W.C. Handy sold the rights to “The Memphis Blues” for $100. The 1912 sheet music went on to introduce his 12-bar blues style to the country, and two years later he wrote “Saint Louis Blues,” a song later nicknamed “the jazzman’s Hamlet.” Handy, who called himself the Father of the Blues, was born 153 years ago this Monday, on November 16, 1873, in a log cabin in Florence, Alabama.
He did not invent the blues, and he never claimed the music came from nowhere. His real achievement was getting it onto paper. Handy ranked among the earliest composers to put blues songs into print, and that carried a regional Delta sound to a national audience.
A guitar his father called sinful
Handy’s father, a pastor, believed musical instruments were tools of the devil. The boy saved up for his first guitar by picking berries and nuts and making lye soap. His father demanded to know, “What possessed you to bring a sinful thing like that into our Christian home?” and ordered it returned, though he did arrange organ lessons. Those faded fast. Handy switched to cornet, joining a local band in secret.
His ear was tuned early. Working on a shovel crew at the McNabb furnace, he and the other men beat out rhythms on hard surfaces that he said were “better to us than the music of a martial drum corps.”
Learning the blues on the road
At 23 Handy became bandmaster of Mahara’s Colored Minstrels, touring as far as Cuba, Mexico and Canada on $6 a week. In 1903, while running a band in Clarksdale, Mississippi, he waited for a train in Tutwiler and heard a man playing steel guitar with a knife as a slide. Around 1905, at a dance in Cleveland, Mississippi, a local trio played music he called “haunting,” and he noticed how the crowd responded.
He borrowed his lyric form from a song he heard Phil Jones sing, then reshaped it. In his own words: “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.”
From a campaign song to a standard
“The Memphis Blues” began in 1909 as a campaign tune for Edward Crump, who won that year’s Memphis mayoral race, and Handy later retitled it. “Saint Louis Blues” followed in 1914, in G major, a key he took from Mississippi square dances. He described its debut: “I tricked the dancers by arranging a tango introduction, breaking abruptly into a low-down blues.”
A short timeline of the Father of the Blues
- 1873: Born November 16 in Florence, Alabama.
- 1909: Moves his band to Beale Street in Memphis and writes the tune that becomes “The Memphis Blues.”
- 1912: “The Memphis Blues” sheet music is published.
- 1914: “Saint Louis Blues” debuts.
- 1917: Moves his publishing business to Times Square in New York.
- 1926: Publishes Blues: An Anthology, with 53 songs.
- 1941: Publishes his autobiography, Father of the Blues.
- 1969: Appears on a US commemorative stamp.
Measured against that timeline, it took Handy just five years, from a 1909 campaign song to “Saint Louis Blues” in 1914, to write the two pieces that made his name. By 1917 his three biggest songs, including “Beale Street Blues,” were all in print.
Beale Street itself was called Beale Avenue until his song made the name famous enough to change it. Memphis opened Handy Park there in 1931, and until 2006 the Blues Music Award carried his name as the W.C. Handy Award. For more birthdays from music history this season, read about Charlie Daniels at 90 and his Bob Dylan sessions and Rory Gallagher’s 1973 album Tattoo. Florence still hosts an annual W.C. Handy Music Festival in his honor.
Further reading
Image: Brian Stansberry, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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