W. C. Handy

Composer

• Born: November 16, 1873
• Birthplace: Florence, Alabama
• Died: March 28, 1958
• Place of death: New York, New York

American composer

Handy popularized the blues in the early twentieth century. By collecting and notating folk blues, publishing arrangements of traditional blues, and writing his own blues compositions, Handy played a major role in standardizing the form and marketing the style to mainstream American and international audiences.

Area of achievement Music

Early Life

W. C. Handy was born in Florence, Alabama, to Charles Bernard Handy and Elizabeth Bewer Handy, both former slaves. He grew up in a log cabin built by his grandfather, William Wise Handy, who had become a Methodist minister after emancipation. Handy’s father was the pastor of a small church in Guntersville, Alabama, and young Handy was raised in a deeply religious household.

As a youth, Handy attended the Florence District School and also apprenticed in carpentry, shoemaking, and plastering, but he secretly wanted to study music. In his autobiography Father of the Blues (1941), he describes how he could identify the musical notes of songbirds, the whistles of river boats, and the rhythms of the nearby Tennessee River. Because his family and church frowned on musical pursuits, especially the playing of instruments, he was forced by his father to give up for a dictionary instead a newly bought guitar with money he had saved from doing odd jobs. Realizing that his son had a passion for music, however, the elder Handy enrolled William in organ lessons. Handy soon became proficient on organ, piano, guitar, and, especially, cornet and trumpet. He also studied voice with Y. A. Wallace, popular music with violinist Jim Turner, music theory, and composition.

Life’s Work

In 1892, Handy left Florence for Birmingham, where he obtained a teaching position. The job paid poorly, however, so he had to take a factory job in nearby Bessemer. In Bessemer he formed a brass band and later established a vocal quartet in Birmingham, which he took on the road. When this group failed to get enough work, he moved to Evansville, Indiana, and then to Henderson, Kentucky, where he played with local brass bands. In 1896, shortly after his marriage to Elizabeth Price, Handy joined Mahara’s Minstrels, playing lead cornet and serving as arranger and, eventually, band leader. Mahara’s Minstrels toured throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba for the next several years. During this time Handy began to appreciate the regional musical styles he encountered, eventually combining the various folk and popular styles with the classical ones in which he had been trained.

After the birth of his first child in 1900, Handy left Mahara’s Minstrels to take a teaching post at the State Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes (now called Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University) in Normal, Alabama (on the outskirts of Huntsville). As band director and faculty member there, he became increasingly frustrated with the neglect of American music in favor of European classical styles. He also came to believe that he could make more money touring again with a band. He resigned the teaching post in 1902 and rejoined Mahara’s Minstrels, touring the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. The following year he became leader of the Knights of Pythias band in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and performed in the Mississippi Delta region. Everywhere he went he heard the blues, which was then, mostly, a black rural folk music. He related that in 1903, while waiting for a train, he heard a man playing his guitar with a knife and singing about a place where two railroads crossed. “It was the weirdest music I ever heard,” Handy recalled, but he soon began to arrange blues songs for his band.

In 1907, Handy moved his band to Memphis, where it became popular on Beale Street. The band was hired to play for the 1909 mayoral campaign of Edward H. Crump, who needed support from those who frequented the Beale Street clubs. For the campaign, Handy wrote “Mr. Crump,” an instrumental arrangement of a folk song whose words had actually criticized Crump’s political platform. Nevertheless, Handy’s piece helped Crump win the election. Handy later revised this tune, combining twelve-bar blues with ragtime syncopations and form, and published it in 1912 with the new title “The Memphis Blues.” Although this was not the first published blues, it became the most popular, especially after George Norton added lyrics the following year.

Handy then joined with Harry Pace to form a publishing company called Pace and Handy. Also known as Home of the Blues and later named Handy Brothers when Pace left to form Black Swan Records, this company had many successes over the next several years. These included “Jogo Blues” (1913), “St. Louis Blues” (1914), “Yellow Dog Blues” (1914), “Joe Turner Blues” (1915), “Beale Street Blues” (1917), “Aunt Hagar’s Children’s Blues” (1921), “Harlem Blues” (1923), and “Atlanta Blues” (1924), among many others. Handy’s most famous song, “St. Louis Blues,” was the first published work to blend frank lyrics and blues harmonies with the syncopations of ragtime and a formal structure borrowed from the Tin Pan Alley style. This song, especially the recording made by Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong in 1925, fueled the blues sensation that swept the country during the 1920’s and into the next decade.

Handy had moved his band to New York City in 1917, where he made several recordings and attracted a large, racially mixed audience. Between 1917 and 1923 the band recorded several songs, including “That Jazz Dance/Livery Stable Blues” (1917), which continued Handy’s penchant for combining blues with ragtime syncopations. In 1922 he established Handy Record Company, which, although short-lived, organized recording sessions aimed at marketing blues music. Handy became a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance after 1924, curtailing his own performing activities in favor of promoting African American music. In 1928 he organized a concert performance of blues and other African American styles at Carnegie Hall; other important concerts followed. Handy copyrighted more than 150 songs and published several collections, including Blues: An Anthology (1926; reprinted in 1950 as A Treasury of the Blues), A Book of Negro Spirituals (1938), and a history of black music, Negro Authors and Composers of the United States (1938).

With director Kenneth Adams, Handy collaborated on a short (fifteen-minute) motion picture called St. Louis Blues in 1929, starring Smith in her only appearance in film. Another film with the same title, based on Handy’s life and starring Nat King Cole, was released in 1958, a few months after Handy’s death.

Handy’s wife, Elizabeth (with whom he had six children), died in 1937, and in 1941, Handy published his autobiography Father of the Blues, an interesting, though not entirely reliable, source. After experiencing vision problems for many years, he became blind by the mid-1940’s. He continued to appear frequently at public and charity events and always spoke on behalf of the integrity of folk music and blues. In 1954, he married his long-time secretary, Irma Louise Logan. After suffering a stroke the following year, he used a wheelchair for mobility. He died after suffering acute bronchial pneumonia in 1958 at the age of eighty-four. His family donated his private collection to Fisk University, and other collections relating to Handy’s life and work are housed at the Library of Congress and at New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Significance

Handy, although not the founder of the blues, took the genre from its folk roots in the Mississippi Delta and transformed it into one of the most important forces in American music. At a time when blues was considered a southern and rural black folk style, Handy realized its significance and its potential appeal to a wide, racially mixed American and international audience.

Handy used his classical musical training to notate traditional blues tunes and to arrange them for his band and for publication. He successfully marketed his published and recorded arrangements and his original songs in the blues style, all of which blend folk blues with ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, and even Afro-Cuban features. The annual awards for accomplishment in blues music were called the W. C. Handy Awards until 2006, when the name was changed to the Blues Music Awards, but the awards remain known as the Handys.

Bibliography

Giddins, Gary. Visions of Jazz: The First Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. A comprehensive collection detailing the first century of jazz. Part one of the book explores the work of W. C. Handy and the founding of blues music. Recommended.

“Handy Archives: A Collection of Information About This Late Great Man from His Own Personal Archives.” Record Research 3, no. 5 (1958), 3. A summary of the primary source information in Handy’s archives.

Handy, William Christopher. Father of the Blues: An Autobiography. Edited by Arna Bontemps. 4th ed. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991. Originally published in 1941, this work provides important information about Handy’s life. Although it is not completely objective and somewhat inflates Handy’s status in blues history, it remains a significant primary source.

Kay, G. W. “William Christopher Handy: Father of the Blues.” Jazz Journal 24, no. 3 (1971): 10-12. A short but insightful account of Handy’s importance in the early years of blues.

Montgomery, Elizabeth Rider. William C. Handy: Father of the Blues. Champaign: Garrard, 1968. A thorough and unbiased account of Handy’s life, career, and significance in music history.

Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New York: Viking Press, 1981. An excellent history of the blues, providing a perspective on the history of the musical genre.

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. 3d ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Places Handy’s contributions to American music in the context of other black Americans.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: 1910’s: Handy Ushers in the Commercial Blues Era; February 15, 1923: Bessie Smith Records “Downhearted Blues”; August 4, 1927: Rodgers Cuts His First Record for RCA Victor; 1933: Billie Holiday Begins Her Recording Career.