Background

William Handy was born on November 16, 1873 in Florence, Alabama, United States, the son of Elizabeth Brewer and Charles Barnard Handy. The log cabin of Handy's birth has been preserved near downtown Florence.

Education

Without his parents' permission, Handy bought his first guitar, which he had seen in a local shop window and secretly saved for by picking berries and nuts and making lye soap. Upon seeing the guitar, his father asked him, "What possessed you to bring a sinful thing like that into our Christian home?" and ordered him to "take it back where it came from", but he also arranged for his son to take organ lessons. The organ lessons did not last long, but Handy moved on to learn to play the cornet. He joined a local band as a teenager, but he kept this fact a secret from his parents. He purchased a cornet from a fellow band member and spent every free minute practicing it. William Handy then attended Florence District School for Negroes. In September 1892, Handy travelled to Birmingham, Alabama, to take a teaching exam. He passed it easily and gained a teaching job at the Teachers Agriculture and Mechanical College in Huntsville.

Career

Some reports say that Handy joined a minstrel show — a theatrical production of the time that featured African-American music, generally in caricatured form — at the age of 15. The troupe disbanded after several appearances. He then found work as a schoolteacher, but in his time off he continued to pursue his music career.

Handy's contributions in shaping what would be called the blues were influenced by the African-American musical folk traditions that he experienced during his travels and performances. In 1892 he formed a band called Lauzette Quartet, with the intention of performing at the Chicago World's Fair later that year, but when the fair was postponed until 1893, the band was forced to split. Handy ended up in St. Louis, where he experienced difficult days of poverty, hunger and homelessness.

Yet Handy held fast, continued to play the cornet at shows and eventually made his way to Kentucky, where he was hired as a musician in the well-to-do in the city of Henderson. Handy's first big musical break came in 1896, when he was asked to join W. A. Mahara's Minstrels as its bandleader. He stayed with the group for several years, traveling the country and as far away as Cuba to perform. Weary of life on the road, in 1900, Handy and Elizabeth, his wife, settled down in Huntsville, Alabama, where Handy worked as a music teacher, but in 1902 he hit the road again.

After a sojourn in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Handy headed up the band the Black Knights of Pyhtias and immersed himself in the local variation of the blues, by the end of the first decade of the 20th century, Handy had settled in Memphis, Tennessee, where he performed frequently at the Beale Street clubs. In 1909 Handy wrote what was to become a campaign song called "Mr. Crump", named after Memphis mayoral candidate Edward H. "Boss" Crump. (Crump won the election, although the lyrics of the song weren't the most flattering). The song was later reworked and became "Memphis Blues." Handy made a deal to get the song published in 1912, and henceforth became a trailblazer in bringing the form's song structures to large audiences.

Often considered the first blues song ever published, "Memphis Blues" was a commercial hit. Handy, however, never got to reap the financial rewards of its success, having sold the rights to the song and fallen prey to exploitative business practices. Having learned his lesson the hard way, he decided to set up a structure to retain ownership of his songs and created his own publishing venture with a songwriter named Harry Pace.

Handy released his next hit, "St. Louis Blues" — outlining the hardships he'd experienced years before in the titular city — in 1914, under the Pace & Handy Music Company (which later became known as the Handy Brothers Music Company, after Pace left the venture). "St. Louis Blues" became a massive success and would be recorded many times over the next several years. Other Handy hits include "Yellow Dog Blues" (1914) and "Beale Street Blues" (1916). He would eventually be credited with composing dozens of songs.

In 1918, Handy moved his business to New York to escape Southern racial hostility, and later scored success with the composition "Aunt Hagar's Blues." He continued to promote blues to large audiences during the 1920s, editing the book "Blues: An Anthology" (1926) — which contained blues arrangements for vocals and piano — and organizing the first blues performance in New York City's Carnegie Hall in 1928.

Handy continued working steadily throughout the 1930s, publishing "Negro Authors and Composers of the United States" in 1935 and "W.C. Handy's Collection of Negro Spirituals" in 1938. A few years later, in 1941, he published an autobiography, "Father of the Blues."

Handy lived to experience his works performed by popular jazz greats. The blues composer died of pneumonia in New York City on March 28, 1958, at the age of 84. More than 20,000 people attended his funeral at a church in Harlem, and thousands more lined the streets to pay their respects. Only months after his death, his life story played on the silver screen in theaters across the country in the film "St. Louis Blues", which starred singer Nat King Cole as the legendary composer.

Achievements

• An African American, Handy was one of the most influential songwriters in the United States. One of many musicians who played the distinctively American blues music, Handy did not create the blues genre and was not the first to publish music in the blues form, but he took the blues from a regional music style (Delta blues) with a limited audience to a new level of popularity. Handy was inducted in the National Academy of Popular Music Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970. He also received a Grammy Trustees Award for lifetime achievement in 1993.
  
  Handy's legacy continues to shine in the annals of music, with his songs continually reinterpreted in idioms of blues, jazz, pop and classical music. Often referred to as the "Father of the Blues", Handy's pioneering vision also lives on through Alabama's annual W.C. Handy Music Festival.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Blues: An Anthology. Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs

    (Originally published in 1926, this classic collection of ...)

    1972
  • Father of the Blues: An Autobiography

    (W. C. Handy's blues-"Memphis Blues," "Beale Street Blues,...)

    1969
  • A Treasury Of The Blues 1949

• music

  • Ain't A That Good News: African-American Art Songs and Spirituals
  • Father of the Blues

Religion

He was deeply religious.

Views

Handy is a somewhat enigmatic figure; in his lifetime he was bitterly accused by some musicians of plagiarism. It seems probable that he was less the original composer he claimed to be, more a sensitive collector of traditional material. Even if this is the case, his services as a folklorist should not be minimized; probably no one else has preserved such a wealth of blues material. As a performing musician, Handy was a competent instrumentalist in the European tradition, with no apparent ability as a jazz soloist.

The music he had absorbed during his youth consisted of spirituals, work songs, and folk ballads. His own work consisted of elements of all these in addition to the popular ragtime and the blues notes that he inserted. His work developed the conception of blues as a harmonic framework within which it was possible to improvise.

Quotations: "I was under the impression that these Negro musicians would jump at the chance to patronize one of their own publishers. They didn't...The Negro musicians simply played the hits of the day...They followed the parade. Many white bands and orchestra leaders, on the other hand, were on the alert for novelties. They were therefore the ones most ready to introduce our numbers. [But] Negro vaudeville artists...wanted songs that would not conflict with white acts on the bill. The result was that these performers became our most effective pluggers."

Personality

Physical Characteristics: An accidental fall in 1943 from a subway platform caused his blindness and ended his music and book writing career.

Connections

In 1896, while performing at a barbecue in Henderson, Kentucky, Handy met Elizabeth Price. They married on July 19, 1896. She gave birth to Lucille, the first of their six children, on June 29, 1900, after they had settled in Florence. After the death of his first wife, he remarried in 1954 when he was 80. His bride was his secretary, Irma Louise Logan, who he frequently said had become his eyes.

Father:

Charles Barnard Handy

Mother:

Elizabeth Brewer

spouse 1st:

Elizabeth Price

Daughter:

Lucille Handy

spouse 2nd:

Irma Louise Logan

References

• W.C. Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues
  2009