Handy’s 1914 song, among the most-recorded of its era; the 1925 / version pairs a blues voice with a jazz cornet in .
Handy published it in September 1914. The verses are a ; the middle strain is a 16-bar habanera — what Handy called a tango — so the song is a ragtime-shaped piece with a blues heart, not a simple loop. It became one of the most-recorded songs of its era (musicians nicknamed it “the jazzman’s Hamlet”). The version this page plays is ’s January 1925 Columbia side, with answering her on cornet: a blues voice and a jazz horn in call-and-response.