Birth of the Blues New York Performances

First heard in 1926, “Birth of the Blues” paired Ray Henderson’s music with lyrics by Buddy DeSylva and Lew Brown, arriving through a Broadway revue at a moment when New York stages were absorbing and repackaging blues idioms for mass audiences. Early recordings that same year helped fix the tune in the popular-jazz repertoire. Now at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, Sherman Irby, and Kenny Washington places it inside a repertory program tracing the blues lineage associated with W.C. Handy. The song’s importance lies in how it reveals Broadway’s role as a crossroads for American vernacular music.