Black Music Sunday: Celebrating W.C. Handy, ‘The Father of the Blues’

Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 285 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.

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Sunday is the anniversary of the birth of W.C. Handy, 152 years ago. Iva Sipal at Musician’s Guide details W.C. Handy’s beginnings:

W. C. Handy’s remarkable life started eight years after the conclusion of the American Civil War. Born in a log cabin in Florence, Alabama, on November 16, 1873, William Christopher Handy entered into a new era for black people–an era that he himself would help define by introducing his people’s music to the world. He thereby became the “Father of the Blues.” […]

As a trained musician Handy would come to recognize what he once regarded “primitive” as a viable form of music. He sought a way to translate the blues into compositional form. … It is generally regarded as a music that is deceivingly simple and too easily unappreciated by the untrained ear.

Handy’s parents and grandparents were among the four million slaves freed by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. One in a sea of liberated souls, his paternal grandfather, William Wise Handy, became a well-respected citizen of Florence and the Methodist minister of his own church. … It was the boy’s maternal grandmother who hit upon his destiny by suggesting that her grandson’s big ears symbolized a talent for music.

The words thrilled him. At the age of 12, he fell in love with a guitar in a shop window, and one day, after counting out the salvaged earnings from his string of odd jobs, he was finally able to take his prize home. … His outraged father apparently demanded that he return the “devil’s plaything” and exchange it for “something that’ll do you some good.” The bewildered boy traded it in for a new Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary–and his father paid for organ lessons.

Handy received his education in the rudiments of music during his 11 years at the Florence District School for Negroes. His teacher was a lover of vocal music and took time to give his students voice and music instructions that would enable them to sing religious material–without the accompaniment of instruments. … But Handy longed to play instruments, so on the sly he bought an old cornet and took lessons from its former owner.

Handy also wrote his own story: “Father of the Blues: An Autobiography.”

The Alabama Music Hall of Fame continues his story:

Handy joined Mahara’s Minstrels in 1896, embarking on a three-year tour that took them throughout the Southeast and eventually to Cuba. … In 1903, he received an offer to direct the Knights of Pythias Band in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he heard the folk songs of rural blues musicians in the Mississippi Delta.

In 1909, Handy and his band moved to Memphis, Tennessee, establishing a new home in the vibrant musical surroundings of Beale Street. Combining his own musical style with the sounds he had heard in Clarksdale, Handy began shaping the music he would call “the blues” into an identifiable form he later defined as “the sound of a sinner on revival day.” Handy’s first official “blues” composition – “Mr. Crump,” a campaign song written for Memphis mayoral candidate E.H. Crump – was published in 1912 as the popular favorite “Memphis Blues.”

Two years later, at the age of 40, Handy published his most famous composition, “St. Louis Blues,” followed by the popular “Beale Street Blues.” As his fame and reputation soared, Handy moved his publishing company to New York City, where it still flourishes today. “St. Louis Blues” has been recorded by artists ranging from Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Rudy Vallee to Ruth Brown, Harry James, Hank Williams Jr. and Natalie Cole.

Handy compiled the blues tunes of his day into a 1926 book, Blues: An Anthology, and published Negro Authors And Composers of the United States in 1935. As his vision began to deteriorate, Handy penned and published his autobiography, Father of the Blues, in 1941. […]

Handy died of bronchial pneumonia in New York at the age of 84. Fellow Alabama native Nat King Cole portrayed him in the 1958 biographical film St. Louis Blues, with young Billy Preston cast as Handy in his childhood. The film was released just after Handy’s death.

Although he did not invent the blues, Handy became the first to identity and name the blues, then transcribe, publish and popularize the music for the general public. Memphis honors his memory with the annual W.C. Handy Awards, presented for outstanding achievement in traditional and modern blues. Handy’s beloved hometown of Florence holds an annual weeklong music festival in his honor each summer. 

Handy tells his own story on this one:

Here’s Handy performing “Saint Louis Blues” on “The Ed Sullivan Show:”

Louis Armstrong recorded this Handy tribute in 1954:

Scott Yarnow at All Music wrote in his review of the tribute:

This recording was not only Louis Armstrong’s finest record of the 1950s but one of the truly classic jazz sets. Armstrong and his All-Stars (trombonist Trummy Young, clarinetist Barney Bigard, pianist Billy Kyle, bassist Arvell Shaw, drummer Barrett Deems, and singer Velma Middleton) were clearly inspired by the fresh repertoire, 11 songs written by W.C. Handy. Their nearly nine-minute version of “St. Louis Blues” with witty vocals, roaring Young trombone, and a couple of long majestic trumpet solos — is arguably the greatest version of the oft-recorded song.

I’ll close with this interesting Harlem Walking Tour video celebrating Handy:

As the video notes, “Handy’s contributions continue into the present day. He is an inductee in the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1970), Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame (1985), and the recipient of a Grammys Trustees Award for lifetime achievement (1993). In 2002 the United States Senate passed a resolution declaring 2003 as the “Year of the Blues” being that it was the centennial anniversary of W.C. Handy’s first encounter with blues music – the moment that led to him becoming the ‘Father of the Blues.’”

Join me in the comments section below for more Handy and more blues.