W.C. Handy has earned the title “Father of the Blues.” That doesn’t mean that he invented the blues, but he’s responsible for making the genre known outside the Mississippi Delta where it originated.

The slave trade brought millions of people from West Africa to  America. As much as slaveowners tried to stamp out vestiges of African culture, they couldn’t succeed. African rhythms and melodic inflections blended with the European music of white culture to make a completely new musical culture.

White musicians began to appreciate slave music as early as the 1840s. Some of them even went to the effort to learn to transcribe the music and dialect accurately. They just had no sympathy for or understanding of black culture. The minstrel shows where whites performed black-influenced music in blackface continued in popularity after the Civil War.

W.C. Handy himself toured the country with a minstrel show. And never heard the blues during all that time.

A brief  history of the blues

Late in the 19th century, freed slaves wanted to distance themselves from the musical genres of the slave era. The blues emerged as one new kind of music that was true to their heritage. It probably started among former slaves living in the Mississippi Delta.

The blues started as a kind of country folk music. It featured flattened, bent notes not in the standard scale. These notes, which became known as blues notes, probably originated in the work songs of slaves.

Most often, the blues was performed by one singer accompanied by guitar. But most of the nation, indeed most of the South, knew little about the Mississippi Delta region. Eventually, when the music reached into urban areas, city blues began to distinguish itself from country blues. It spread throughout the South, and then with the Great Migration, all over the country.

Ragtime developed at about the same time and for the same reasons. Ragtime and blues became two of the elements of jazz.

All three genres took American culture by storm and forever changed popular music. Jim Crow laws in the South kept strict racial segregation. Nevertheless, white audiences could hear and enjoy black musical performances. Just not in the same room as black audiences.

But how did the blues emerge from isolation in one neglected part of the country to take part in this transformation? Part of the answer is that music was one of the few avenues open to black people out of the life of sharecropping and grinding poverty.

Many black musicians traveled from place to place playing in both respectable venues and disreputable ones. They performed a wide variety of music from standard minstrel show fare to ragtime to gospel music from black churches. W.C. Handy’s experience with a touring minstrel show enabled him to popularize the blues once he heard it.

W.C. Handy’s early life

William Christopher Handy was born in Florence, Alabama to former slaves on November 16, 1873. His father was a preacher. An uncle played fiddle.

Handy showed keen interest in music as a child. His family disapproved. The boy earned money making soap and picking nuts and berries. He used his money to buy a guitar. When he got it home, his father made him return it for a refund and buy a dictionary.

When he joined a local band as a teenager and bought a cornet, he kept it a secret from his family. His parents must have been proud of his academic prowess, however. He placed near the top of his class in school and easily passed an exam to become a teacher. Then he found how little money he could make as a teacher and quit to work in a pipe works plant.

On the side, he organized a small string orchestra and taught the members how to read music. A quartet he formed made their way to Chicago but didn’t meet with success either there or in St. Louis. Handy’s luck changed when he moved to Evansville, Indiana. He joined a band that successfully toured nearby cities in both Indiana and Kentucky. He married a woman he met at one of the performances.

In 1896, Handy accepted an invitation to join Mahara’s Minstrels. He and his new wife moved to Chicago and signed on for a three-year tour. It took them from Chicago to Texas to Cuba. It also gave him the opportunity to study how white people responded to black music.

When the group performed in Huntsville, Alabama after their return from Cuba, Handy and his wife decided to leave the show and move back to Florence.

W.C. Handy hears the blues

Handy again tried teaching when he joined the faculty of the Agricultural and Mechanical College in Normal, Alabama.  The college suppressed good American music in favor of inferior European music that was more respectable. And again, he didn’t have a very good salary.

So he rejoined the Mahara’s Minstrels to tour the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. In 1903, he left them again to conduct a band in Clarksdale, Mississippi called the Knights of Pythias and remained there for six years.

As Handy waited for a train in Tutwiler, Mississippi in 1903, he heard a man singing. As he described the experience in his autobiography,

“A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of a guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly. ‘Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.’ The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I ever heard.”

About 42 miles south of Tutwiler, the Southern Railroad crossed the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad. The latter sometimes went by the name Yazoo Delta. Y.D. became “Yellow Dog” in local slang.

Wouldn’t most people who encountered “the weirdest music I ever heard” recoil and not give it another thought? But Handy made it his business to learn more about it. Knights of Pythias played all over the Mississippi Delta region. Handy heard plenty of other musicians singing the blues and learned to add it to the band’s repertoire.

W.C. Handy becomes famous

The history of the blues was about to reach a turning point. In 1909, Handy moved the band to Memphis, Tennessee and broke into the active musical life on Beale Street.

E.H. Crump, a candidate for mayor, asked Handy to write a campaign song for him. So Handy composed “Mr. Crump.” He later retitled the tune “Memphis Blues,” and in that form, it became very popular. The success prompted him to publish it in 1912.

It was not the first published blues. An Alabama-born black entertainer known as Baby Seals had “Baby Seals Blues” published in St. Louis a few months before Handy brought out “Memphis Blues.” It, too, became a hit. Seals had directed musical shows all over the South and had at least one previous published hit.

Meanwhile, Handy ran into financial troubles and couldn’t pay his debt to the printer, Theron C. Bennett. He had to sell it back for $50 and turn over all unsold copies. Bennet reissued it with lyrics and took it to New York to promote it. In that form, it became a successful hit. Handy wasn’t yet rich, but “Memphis Blues” made him famous.

The famous dance team of Vernon and Irene Castle had hired black musician James Reese Europe as accompanist. He adapted “Memphis Blues” for them, and they invented a new ballroom dance for it called the Fox Trot. When they gave Europe credit for the unique rhythms, he publicly acknowledged that he had obtained the song from W.C. Handy.

W.C. Handy becomes rich and respected

Two years later, Handy published “St. Louis Blues,” which remains his most famous composition. And he founded his own publishing company to bring it out. “St. Louis Blues” continued to earn $25,000 in annual royalties 25 years after its publication.

In 1917, W.C. Handy’s orchestra became the third black band ever to record jazz. They played a cover of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues.” And “St. Louis Blues”? Charles Prince’s Band had recorded it two years earlier.

Handy moved his publishing operations to New York. He never had another hit to equal “St. Louis Blues,” but plenty of his other pieces became immediately popular.

In addition to composing prolifically, he compiled and published Blues: An Anthology and wrote two prose books. He went blind in 1943 but continued to be a popular figure until his death in 1958.

His career embodied a major chapter in the history of the blues.

Sources:
The evolution of the blues / National Blues Museum. January  2015
The origin of blues music / All About Blues Music
The painful birth of blues and jazz / Stephanie Hall, Folk Life Today (Library of Congress). February 24, 2017
W.C. Handy / Memphis Music Hall of Fame
W.C. Handy––biography / University of North Alabama
W.C. Handy encounters the blues / Mississippi Blues Trail

Photo credit:
Handy statue. Image by Leslie Thompson from Pixabay