William Christopher Handy (November 16, 1873 โ March 28, 1958) was a blues … Read Full Bio ↴William Christopher Handy (November 16, 1873 โ March 28, 1958) was a blues composer and musician. He was widely known as the "Father of the Blues".
Handy remains among the most influential of American songwriters. Though he was one of many musicians who played the distinctively American form of music known as the blues, he is credited with giving it its contemporary form. While Handy was not the first to publish music in the blues form, he took the blues from a regional music style with a limited audience to one of the dominant national forces in American music.
Handy was an educated musician who used folk material in his compositions. He was scrupulous in documenting the sources of his works, which frequently combined stylistic influences from several performers.
Handy was born in Florence, Alabama. His father was the pastor of a small church in Guntersville, another small town in northeast central Alabama. Handy wrote in his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues, that he was born in the log cabin built by his grandfather William Wise Handy, who became an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) minister after emancipation. The log cabin of Handy's birth has been saved and preserved in downtown Florence.
Growing up he apprenticed in carpentry, shoemaking and plastering.
Handy was a deeply religious man, whose influences in his musical style were found in the church music he sang and played as a youth, and in the natural world. He later cited the sounds of nature, such as "whippoorwills, bats and hoot owls and their outlandish noises", the sounds of Cypress Creek washing on the fringes of the woodland, and "the music of every songbird and all the symphonies of their unpremeditated art" as inspiration.[citation needed]
Handy's father believed that musical instruments were tools of the devil. 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, 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?" Ordering Handy to "Take it back where it came from", his father quickly enrolled him in organ lessons. Handy's days as an organ student were short lived, and he moved on to learn the cornet. Handy 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.
He worked on a "shovel brigade" at the McNabb furnace, and described the music made by the workers as they beat shovels, altering the tone while thrusting and withdrawing the metal part against the iron buggies to pass the time while waiting for the overfilled furnace to digest its ore. "With a dozen men participating, the effect was sometimes remarkable...It was better to us than the music of a martial drum corps, and our rhythms were far more complicated." He wrote, "Southern Negroes sang about everything...They accompany themselves on anything from which they can extract a musical sound or rhythmical effect..." He would later reflect that, "In this way, and from these materials, they set the mood for what we now call blues".
In September 1892, Handy traveled to Birmingham to take a teaching exam, which he passed easily, and gained a teaching job in the city. Learning that it paid poorly, he quit the position and found industrial work at a pipe works plant in nearby Bessemer.
During his off-time, he organized a small string orchestra and taught musicians how to read notes. Later, Handy organized the Lauzetta Quartet. When the group read about the upcoming World's Fair in Chicago, they decided to attend. To pay their way, group members performed at odd jobs along the way. They arrived in Chicago only to learn that the World's Fair had been postponed for a year. Next they headed to St. Louis but found working conditions very bad.
After the quartet disbanded, Handy went to Evansville, Indiana, where he helped introduce the blues. He played cornet in the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. In Evansville, Handy joined a successful band that performed throughout the neighboring cities and states. His musical endeavors were varied: he sang first tenor in a minstrel show, worked as a band director, choral director, cornetist and trumpeter.
At age 23, Handy became band master of Mahara's Colored Minstrels. In their three-year tour, they traveled to Chicago, throughout Texas and Oklahoma, through Tennessee, Georgia and Florida, and on to Cuba. Handy earned a salary of $6 per week. Returning from Cuba, the band traveled north through Alabama, and stopped to perform in Huntsville. Weary of life on the road, he and his wife Elizabeth decided to stay with relatives in his nearby hometown of Florence.
In 1896 while performing at a barbecue in Henderson, Kentucky, Handy met Elizabeth Price. They married shortly afterward on July 19, 1896. She had Lucille, the first of their six children, on June 29, 1900 after they had settled in Florence, Alabama, his hometown. Henderson's W.C. Handy Music Bar B Q and Blues Festival is held annually in June. There is also a 10 day, 200 event W.C. Handy Music Festival in Handy's hometown of Florence, Alabama annually the last week of July. www.wchandymusicfestival.org
W.C. Handy, ca. 1900, Director of the Alabama Agriculture & Mechanical College BandAround that time, William Hooper Councill, President of Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes (AAMC) (today named Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University) in Normal, Alabama, recruited Handy to teach music at the college. Handy became a faculty member in September 1900 and taught through much of 1902.
His enthusiasm for the distinctive style of uniquely American music, then often considered inferior to European classical music, was part of his development. He was disheartened to discover that the college emphasized teaching European music considered to be "classical". Handy felt he was underpaid and could make more money touring with a minstrel group.
In 1902 Handy traveled throughout Mississippi, where he listened to the various black popular musical styles. The state was mostly rural, and music was part of the culture, especially of the Mississippi Delta cotton plantation areas. Musicians usually played the guitar, banjo and to a much lesser extent, the piano. Handy's remarkable memory enabled him to recall and transcribe the music heard in his travels.
After a dispute with AAMC President Councill, Handy resigned his teaching position to rejoin the Mahara Minstrels and tour the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. In 1903 he became the director of a black band organized by the Knights of Pythias, located in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Handy and his family lived there for six years. In 1903 while waiting for a train in Tutwiler in the Mississippi Delta, Handy had the following experience:
"A lean loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept... As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars....The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard."
About 1905 while playing a dance in Cleveland, Mississippi, Handy was given a note asking for โour native musicโ.[6] He played an old-time Southern melody, but was asked if a local colored band could play a few numbers. Three young men with a battered guitar, mandolin, and a worn-out bass took the stage.
โThey struck up one of those over and over strains that seem to have no beginning and certainly no ending at all. The strumming attained a disturbing monotony, but on and on it went, a kind of stuff associated with [sugar] cane rows and levee camps. Thump-thump-thump went their feet on the floor. It was not really annoying or unpleasant. Perhaps โhauntingโ is the better word.โ
Handy noted square dancing by Mississippi blacks with "one of their own calling the figures, and crooning all of his calls in the key of G." He remembered this when deciding on the key for "St Louis Blues".
"It was the memory of that old gent who called figures for the Kentucky breakdownโthe one who everlastingly pitched his tones in the key of G and moaned the calls like a presiding elder preaching at a revival meeting. Ah, there was my key โ I'd do the song in G."
In describing "blind singers and footloose bards" around Clarksdale, Handy wrote, "urrounded by crowds of country folks, they would pour their hearts out in song ... They earned their living by selling their own songs โ "ballets," as they called themโand I'm ready to say in their behalf that seldom did their creations lack imagination."
In 1909 Handy and his band moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where they started playing at clubs on Beale Street. The genesis of his "Memphis Blues" was as a campaign tune written for Edward Crump, a successful Memphis mayoral candidate in 1909 (and future "boss"). Handy later rewrote the tune and changed its name from "Mr. Crump" to "Memphis Blues."
The 1912 publication of his "Memphis Blues" sheet music introduced his style of 12-bar blues; it was credited as the inspiration for the foxtrot dance step by Vernon and Irene Castle, a New Yorkโbased dance team. Some consider it to be the first blues song. Handy sold the rights to the song for US$100. By 1914, when Handy was 40, he had established his musical style, his popularity increased significantly, and he composed prolifically.
Handy wrote about using folk songs:
"The primitive southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same. Till then, however, I had never heard this slur used by a more sophisticated Negro, or by any white man. I tried to convey this effect... by introducing flat thirds and sevenths (now called blue notes) into my song, although its prevailing key was major..., and I carried this device into my melody as well... This was a distinct departure, but as it turned out, it touched the spot."
"The three-line structure I employed in my lyric was suggested by a song I heard Phil Jones sing in Evansville ... While I took the three-line stanza as a model for my lyric, I found its repetition too monotonous ... Consequently I adopted the style of making a statement, repeating the statement in the second line, and then telling in the third line why the statement was made."
Regarding the "three-chord basic harmonic structure" of the blues, Handy wrote the "(tonic, subdominant, dominant seventh) was that already used by Negro roustabouts, honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of the underprivileged but undaunted class". He noted,
"In the folk blues the singer fills up occasional gaps with words like 'Oh, lawdy' or 'Oh, baby' and the like. This meant that in writing a melody to be sung in the blues manner one would have to provide gaps or waits."
Writing about the first time "St Louis Blues" was played (1914), Handy said,
"The one-step and other dances had been done to the tempo of Memphis Blues ... When St Louis Blues was written the tango was in vogue. I tricked the dancers by arranging a tango introduction, breaking abruptly into a low-down blues. My eyes swept the floor anxiously, then suddenly I saw lightning strike. The dancers seemed electrified. Something within them came suddenly to life. An instinct that wanted so much to live, to fling its arms to spread joy, took them by the heels."
His published musical works were groundbreaking because of his ethnicity, and he was among the first blacks to achieve economic success because of publishing. In 1912, Handy met Harry H. Pace at the Solvent Savings Bank in Memphis. Pace was valedictorian of his graduating class at Atlanta University and student of W. E. B. Du Bois. By the time of their meeting, Pace had already demonstrated a strong understanding of business. He earned his reputation by recreating failing businesses. Handy liked him, and Pace later became manager of Pace and Handy Sheet Music.
While in New York City, Handy wrote:
"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."
In 1917, he and his publishing business moved to New York City, where he had offices in the Gaiety Theatre office building in Times Square. By the end of that year, his most successful songs: "Memphis Blues", "Beale Street Blues", and "Saint Louis Blues", had been published. That year the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a white New Orleans jazz ensemble, had recorded the first jazz record, introducing the style to a wide segment of the American public. Handy initially had little fondness for this new "jazz", but bands dove into his repertoire with enthusiasm, making many of them jazz standards.
Handy encouraged performers such as Al Bernard, "a young white man" with a "soft Southern accent" who "could sing all my Blues". Handy sent Bernard to Thomas Edison to be recorded, which resulted in "an impressive series of successes for the young artist, successes in which we proudly shared." Handy also published the original "Shake Rattle and Roll" and "Saxophone Blues", both written by Bernard. "Two young white ladies from Selma, Alabama (Madelyn Sheppard and Annelu Burns) contributed the songs "Pickaninny Rose" and "O Saroo", with the music published by Handy's company. These numbers, plus our blues, gave us a reputation as publishers of Negro music."
Expecting to make only "another hundred or so" on a third recording of his "Yellow Dog Blues" (originally titled "Yellow Dog Rag"), Handy signed a deal with the Victor company. The Joe Smith recording of this song in 1919 became the best-selling recording of Handy's music to date.
Handy tried to interest black women singers in his music, but initially was unsuccessful. In 1920 Perry Bradford persuaded Mamie Smith to record two of his non-blues songs, published by Handy, accompanied by a white band: "That Thing Called Love" and "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down". When Bradford's "Crazy Blues" became a hit as recorded by Smith, African-American blues singers became increasingly popular. Handy found his business began to decrease because of the competition.
In 1920 Pace amicably dissolved his long-standing partnership with Handy, with whom he also collaborated as lyricist. As Handy wrote: "To add to my woes, my partner withdrew from the business. He disagreed with some of my business methods, but no harsh words were involved. He simply chose this time to sever connection with our firm in order that he might organize Pace Phonograph Company, issuing Black Swan Records and making a serious bid for the Negro market. . . . With Pace went a large number of our employees. . . . Still more confusion and anguish grew out of the fact that people did not generally know that I had no stake in the Black Swan Record Company."
Although Handy's partnership with Pace was dissolved, he continued to operate the publishing company as a family-owned business. He published works of other black composers as well as his own, which included more than 150 sacred compositions and folk song arrangements and about 60 blues compositions. In the 1920s, he founded the Handy Record Company in New York City. Bessie Smith's January 14, 1925, Columbia Records recording of "Saint Louis Blues" with Louis Armstrong is considered by many to be one of the finest recordings of the 1920s. So successful was Handy's "Saint Louis Blues" that in 1929, he and director Kenneth W. Adams collaborated on a RCA motion picture project of the same name, which was to be shown before the main attraction. Handy suggested blues singer Bessie Smith have the starring role, since she had gained widespread popularity with that tune. The picture was shot in June and was shown in movie houses throughout the United States from 1929 to 1932.
In 1926 Handy authored and edited a work entitled Blues: An AnthologyโComplete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs. It is probably the first work that attempted to record, analyze and describe the blues as an integral part of the U.S. South and the history of the United States.
The genre of the blues was a hallmark of American society and culture in the 1920s and 1930s. So great was its influence, and so much was it recognized as Handy's hallmark, that author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his novel The Great Gatsby that "All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the "Beale Street Blues" while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor."
Following publication of his autobiography, Handy published a book on African-American musicians entitled Unsung Americans Sing (1944). He wrote a total of five books:
1.Blues: An Anthology: Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs
2.Book of Negro Spirituals
3.Father of the Blues: An Autobiography
4.Unsung Americans Sing
5.Negro Authors and Composers of the United States
During this time, he lived on Strivers' Row in Harlem. He became blind following an accidental fall from a subway platform in 1943. After the death of his first wife, he remarried in 1954, when he was eighty. His new bride was his secretary, the former Irma Louise Logan, whom he frequently said had become his eyes.
In 1955, Handy suffered a stroke, following which he began to use a wheelchair. More than eight hundred attended his 84th birthday party at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
On March 28, 1958 he died of bronchial pneumonia at Sydenham Hospital in New York City. Over 25,000 people attended his funeral in Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church. Over 150,000 people gathered in the streets near the church to pay their respects. He was buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery in Bronx, New York.
Compositions
Handy's songs do not always follow the classic 12-bar pattern, often having 8- or 16-bar bridges between 12-bar verses.
"Memphis Blues", written 1909, published 1912. Although usually subtitled "Boss Crump", it is a distinct song from Handy's campaign satire, "Boss Crump don't 'low no easy riders around here", which was based on the good-time song "Mamma Don't Allow It."
"Yellow Dog Blues" (1912), "Your easy rider's gone where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog." The reference is to the crossing at Moorhead, Mississippi, of the Southern Railway and the local Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, called the Yellow Dog. By Handy's telling locals assigned the words "Yellow Dog" to the letters Y.D.(for Yazoo Delta) on the freight trains that they saw.
"Saint Louis Blues" (1914), "the jazzman's Hamlet."
"Loveless Love", based in part on the classic, "Careless Love". Possibly the first song to complain of modern synthetics, "with milkless milk and silkless silk, we're growing used to soulless soul."
"Aunt Hagar's Blues", the biblical Hagar, handmaiden to Abraham and Sarah, was considered the "mother" of the African Americans.
"Beale Street Blues" (1916), written as a farewell to the old Beale Street of Memphis (actually called Beale Avenue until the song changed the name); but Beale Street did not go away and is considered the "home of the blues" to this day. B.B. King was known as the "Beale Street Blues Boy" and Elvis Presley watched and learned from Ike Turner there. In 2004 the tune was included as a track on the Memphis Jazz Box compilation as a tribute to Handy and his music.
"Long Gone John (From Bowling Green)", tribute to a famous bank robber.
"Chantez-Les-Bas (Sing 'Em Low)", tribute to the Creole culture of New Orleans.
"Atlanta Blues", includes the song known as "Make Me a Pallet on your Floor" as its chorus.
"Ole Miss Rag" (1917), a ragtime composition, recorded by Handy's Orchestra of Memphis.
Performances and honors[edit]On April 27, 1928, he performed a program of jazz, blues, plantation songs, work songs, piano solos, spirituals and a Negro rhapsody in Carnegie Hall.
In 1938 he performed at the National Folk Festival in Washington, DC, his first national performance on a desegregated stage.
He performed at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 and 1934 and the New York World's Fair in 1939 and 1940.
In 1940, NBC broadcast an all-Handy program as part of its weekly series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. His songs were performed by Dinah Shore and by the composer himself.
On September 1, 1951, Handy and Dizzy Dean were among the guest stars on the CBS live variety series, Faye Emerson's Wonderful Town.
Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy (1954)
He is referenced in Prof. Harold Hill's lead-in to the song Seventy-Six Trombones in Meredith Willson's 1957 musical The Music Man.
In 1958, a movie about his life - appropriately entitled St. Louis Blues - was released starring legendary African-Americans Nat "King" Cole (in the main role), Pearl Bailey, Mahalia Jackson, Ruby Dee, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, and Eartha Kitt. It was released the year of Handy's death.
US Postage Stamp 1969On May 17, 1969, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in his honor.
Inducted in the National Academy of Popular Music Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.
He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983.
He is referenced in Joni Mitchell's 1975 song Furry Sings the Blues.
He is referenced in Marc Cohn's 1991 song Walking in Memphis, covered by Lonestar, Cher, and other artists. "...Touched down in the land of the Delta Blues, in the middle of the pouring rain. W.C. Handy, won't you look down over me?"
He received a Grammy Trustees Award for his lifetime achievements in 1993.
He was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1985, and was a 1993 Inductee into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, with the Lifework Award for Performing Achievement.
Citing 2003 as "the centennial anniversary of when W.C. Handy composed the first Blues music..." the United States Senate in 2002 passed a resolution declaring the year beginning February 1, 2003 as the "Year of the Blues."
Each November 16, Handy's birthday is celebrated with free music, birthday cake and free admission to the W.C. Handy Museum in Florence, Alabama. The hand-hewn log cabin made by his grandfather is his birthplace and museum.
An autographed 1937 photo from W.C. Handy to Anton Lada of Lada's Louisiana Orchestra sold for $850 in 2006.
Awards, festivals and memorials
The Blues Music Award, widely recognized as the most prestigious award for blues artists was known as the W. C. Handy Award until the name change in 2006.
The W. C. Handy Music Festival is held annually in Florence, Alabama and the greater Shoals area. The festival has evolved into a 10-day long celebration that includes a parade, various artists at restaurants and venues around town, and larger music events at Wilson Park in downtown Florence. The park features a statue of Handy and is close to his birthplace and museum. Previous festivals have featured jazz and blues legends including Jimmy Smith, Ramsey Lewis, Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby Blue Bland, Diane Schuur, Billy Taylor, Dianne Reeves and Charlie Byrd, Ellis Marsalis and Take 6. The festival also features a roster of annual regulars, called the W. C. Handy Jazz All-Stars.[29]
W. C. Handy Park is a city park located on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. The park contains a life-sized bronze statue of Handy.
The W.C. Handy Blues & Barbeque Festival is a week-long musical event that features blues and Zydeco bands from across the U.S and is held every June on the banks of the Ohio River in downtown Henderson, Kentucky.
The footstone of W.C. Handy in Woodlawn CemeteryIn 1979, New York City joined the list of institutions and municipalities to honor Handy by naming one block of West 52nd Street in Manhattan "W.C. Handy Place".
Handy remains among the most influential of American songwriters. Though he was one of many musicians who played the distinctively American form of music known as the blues, he is credited with giving it its contemporary form. While Handy was not the first to publish music in the blues form, he took the blues from a regional music style with a limited audience to one of the dominant national forces in American music.
Handy was an educated musician who used folk material in his compositions. He was scrupulous in documenting the sources of his works, which frequently combined stylistic influences from several performers.
Handy was born in Florence, Alabama. His father was the pastor of a small church in Guntersville, another small town in northeast central Alabama. Handy wrote in his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues, that he was born in the log cabin built by his grandfather William Wise Handy, who became an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) minister after emancipation. The log cabin of Handy's birth has been saved and preserved in downtown Florence.
Growing up he apprenticed in carpentry, shoemaking and plastering.
Handy was a deeply religious man, whose influences in his musical style were found in the church music he sang and played as a youth, and in the natural world. He later cited the sounds of nature, such as "whippoorwills, bats and hoot owls and their outlandish noises", the sounds of Cypress Creek washing on the fringes of the woodland, and "the music of every songbird and all the symphonies of their unpremeditated art" as inspiration.[citation needed]
Handy's father believed that musical instruments were tools of the devil. 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, 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?" Ordering Handy to "Take it back where it came from", his father quickly enrolled him in organ lessons. Handy's days as an organ student were short lived, and he moved on to learn the cornet. Handy 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.
He worked on a "shovel brigade" at the McNabb furnace, and described the music made by the workers as they beat shovels, altering the tone while thrusting and withdrawing the metal part against the iron buggies to pass the time while waiting for the overfilled furnace to digest its ore. "With a dozen men participating, the effect was sometimes remarkable...It was better to us than the music of a martial drum corps, and our rhythms were far more complicated." He wrote, "Southern Negroes sang about everything...They accompany themselves on anything from which they can extract a musical sound or rhythmical effect..." He would later reflect that, "In this way, and from these materials, they set the mood for what we now call blues".
In September 1892, Handy traveled to Birmingham to take a teaching exam, which he passed easily, and gained a teaching job in the city. Learning that it paid poorly, he quit the position and found industrial work at a pipe works plant in nearby Bessemer.
During his off-time, he organized a small string orchestra and taught musicians how to read notes. Later, Handy organized the Lauzetta Quartet. When the group read about the upcoming World's Fair in Chicago, they decided to attend. To pay their way, group members performed at odd jobs along the way. They arrived in Chicago only to learn that the World's Fair had been postponed for a year. Next they headed to St. Louis but found working conditions very bad.
After the quartet disbanded, Handy went to Evansville, Indiana, where he helped introduce the blues. He played cornet in the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. In Evansville, Handy joined a successful band that performed throughout the neighboring cities and states. His musical endeavors were varied: he sang first tenor in a minstrel show, worked as a band director, choral director, cornetist and trumpeter.
At age 23, Handy became band master of Mahara's Colored Minstrels. In their three-year tour, they traveled to Chicago, throughout Texas and Oklahoma, through Tennessee, Georgia and Florida, and on to Cuba. Handy earned a salary of $6 per week. Returning from Cuba, the band traveled north through Alabama, and stopped to perform in Huntsville. Weary of life on the road, he and his wife Elizabeth decided to stay with relatives in his nearby hometown of Florence.
In 1896 while performing at a barbecue in Henderson, Kentucky, Handy met Elizabeth Price. They married shortly afterward on July 19, 1896. She had Lucille, the first of their six children, on June 29, 1900 after they had settled in Florence, Alabama, his hometown. Henderson's W.C. Handy Music Bar B Q and Blues Festival is held annually in June. There is also a 10 day, 200 event W.C. Handy Music Festival in Handy's hometown of Florence, Alabama annually the last week of July. www.wchandymusicfestival.org
W.C. Handy, ca. 1900, Director of the Alabama Agriculture & Mechanical College BandAround that time, William Hooper Councill, President of Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes (AAMC) (today named Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University) in Normal, Alabama, recruited Handy to teach music at the college. Handy became a faculty member in September 1900 and taught through much of 1902.
His enthusiasm for the distinctive style of uniquely American music, then often considered inferior to European classical music, was part of his development. He was disheartened to discover that the college emphasized teaching European music considered to be "classical". Handy felt he was underpaid and could make more money touring with a minstrel group.
In 1902 Handy traveled throughout Mississippi, where he listened to the various black popular musical styles. The state was mostly rural, and music was part of the culture, especially of the Mississippi Delta cotton plantation areas. Musicians usually played the guitar, banjo and to a much lesser extent, the piano. Handy's remarkable memory enabled him to recall and transcribe the music heard in his travels.
After a dispute with AAMC President Councill, Handy resigned his teaching position to rejoin the Mahara Minstrels and tour the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. In 1903 he became the director of a black band organized by the Knights of Pythias, located in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Handy and his family lived there for six years. In 1903 while waiting for a train in Tutwiler in the Mississippi Delta, Handy had the following experience:
"A lean loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept... As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars....The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard."
About 1905 while playing a dance in Cleveland, Mississippi, Handy was given a note asking for โour native musicโ.[6] He played an old-time Southern melody, but was asked if a local colored band could play a few numbers. Three young men with a battered guitar, mandolin, and a worn-out bass took the stage.
โThey struck up one of those over and over strains that seem to have no beginning and certainly no ending at all. The strumming attained a disturbing monotony, but on and on it went, a kind of stuff associated with [sugar] cane rows and levee camps. Thump-thump-thump went their feet on the floor. It was not really annoying or unpleasant. Perhaps โhauntingโ is the better word.โ
Handy noted square dancing by Mississippi blacks with "one of their own calling the figures, and crooning all of his calls in the key of G." He remembered this when deciding on the key for "St Louis Blues".
"It was the memory of that old gent who called figures for the Kentucky breakdownโthe one who everlastingly pitched his tones in the key of G and moaned the calls like a presiding elder preaching at a revival meeting. Ah, there was my key โ I'd do the song in G."
In describing "blind singers and footloose bards" around Clarksdale, Handy wrote, "urrounded by crowds of country folks, they would pour their hearts out in song ... They earned their living by selling their own songs โ "ballets," as they called themโand I'm ready to say in their behalf that seldom did their creations lack imagination."
In 1909 Handy and his band moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where they started playing at clubs on Beale Street. The genesis of his "Memphis Blues" was as a campaign tune written for Edward Crump, a successful Memphis mayoral candidate in 1909 (and future "boss"). Handy later rewrote the tune and changed its name from "Mr. Crump" to "Memphis Blues."
The 1912 publication of his "Memphis Blues" sheet music introduced his style of 12-bar blues; it was credited as the inspiration for the foxtrot dance step by Vernon and Irene Castle, a New Yorkโbased dance team. Some consider it to be the first blues song. Handy sold the rights to the song for US$100. By 1914, when Handy was 40, he had established his musical style, his popularity increased significantly, and he composed prolifically.
Handy wrote about using folk songs:
"The primitive southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same. Till then, however, I had never heard this slur used by a more sophisticated Negro, or by any white man. I tried to convey this effect... by introducing flat thirds and sevenths (now called blue notes) into my song, although its prevailing key was major..., and I carried this device into my melody as well... This was a distinct departure, but as it turned out, it touched the spot."
"The three-line structure I employed in my lyric was suggested by a song I heard Phil Jones sing in Evansville ... While I took the three-line stanza as a model for my lyric, I found its repetition too monotonous ... Consequently I adopted the style of making a statement, repeating the statement in the second line, and then telling in the third line why the statement was made."
Regarding the "three-chord basic harmonic structure" of the blues, Handy wrote the "(tonic, subdominant, dominant seventh) was that already used by Negro roustabouts, honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of the underprivileged but undaunted class". He noted,
"In the folk blues the singer fills up occasional gaps with words like 'Oh, lawdy' or 'Oh, baby' and the like. This meant that in writing a melody to be sung in the blues manner one would have to provide gaps or waits."
Writing about the first time "St Louis Blues" was played (1914), Handy said,
"The one-step and other dances had been done to the tempo of Memphis Blues ... When St Louis Blues was written the tango was in vogue. I tricked the dancers by arranging a tango introduction, breaking abruptly into a low-down blues. My eyes swept the floor anxiously, then suddenly I saw lightning strike. The dancers seemed electrified. Something within them came suddenly to life. An instinct that wanted so much to live, to fling its arms to spread joy, took them by the heels."
His published musical works were groundbreaking because of his ethnicity, and he was among the first blacks to achieve economic success because of publishing. In 1912, Handy met Harry H. Pace at the Solvent Savings Bank in Memphis. Pace was valedictorian of his graduating class at Atlanta University and student of W. E. B. Du Bois. By the time of their meeting, Pace had already demonstrated a strong understanding of business. He earned his reputation by recreating failing businesses. Handy liked him, and Pace later became manager of Pace and Handy Sheet Music.
While in New York City, Handy wrote:
"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."
In 1917, he and his publishing business moved to New York City, where he had offices in the Gaiety Theatre office building in Times Square. By the end of that year, his most successful songs: "Memphis Blues", "Beale Street Blues", and "Saint Louis Blues", had been published. That year the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a white New Orleans jazz ensemble, had recorded the first jazz record, introducing the style to a wide segment of the American public. Handy initially had little fondness for this new "jazz", but bands dove into his repertoire with enthusiasm, making many of them jazz standards.
Handy encouraged performers such as Al Bernard, "a young white man" with a "soft Southern accent" who "could sing all my Blues". Handy sent Bernard to Thomas Edison to be recorded, which resulted in "an impressive series of successes for the young artist, successes in which we proudly shared." Handy also published the original "Shake Rattle and Roll" and "Saxophone Blues", both written by Bernard. "Two young white ladies from Selma, Alabama (Madelyn Sheppard and Annelu Burns) contributed the songs "Pickaninny Rose" and "O Saroo", with the music published by Handy's company. These numbers, plus our blues, gave us a reputation as publishers of Negro music."
Expecting to make only "another hundred or so" on a third recording of his "Yellow Dog Blues" (originally titled "Yellow Dog Rag"), Handy signed a deal with the Victor company. The Joe Smith recording of this song in 1919 became the best-selling recording of Handy's music to date.
Handy tried to interest black women singers in his music, but initially was unsuccessful. In 1920 Perry Bradford persuaded Mamie Smith to record two of his non-blues songs, published by Handy, accompanied by a white band: "That Thing Called Love" and "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down". When Bradford's "Crazy Blues" became a hit as recorded by Smith, African-American blues singers became increasingly popular. Handy found his business began to decrease because of the competition.
In 1920 Pace amicably dissolved his long-standing partnership with Handy, with whom he also collaborated as lyricist. As Handy wrote: "To add to my woes, my partner withdrew from the business. He disagreed with some of my business methods, but no harsh words were involved. He simply chose this time to sever connection with our firm in order that he might organize Pace Phonograph Company, issuing Black Swan Records and making a serious bid for the Negro market. . . . With Pace went a large number of our employees. . . . Still more confusion and anguish grew out of the fact that people did not generally know that I had no stake in the Black Swan Record Company."
Although Handy's partnership with Pace was dissolved, he continued to operate the publishing company as a family-owned business. He published works of other black composers as well as his own, which included more than 150 sacred compositions and folk song arrangements and about 60 blues compositions. In the 1920s, he founded the Handy Record Company in New York City. Bessie Smith's January 14, 1925, Columbia Records recording of "Saint Louis Blues" with Louis Armstrong is considered by many to be one of the finest recordings of the 1920s. So successful was Handy's "Saint Louis Blues" that in 1929, he and director Kenneth W. Adams collaborated on a RCA motion picture project of the same name, which was to be shown before the main attraction. Handy suggested blues singer Bessie Smith have the starring role, since she had gained widespread popularity with that tune. The picture was shot in June and was shown in movie houses throughout the United States from 1929 to 1932.
In 1926 Handy authored and edited a work entitled Blues: An AnthologyโComplete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs. It is probably the first work that attempted to record, analyze and describe the blues as an integral part of the U.S. South and the history of the United States.
The genre of the blues was a hallmark of American society and culture in the 1920s and 1930s. So great was its influence, and so much was it recognized as Handy's hallmark, that author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his novel The Great Gatsby that "All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the "Beale Street Blues" while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor."
Following publication of his autobiography, Handy published a book on African-American musicians entitled Unsung Americans Sing (1944). He wrote a total of five books:
1.Blues: An Anthology: Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs
2.Book of Negro Spirituals
3.Father of the Blues: An Autobiography
4.Unsung Americans Sing
5.Negro Authors and Composers of the United States
During this time, he lived on Strivers' Row in Harlem. He became blind following an accidental fall from a subway platform in 1943. After the death of his first wife, he remarried in 1954, when he was eighty. His new bride was his secretary, the former Irma Louise Logan, whom he frequently said had become his eyes.
In 1955, Handy suffered a stroke, following which he began to use a wheelchair. More than eight hundred attended his 84th birthday party at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
On March 28, 1958 he died of bronchial pneumonia at Sydenham Hospital in New York City. Over 25,000 people attended his funeral in Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church. Over 150,000 people gathered in the streets near the church to pay their respects. He was buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery in Bronx, New York.
Compositions
Handy's songs do not always follow the classic 12-bar pattern, often having 8- or 16-bar bridges between 12-bar verses.
"Memphis Blues", written 1909, published 1912. Although usually subtitled "Boss Crump", it is a distinct song from Handy's campaign satire, "Boss Crump don't 'low no easy riders around here", which was based on the good-time song "Mamma Don't Allow It."
"Yellow Dog Blues" (1912), "Your easy rider's gone where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog." The reference is to the crossing at Moorhead, Mississippi, of the Southern Railway and the local Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, called the Yellow Dog. By Handy's telling locals assigned the words "Yellow Dog" to the letters Y.D.(for Yazoo Delta) on the freight trains that they saw.
"Saint Louis Blues" (1914), "the jazzman's Hamlet."
"Loveless Love", based in part on the classic, "Careless Love". Possibly the first song to complain of modern synthetics, "with milkless milk and silkless silk, we're growing used to soulless soul."
"Aunt Hagar's Blues", the biblical Hagar, handmaiden to Abraham and Sarah, was considered the "mother" of the African Americans.
"Beale Street Blues" (1916), written as a farewell to the old Beale Street of Memphis (actually called Beale Avenue until the song changed the name); but Beale Street did not go away and is considered the "home of the blues" to this day. B.B. King was known as the "Beale Street Blues Boy" and Elvis Presley watched and learned from Ike Turner there. In 2004 the tune was included as a track on the Memphis Jazz Box compilation as a tribute to Handy and his music.
"Long Gone John (From Bowling Green)", tribute to a famous bank robber.
"Chantez-Les-Bas (Sing 'Em Low)", tribute to the Creole culture of New Orleans.
"Atlanta Blues", includes the song known as "Make Me a Pallet on your Floor" as its chorus.
"Ole Miss Rag" (1917), a ragtime composition, recorded by Handy's Orchestra of Memphis.
Performances and honors[edit]On April 27, 1928, he performed a program of jazz, blues, plantation songs, work songs, piano solos, spirituals and a Negro rhapsody in Carnegie Hall.
In 1938 he performed at the National Folk Festival in Washington, DC, his first national performance on a desegregated stage.
He performed at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 and 1934 and the New York World's Fair in 1939 and 1940.
In 1940, NBC broadcast an all-Handy program as part of its weekly series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. His songs were performed by Dinah Shore and by the composer himself.
On September 1, 1951, Handy and Dizzy Dean were among the guest stars on the CBS live variety series, Faye Emerson's Wonderful Town.
Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy (1954)
He is referenced in Prof. Harold Hill's lead-in to the song Seventy-Six Trombones in Meredith Willson's 1957 musical The Music Man.
In 1958, a movie about his life - appropriately entitled St. Louis Blues - was released starring legendary African-Americans Nat "King" Cole (in the main role), Pearl Bailey, Mahalia Jackson, Ruby Dee, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, and Eartha Kitt. It was released the year of Handy's death.
US Postage Stamp 1969On May 17, 1969, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in his honor.
Inducted in the National Academy of Popular Music Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.
He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983.
He is referenced in Joni Mitchell's 1975 song Furry Sings the Blues.
He is referenced in Marc Cohn's 1991 song Walking in Memphis, covered by Lonestar, Cher, and other artists. "...Touched down in the land of the Delta Blues, in the middle of the pouring rain. W.C. Handy, won't you look down over me?"
He received a Grammy Trustees Award for his lifetime achievements in 1993.
He was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1985, and was a 1993 Inductee into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, with the Lifework Award for Performing Achievement.
Citing 2003 as "the centennial anniversary of when W.C. Handy composed the first Blues music..." the United States Senate in 2002 passed a resolution declaring the year beginning February 1, 2003 as the "Year of the Blues."
Each November 16, Handy's birthday is celebrated with free music, birthday cake and free admission to the W.C. Handy Museum in Florence, Alabama. The hand-hewn log cabin made by his grandfather is his birthplace and museum.
An autographed 1937 photo from W.C. Handy to Anton Lada of Lada's Louisiana Orchestra sold for $850 in 2006.
Awards, festivals and memorials
The Blues Music Award, widely recognized as the most prestigious award for blues artists was known as the W. C. Handy Award until the name change in 2006.
The W. C. Handy Music Festival is held annually in Florence, Alabama and the greater Shoals area. The festival has evolved into a 10-day long celebration that includes a parade, various artists at restaurants and venues around town, and larger music events at Wilson Park in downtown Florence. The park features a statue of Handy and is close to his birthplace and museum. Previous festivals have featured jazz and blues legends including Jimmy Smith, Ramsey Lewis, Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby Blue Bland, Diane Schuur, Billy Taylor, Dianne Reeves and Charlie Byrd, Ellis Marsalis and Take 6. The festival also features a roster of annual regulars, called the W. C. Handy Jazz All-Stars.[29]
W. C. Handy Park is a city park located on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. The park contains a life-sized bronze statue of Handy.
The W.C. Handy Blues & Barbeque Festival is a week-long musical event that features blues and Zydeco bands from across the U.S and is held every June on the banks of the Ohio River in downtown Henderson, Kentucky.
The footstone of W.C. Handy in Woodlawn CemeteryIn 1979, New York City joined the list of institutions and municipalities to honor Handy by naming one block of West 52nd Street in Manhattan "W.C. Handy Place".
St. Louis Blues
W.C. Handy Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
I hate to see that evening sun go down
I hate to see that evening sun go down
Cause my baby, he's gone left this town
Feelin' tomorrow like I feel today
If I'm feelin' tomorrow like I feel today
I'll pack my truck and make my give-a-way
St. Louis woman with her diamond ring
Pulls that man around by her, if it wasn't for her and her
That man I love would have gone nowhere, nowhere
I got the St. Louis blues, blues as I can be
That man's got a heart like a rock cast in the sea
Or else he wouldn't have gone so far from me
I love my baby like a school boy loves his pie
Like a Kentucky colonel loves his mint 'n rye
I love my man till the day I die
I hate to see that evening sun go down
Cause my baby, he's gone left this town
Feelin' tomorrow like I feel today
If I'm feelin' tomorrow like I feel today
I'll pack my truck and make my give-a-way
Pulls that man around by her, if it wasn't for her and her
That man I love would have gone nowhere, nowhere
I got the St. Louis blues, blues as I can be
That man's got a heart like a rock cast in the sea
Or else he wouldn't have gone so far from me
I love my baby like a school boy loves his pie
Like a Kentucky colonel loves his mint 'n rye
I love my man till the day I die
W.C Handy's song St. Louis Blues is a classic blues song performed famously by Bessie Smith. The song revolves around the theme of heartbreak and the singer's pain of losing her lover. The first stanza of the song starts off with the lines "I hate to see that evening sun go down, Cause my baby, he's gone left this town." The singer laments about the departure of her lover and the pain it brings. She uses the imagery of the sun setting to represent the end of a part of her life.
The second stanza shows the singer's desperation to leave the town if she doesn't feel better tomorrow. She says, "Feelin' tomorrow like I feel today, I'll pack my truck and make my give-a-way." This line shows that the singer has lost all hope and plans to leave the town to start fresh somewhere else. The third and last stanza reveals that the departure of the singer's lover is because of another woman, a St. Louis woman, who has a hold over the man. The lyrics say, "St. Louis woman with her diamond ring, Pulls that man around by her, if it wasn't for her and her, That man I love would have gone nowhere, nowhere."
Line by Line Meaning
I hate to see that evening sun go down
I am heartbroken to see the sun setting since it marks the departure of my love from this place.
Cause my baby, he's gone left this town
My beloved has abandoned this town leaving me distressed and alone.
Feelin' tomorrow like I feel today
I am confident that my emotions tomorrow, will be as hurtful as they are today.
If I'm feelin' tomorrow like I feel today
In case my feelings about my lover remain unchanged tomorrow, I will have no choice but to leave.
I'll pack my truck and make my give-a-way
I will pack my belongings and leave without any further delay.
St. Louis woman with her diamond ring
The woman in St. Louis, with her expensive ring, attracts men towards her.
Pulls that man around by her, if it wasn't for her and her
If not for the St. Louis woman with her captivating presence, my beloved would have never left me.
That man I love would have gone nowhere, nowhere
Without the influence of the woman in St. Louis, my love would never have gone away from me.
I got the St. Louis blues, blues as I can be
I am consumed by despair and sorrow, the St. Louis blues has taken over me.
That man's got a heart like a rock cast in the sea
My beloved's heart is as unyielding and cold as a rock tossed in the sea.
Or else he wouldn't have gone so far from me
If not for his indomitable heart, my love would never be so far away from me.
I love my baby like a school boy loves his pie
I love my lover with the same unbridled passion as a schoolboy loves his pie.
Like a Kentucky colonel loves his mint 'n rye
The love I have for my man is as strong and cherished as a Kentucky colonel's love for his mint and rye.
I love my man till the day I die
My love for my lover will remain unwavering until the day I draw my final breath.
Lyrics ยฉ BMG Rights Management, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Peermusic Publishing, HANDY BROTHERS MUSIC CO.,INC.
Written by: William Christopher Handy
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind
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@kevinwaters5872
American music. Brought to you by the poorest people in the richest nation. A gift for the whole world.
@SlimecraftStudios2
He's 75 in a video that's turning 75 in 2 weeks
@SlimecraftStudios2
Happy late 75 year anniversary ed sullivan show
@kellycoleman715
W. C. Handy and his band played at my grandmotherโs high school graduation in Florence, Alabama around 1918. She graduated from college at age 17.
@randallcarter6913
Thatโs so cool!! Thanks for sharing that๐
@GavinLepley
I wonder why he was playing at a high school.
@kellycoleman715
@@GavinLepley He lived in Florence where my grandmother went to high school and it was very early in his career. He wasnโt as well known then.
@ShinyFlakesShinyFlakes
@@kellycoleman715do u have any memorabilia?
@cordieray2471
muscle Shoals and everything that followed owes to Handy's playing around Northern Alabama before relocating to Memphis and popularizing his talents and songs, think
@MikeBlitzMag
Having these extraordinarily brilliant moments preserved is nothing less than answered prayer. Pay close attention, folks. This is great art at its utmost.