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Everyday I Have the Blues.
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“Every Day I Have the Blues” is a blues song that has been performed in a variety of styles. An early version of the song is attributed to Pinetop Sparks and his brother Milton.
It was first performed in the taverns of St. Louis by the Sparks brothers and was recorded July 28, 1935, by Pinetop with Henry Townsend on guitar. The song is a twelve-bar blues that features Pinetop’s piano and falsetto vocal. The opening verse includes the line “Every day, every day I have the blues”.
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After a reworking of the song by Memphis Slim in 1949, it became a blues standard with renditions recorded by numerous artists. Four different versions of “Every Day I Have the Blues” have reached the Top Ten of the Billboard R&B chart, and two—one by the Count Basie Orchestra with Joe Williams and one by B.B. King—have received Grammy Hall of Fame Awards. In 2019, the latter version was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame as a “Classic of Blues Recording”.
Also in 1955, B.B. King recorded “Every Day I Have the Blues”. King attributed the song’s appeal to arranger Maxwell Davis: “He [Davis] wrote a chart of ‘Every Day I Have the Blues’ with a crisp and relaxed sound I’d never heard before. I liked it so well, I made it my theme … Maxwell Davis didn’t write majestically he wrote naturally, which was my bag. He created an atmosphere that let me relax.”
The song was recorded at Capitol Records’ old studio on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood which, according to RPM Records part-owner Joe Bihari, had “a better sound” than the new studio in the company’s new tower. Bihari commented on a technique which bypassed the then normal method of using a microphone on an instrumentalist’s amplifier: “We jacked B.B.’s guitar straight into the board, so it sounded a little different.”
RPM issued the song as a single, backed with “Sneakin’ Around”, which reached number eight on the R&B chart. It appears on several King albums, including his first, Singin’ the Blues (1957). In 1959, King re-recorded the song as a guest vocalist with members of Basie’s orchestra, with Davis conducting. Kent Records released it as a single, backed with “Time to Say Goodbye”.
The remake is included on the 1959 album Compositions of Count Basie and Others and as a bonus track on a 2003 Ace Records reissue of King’s 1959 album B.B. King Wails. The song became an important piece in King’s repertoire, and live recordings are included on Live at the Regal (1965) and Live in Cook County Jail (1971).
In 2019, the Blues Foundation inducted “Every Day I Have the Blues” into the Blues Hall of Fame as a “Classic of Blues Recording”. The induction statement includes:
"Everyday I Have the Blues" is one of the most ubiquitous of all blues songs, a required number in the repertoires of the countless bar and lounge bands of many genres. Its late entry into the Blues Hall of Fame reflects the fact that no strong consensus emerged as to which of the hundreds of recorded versions was most deserving. But it often is associated with B.B. King, and so the first of his own many versions gets the honors.