Limehouse Blues was composed in 1922 by Philip Braham with lyrics by Douglas Furber; they were inspired by the Limehouse district in the East End docklands of London, once notorious for its opium dens and hardscrabble yet colourful life. Since its first public appearance, it has become a jazz standard. See the Wikipedia article for more detail.

In its original form, the piano score is set in the key of F-major, changing to F-minor in the refrain. For the amateur pianist of modest skill, the music is a handful that can rapidly escape control. However, perseverance in practice is repaid handsomely by excellent results. When compared with performance on the piano, playing Limehouse Blues refrain on pennywhistle is extremely easy.

Other tunes in this series can be found listed on the Toots of the Whistle page of the Guide.

This abc-rendition is transposed for the pennywhistle, tuned to the key of D. Copy and paste the abc-code, shown below, into your own text file and then process the file using the abc-tool of your choice. Free abc utilities are available that will convert the code to a MIDI file, to Adobe PostScript, and to Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) suitable for printing the sheet music. As an alternative, it is possible to read the abc-code direct and play it on your favourite instrument.