ray Henderson, Buddy DeSylva, and Lew Brown, written for Broadway’s *George White’s Scandals* and quickly absorbed into the jazz repertoire. Its lyric treats the blues as a kind of folk invention, tracing the music to an imagined origin story rather than documented history. In New York, it would have been heard first in the Broadway run at the Apollo Theatre, then carried outward through recordings and dance bands. The song is a reminder of how Broadway helped package Black musical forms for mainstream audiences.