Birth name : William Christopher Handy
Also known as The Father of Blues
Born November 16, 1873, Florence, Alabama
Died March 28, 1958
New York City, New York
William Christopher Handy (November 16, 1873 – March 28, 1958) was a blues composer and musician, often known as the Father of the Blues. Wrote song St Louis Blues which was a giant hit and recorded my many famous singers and made into a movie about his life.
Handy remains among the most influential of American songwriters. Though he was one of many musicians who played the style of music that is distinctively American, he is credited with giving it its contemporary form not only because he was able to notate his music for publication and hence, posterity, but because of syncopated rhythms, a style unique to his music.
While Handy was not the first to publish music in the blues form, he took the blues from a not very well-known regional music style from the Delta to one of the dominant 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. He loved this folk musical form and brought his own transforming touch to it.
Handy was born in Florence, Alabama to Charles Bernard Handy and Elizabeth Brewer. 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 minister after emancipation. The log cabin of Handys birth has been saved and preserved in downtown Florence.
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 sounds of nature in Florence.
He cited the sounds of nature, such as whippoorwills, bats and hoot owls and their no he did not he notcooolmhe did nh 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.
Growing up he apprenticed in carpentry, shoemaking and plastering, and bought his first guitar that he had seen in a local shop window and had secretly saved for by picking berries, nuts and making lye soap, without his parents permission. His father, dismayed at his actions, asked him, What possessed you to bring a sinful thing like that into our Christian home? He then ordered him to Take it back where it came from, and enrolled him in organ lessons. His days as an organ student were short lived, and he moved on to learn the cornet.
Musical and social development
Handy joined a local blues 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. An exceptional student in school, he placed near the top of his class. In September of 1892, Handy traveled to Birmingham, Alabama to take a teaching exam, which he passed easily. He obtained a teaching job in Birmingham but soon learned that the teaching profession paid poorly. He quit the position and found 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. He formed a quartet called the Lauzetta Quartet. When the group read about the upcoming Worlds Fair in Chicago, they decided to attend. The trip to Chicago was long and arduous. To pay their way, group members performed at odd jobs along the way. They finally arrived in Chicago only to learn that the Worlds Fair had been postponed for a year. The group then headed to St. Louis but working conditions there proved to be very bad. The Lauzetta Quartet disbanded and Handy subsequently left St. Louis for Evansville, Indiana.
In Evansville, Handys luck changed dramatically. He joined a successful band which performed throughout the neighboring cities and states. While performing at a barbecue in Henderson, Kentucky, he met Elizabeth Price, and they married shortly afterwards (on July 19, 1896).
His musical endeavors were varied, and he sang first tenor in a minstrel show, moved from Alabama and worked as a band director, choral director, cornetist and trumpeter. At age 23, he was band master of Maharas Colored Minstrels.
As a young man, he played cornet in the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1893, and in 1902 he travelled throughout Mississippi listening to various musical styles played by ordinary Negroes. The instruments most often used in many of those songs were the guitar, banjo and to a much lesser extent, the piano. His remarkable memory served him well, and he was able to recall and transcribe the music he heard in his travels. In particular, he noted in his autobiography a blues guitarist he heard in Tutwiler, Mississippi.
Shortly after his marriage to Elizabeth Price in 1896, he was invited to join a minstrel group called s Minstrels. In their three year tour, they travelled to Chicago, throughout Texas and Oklahoma, through Tennessee, Georgia and Florida on to Cuba, and Handy was paid a salary of $6 per week. Upon their return from their Cuban engagements, they travelled north through Alabama, and stopped to perform in Huntsville, Alabama. Growing weary from life on the road, it was there he and his wife decided to stay with relatives in his nearby hometown of Florence.
On June 29, 1900 in Florence, Elizabeth gave birth to the first (a daughter, Lucille) of their six children. Around that time, William Hooper Councill, President of Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes in Normal, Alabama (a small community just outside Huntsville) approached Handy about teaching music. At the time, AAMC and Tuskegee Institute were the only colleges for Negroes in Alabama. Handy accepted Councills offer and became a faculty member that September. He taught music there from 1900 to 1902 which is today named Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University.
An important factor in his musical development and in music history, was his enthusiasm for the distinctive style of uniquely American music which was often considered inferior to European classical music. He was soon disheartened to discover that American music was often cast aside by the college and instead emphasized foreign music considered to be . Handy felt he was underpaid and felt he could make more money touring with a minstrel group and after a dispute with AAMC President Councill, he resigned his teaching position to rejoin the Mahara Minstrels to tour the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. In 1903 he was offered the opportunity to direct a black band named the Knights of Pythias, located in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Handy accepted and remained there six years.
Transition: popularity, fame and business
In 1909 he and his band moved to Memphis, Tennessee and established their presence on Beale Street. At that time, American society and culture were distinctly segregated, and Handys observations of whites responses to native black music in conjunction with his own observations of the habits, attitudes and music of his ethnicity served as the foundation for what was later to become the style of music popularized as the Blues.
The genesis of his Memphis Blues was as a campaign tune originally entitled as Mr. Crump which he had written for Edward Crump, a successful Memphis, Tennessee mayoral candidate in 1909 (and future ). He later rewrote the tune and changed the name to Memphis Blues.
The 1912 publication of his Memphis Blues sheet music introduced his style of 12-bar blues to many households and was credited as the inspiration for the invention of the foxtrot dance step by Vernon and Irene Castle, a New York–based dance team. Some consider it to be the first blues song. He sold the rights to the song for US$100, and by 1914, when Handy was aged 40, his musical style was asserted, his popularity increased significantly, and he composed prolificly.
Because of the difficulty of getting his works published, he published many of his own works, and in 1917, he and his business moved to New York City. By the end of that year, his most successful songs, Memphis Blues, Beale Street Blues, and St. Louis Blues, had been published. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a white New Orleans jazz ensemble, had recorded the very first jazz record that year, introducing jazz music to a wide segment of the American public. Handy initially had little fondness for this new music, but jazz bands dove into the repertoire of W. C. Handy compositions with enthusiasm, making many of them jazz standards.
Handys foray into publishing was noteworthy for several reasons. Not only were his works groundbreaking because of his ethnicity, but he was among the first blacks who were successful because of it. The rejection of his manuscripts for publication led him to self-publish his works. 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. DuBois. By the time of their meeting, Pace had already demonstrated a strong understanding of business and earned his business reputation by rebuilding failing businesses. Handy liked him, and he later became manager of Pace and Handy Sheet Music.
In 1920, frustrated at white publishing companies that would buy their music and lyrics and record them using white artists, Pace amicably dissolved his long-standing partnership with Handy, with whom he also collaborated as lyricist, and resolved to start his own record firm, which he later named Black Swan Records. For years, scholars thought Handy was a founder of Black Swan Records. However, 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 Handys partnership with Pace was dissolved, he continued to operate the publishing company as a family-owned business, and published works of other black composers as well as his own, which included more than 150 sacred compositions and folk song arrangements and about sixty blues compositions.
In the 1920s, he founded the Handy Record Company in New York City.
Bessie Smiths January 14, 1925, Columbia Records recording of St. Louis Blues with Louis Armstrong is considered by many to be one of the finest recordings of the 1920s.
In 1926 he authored and edited a work entitled Blues: An Anthology—Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs, which is probably the first work of its type which attempted to record, analyze and describe the blues as an integral part of the U.S. South and the history of the United States.
So successful was Handys St. 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 be placed in 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.
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 Handys 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.
Later life
Following publication of his autobiography, Handy published a subsequent book on African American musicians entitled Unsung Americans Sung, which was published in 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
In this time period, he lived on Strivers Row in Harlem. An accidental fall from a subway platform in 1943 resulted in his blindness. Following the death of his first wife, he remarried in 1954 at age 80 to his secretary Irma Louise Logan, who he frequently said had become his eyes.
In 1955 he suffered a stroke and became confined to a wheelchair. Over 800 people attended his 84th birthday party at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
On March 28, 1958, W. C. Handy succumbed to acute bronchial pneumonia and died. Over 25,000 people attended his funeral in Harlems Abyssinian Baptist Church. Over 150,000 people gathered in the streets near the church to pay their respects.
He is buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery in Bronx, New York.

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