original
warren project
anderson council
Story behind the song
We were talking about jazz. We got together, yada yada yada.....
History
The earliest incarnation of the hymn was as When the Saints are Marching In [1], published in 1896 in Cincinnati, Ohio, with music by James Milton Black and lyrics by Katharine Purvis. Already very similar to the contemporary song, the latter is obviously a derivative of it. Over the years, the song morphed to When the Saints March In for Crowning (1908), When All the Saints Come Marching In (1923), When the Saints Go Marching Home (1927), and finally When the Saints Go Marching In published in Nashville, Tennessee in 1927 for Edward Boatner's hymn book Spirituals Triumphant - Old and New.
Over the years, so many arrangements of the music and variations of the lyrics have been produced (see below) that nobody can agree on any one canonical version. In this respect, it has become more like a folk song than a formally composed work.
[edit] Uses
A traditional use of the song is as a funeral march. In the traditional funeral music traditions of New Orleans, Louisiana, often called the "jazz funeral", while accompanying the coffin to the cemetery, a band would play the tune as a dirge On the way back from the interment, it would switch to the familiar upbeat "hot" or "Dixieland" style. While the tune is still heard as a slow spiritual number on rare occasions, from the mid-20th century it has been massively more common as a "hot" number. The number remains particularly associated with the city of New Orleans.
Both vocal and instrumental renditions of the song abound. Louis Armstrong was one of the first to make the tune into a nationally known pop-tune in the 1930s. Armstrong wrote that his sister told him she thought the secular performance style of the traditional church tune was inappropriate and irreligious. However Armstrong was in a New Orleans tradition of turning church numbers into brass band and dance numbers that went back at least to Buddy Bolden's band at the very start of the 20th century.
Other pop versions include that by Judy Garland.
The tune was brought into the early rock and roll repertory by Fats Domino as one of the traditional New Orleans numbers he often
........... History taken from Wikpedia....
complete history available..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_The_Saints_Go_Marching_In