How Blue Can You Get?

The version we all know was born in 1964 as a single, but its story begins earlier. In 1949, Johnny Moore's Three Blazers recorded it for the first time with a piano that sounds like a whisper and a bass that drags every note. By 1951, Louis Jordan gave it a twist with brass that brought it closer to jump blues. When King revisited it in 1963 for his album Blues in My Heart, he titled it "Downhearted," but the following year he rechristened and released it as How Blue Can You Get? Here, the arrangement was simplified to keep the focus on his voice—now with an edge it hadn’t had before—and on that moment of dead time where the band falls silent and he spits out the lyrics as if it were a sermon. It reached number 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1964, but its real triumph was staying in King’s repertoire for decades, becoming a number that always starts with that warning: "pay attention to the lyrics, not so much to my singing." Even cinema adopted it: in 1998, King played it as part of the Louisiana Gator Boys in Blues Brothers 2000, surrounded by legends like Eric Clapton and Bo Diddley. And if anyone doubts its power, just remember that in 1996 a sample of its line "I’ve been blue since the day we met" slipped into the hit Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand by Primitive Radio Gods, proving that even a snippet of this song can be an irresistible hook.