Though a short piece, with a running time of between twenty and thirty minutes, Blue Monday is often considered the blueprint to many of Gershwin's later works, and is often considered to be the "first piece of symphonic jazz"[1] in that it was the first significant attempt to fuse forms of classical music such as opera with American popular music, with the opera largely influenced by Jazz and the African-American culture of Harlem.

After a brief overture, the gambler Joe appears in front of the curtain as a Prologue, in a reference to the character Tonio's opening aria in Pagliacci.

[2][3] Like that number, which explained the serious nature of Leoncavallo's opera as if it were an actual event, Joe tells his audience that, just like "the white man's opera", this "colored [Harlem] tragedy enacted in operatic style" focuses on primal human emotions such as love, hate, passion, and jealousy, and that the moral of the story is that tragic results come from when a woman's intuition goes wrong (Joe: "Ladies and gentlemen!").

The pianist Sweetpea arrives and plays for a while until the arrogant singer Tom comes in and knocks her out of the way, claiming that the only reason the café is still in business is his singing.

Gershwin's lyricist Buddy DeSylva originally conceived a plan for writing a "jazz opera" set in Harlem and based on the Italian language verismo opera Pagliacci with Gershwin in the early 1920s, and Whiteman, who had built much of his reputation on such experimental fusions of different musical and dramatic genres, persuaded producer George White to include it in the 1922 Scandals.

White was initially enthusiastic about an idea of a black "opera" because "A recent Broadway success was Shuffle Along, a show with an all-black cast—its words and music by the black creative team of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake... White seems to have imagined that a black-oriented segment in the new edition of his revue would capitalize on Shuffle Along's appeal.

Gershwin later wrote that what he referred to as his "composer's stomach", ailments which he would have for the rest of his life, originated in his nervousness on the opening night of Blue Monday.

Some critics saw the work as worse than just inappropriate for the Scandals, as Charles Darnton's review in the New York World called it "the most dismal, stupid, and incredible blackface sketch that has probably ever been perpetrated.

"[5] According to Reed College Professor of Music David Schiff, "With the appearance of black musicals like Shuffle Along and the emergence of black stars such as Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters, the minstrel convention of blackface, which survived in the vastly popular performances of Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, had become an embarrassment – at least to some critics.

"[6] However, "Another critic... said it was a genuine human plot of American life and foreshadowed things to come from Gershwin,"[7] and another wrote that "This opera will be imitated in a hundred years."

"[8] Many biographers and musicologists would see such an assessment as a prophetic prediction of the accomplishment that Gershwin would make thirteen years later with Porgy and Bess.

[10] A photostat of the original Grofé score exists in the Music and Recorded Sound Division of the New York Public Library and is titled Blue Monday (135th Street).

[11] In an unusually daring move for 1950s television, it was presented in that medium in 1953, as part of the famous anthology, Omnibus, under the title 135th Street.