"Birth of the Blues" - Kid Ory

“Birth of the Blues” (PDF) from the Kid Ory album, Kid Ory Plays the Blues.

This version of “Birth of the Blues,” recorded from a live radio broadcast, is in the unfriendly key of B Major and could be due to the audio transfer process with a varying tape speed, resulting in a half-step raised tonality compared to the traditional key of Bb Major. However, both The Real Book, Volume 2 and The Firehouse fakebooks suggest the original key of C Major as composed by Ray Henderson. And yet, the popular recorded version by Frank Sinatra from 1957 is also arranged in the key of B Major but presumably after these Kid Ory performances were originally broadcast. So it remains unclear as to why anyone would think to arrange an instrumental version in such a stupid key.

Here’s a YouTube video of Louis Armstrong performing “Birth of the Blues” with Frank Sinatra in - whad’ya know - the key of Bb Major:

Recommended reading: Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz by John McCusker.  Published by University Press of Mississippi.