Limehouse Blues is a popular British song with music by Philip Braham and lyrics by Douglas Furber. It evokes Limehouse, London's prewar Chinatown, with Chinese imagery in both the lyrics and the melody. The song premiered in the 1921 West End revue A to Z and was published in 1922; its Broadway breakthrough came with Gertrude Lawrence in André Charlot’s Revue in 1924. It has since become a jazz standard, frequently performed as an instrumental, with early vocal records by Red Nichols with Scrappy Lambert in 1928 and the Mills Brothers in 1934, and later versions by artists such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and many others. It has appeared in films and revues, including Hoagy Carmichael in To Have and Have Not (1944), the 1946 Ziegfeld Follies segment with Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer, and the 1968 film Star! where Julie Andrews revived the number, and it has appeared on numerous albums and film soundtracks, underscoring its enduring appeal.
