Traditional, 1915

Over a century old, “Hesitation Blues” is a perennial folk-blues standard with a highly adaptable form and unknown original composer.  It’s catchy melody and 12-bar format predates the recording era originating from an unknown 19th century African-American spiritual, which pre-war bluesman Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Leadbelly, recalled learning around 1910.  Some theorize that the tune’s genesis may relate to the ragtime “hesitation” style waltzes that were popular in America in the early twentieth century. 

The song’s simple verse structure easily lends itself to the insertion of any common blues phrases, or “maverick stanzas,” a testament to both the improvisational nature and unique identity of the song.  Singers would mix and match different verses and lyrics, keeping the standard chorus: “Tell me, how long do I have to wait? / Can I get you now? / Do I have to hesitate?”.  Before its lyrics were written down, “Hesitation Blues” was passed on by oral traditions, often performed as an extended group song where multiple singers kept adding and improvising verses, sometimes with more risqué lyrics. When the blues caught on in the 1910’s, folklorists began collecting oral variations of “Hesitation Blues.”  By 1915, the lyrics were cleaned up and packaged for a wider audience with the publication of two competing versions of lyrics by W. C. Handy, the self-proclaimed “Father of the Blues,” and the white team of Billy Smythe and Scott Middleton.  By the next year, the song was performed widely as an instrumental, being touted as the “song with over 100 verses.”  The earliest known recording of this piece is an instrumental by the Victor Military Band in 1916. Performed live, the number was popular in the black vaudeville South in the mid-1910’s, where Besse Smith and other vaudeville artists performed it.  The white American vaudeville singer, Al Bernard, is credited with recording the first version of “Hesitation Blues” with both melody and lyrics in 1919 for Edison Records (Thomas Edison), using Smythe and Middleton’s lyrics. 

Through the years, scores of artists have recorded their version of “Hesitation Blues,” typically a variation on Handy’s or Smythe-Middleton’s version. Notable versions include those from Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Taj Mahal, Doc Watson, Hot Tuna and Willie Nelson.  Perhaps the most influential version of the song was performed through the 1960’s by finger-picking bluesman Reverend Gary Davis, although Davis himself wrote and improvised many different versions. Fellow folksinger Dave Van Ronk once claimed that Davis refused to perform some of the tune’s earlier risqué lyrics in later years, regarding them as sinful, but would sometimes get around that by speaking the verses.  Van Ronk himself was known to riff on explicit versions of the song in the late 1960s. In 1961, American poet Langston Hughes included “Hesitation Blues” as the musical accompaniment to his longform poem Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz.