W.C. Handy, 19 year old band man. |
William
Christopher Handy was
born on November 16, 1873 in a log cabin in Florence, Alabama. It
is safe to say that W.C. Handy almost single handedly changed the face and
sound of virtually every genre of popular American music by
introducing—and some say inventing—the blues as a performer, band
leader, folklorist, composer, publisher and business man, mentor, and
author. His cultural importance would be almost impossible to
underestimate.
Handy’s
father was a respected African Methodist Episcopal minister.
Although he had a close relationship with his soon, his strong religious
beliefs led him to oppose the early interest that the boy showed in “shameless,
worldly” music. Using money he saved doing odd jobs while serving
informal apprenticeships with local Black craftsmen, Handy bought a
guitar, the popular instrument of the “field pickers” and laborers. His
father ordered him to return the instrument and enrolled him in organ classes
instead so that he could play sacred music.
Not to be
deterred Handy obtained a coronet and learned to play it by practicing
in woods and barns. He joined one of the popular Black brass bands of the
era and was soon playing across Alabama on weekends. During the week he
continued to work at various often back breaking jobs as a laborer. He
picked up, and with a remarkable memory, retained many of the field chants,
call and response songs, and incidental music with which his fellows past the
time. He noted while shoveling coal into the boiler of a local factory
that his fellows would make complex and unusual rhythms by banging their
shovels and scraping them on the furnace door to create tones.
Handy
quit an unsuccessful stint as a teacher because he could make more money in the
steel mills and factories of Bessemer. In his spare time, he
organized first a string band and then the Lauzetta Quartet which began
to get local attention. Determined to quit his day job Handy and the
Quartet made their way to Chicago playing barrel houses and juke joints
along the way hoping to find work in or around the Columbian Exhibition.
He got to the city only to learn that construction delays had pushed the
opening back a full year to 1893. The band then went to St. Louis
and finally to Evansville, Indiana, where the band broke up. But
along the way Handy and his group were the first to play blues, or blues like
music in northern commercial venues.
After
returning to Chicago to play cornet when the Fair did open, Handy found steady
employment with a successful Evansville based touring band with which he played
for a few years. Along the way he met his wife Elizabeth Price in Henderson,
Kentucky and married her in 1896. His career got a boost the same
year when the 23 year old musician got a job a band leader with Mahara’s
Minstrels, a touring show of black performers—as opposed to the blackface
shows of white performers. He toured with the troupe from Chicago,
through Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida
on to Cuba for the princely sum of $6 a week.
In 1900
Handy and his wife settled in Huntsville, near his boyhood home of
Florence. She gave birth to the first of six children, and he found a job as professor of music and band director at the Alabama
Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes, one of only two school of
higher education for Blacks in Alabama, the other being Tuskegee Institute.
College President William Hooper Councill was glad to find a musician of
Handy’s stature who could not only read and notate music, but demonstrated an
advanced grasp of musical theory. Despite the prestige of the appointment
and his wife’s hope for a stable home life, Handy soon clashed with Councill
over the introduction of Black musical idiom into the curriculum and the
programs of the Band. Councill thought the music “primitive and degrading”
and thought that Blacks would elevate themselves in the eyes of the White
establishment by learning and performing European classical music.
There was also the consideration that life as a touring musician simply paid
better. After two years, Handy quit the school and resumed touring with Mahara’s
Minstrels.
In 1903
Handy took a job as director of the Knights of Pythias—a Black band not
to be confused with the fraternal organization—which toured the South
from its base in Clarksville, Mississippi. He toured with the band
for six years, all the while noting and collecting folk songs and styles he
heard along the way. One of his most important discoveries was hearing a
field hand use a knife blade as a slide on his guitar in the “Hawaiian stile” to
produce remarkable “bent notes.” Noting that he was playing in “G”, a key
seldom used in European music, Handy picked out the blue notes—flat
thirds and sevenths that became the basis of the blues sound. From a
string band that took the stage with him during a 1905 performance in Cleveland,
Mississippi he picked up on a heavily rhythmic, repeating refrain that
seemed to be “…haunted by the cane rows and fields.” Handy began to add
these elements to the songs that he was writing.
In 1909
Handy and his band relocated to Memphis, Tennessee the informal capital
of the Mississippi Delta. He found a receptive home for his new
sound in the joints and dives of Beale Street. That year he was
paid a few dollars to compose a campaign song form Memphis mayoral candidate Edward
Crump. It must have been a hell of a song because Crump went on to
the longtime mayor and the boss of a notorious political machine. Handy
liked the basic tune of the little march ditty, but reworked with those blue
notes, field rhythms, and call and response structure. The result
was the Memphis Blues, which soon became wildly popular in the
region. In 1912 he sold the publishing rights of the song for $100. The
sheet music became a huge hit and introduced the “twelve-bar blues” to parlors
all over the country. In New York the vaudeville dancers Verne
and Irene Castle devised a new dance, the Fox Trot to take
advantage of the song’s rapid pace and shifting, irregular rhythms.
Several early recordings were made, usually as band instrumentals.
W.C. Handy's Memphis Orchestra, 1918 |
By 1914 at
the age of 40, Handy was actually becoming famous as a composer. Although
at first he sometimes struggled to get his work published and was dissatisfied
with the low prices paid for signing away all rights to his work, the songs
were spreading rapidly among both his Black southern audience and by White
singers and performers. And other composers were quick to pick up on
Handy’s style and techniques. The blues were rapidly becoming a
recognized genre. To take advantage of this Handy wrote furiously and
toured more successfully with his band, now renamed the W. C. Handy Memphis
Orchestra. Within a few years he had produced his most famous songs
including Beale Street Blues and St. Louis Blues.
Tired of
seeing his publishing profits enrich others, Handy became his own publisher in
association with Harry H. Pace, a young graduate of Atlanta University and a student of W. E.
B. Dubois. In 1917 they decided to move the company to New York
City to take advantage of the ability to sell the songs to orchestras,
theater, vaudeville, and the growing recording industry.
Sometimes he
was shocked and unsure of the directions his compositions were taking.
1917 was also the year that the Original Dixieland Jass Band, a
white New Orleans band, made what is regarded to be the very first jazz
record, introducing jazz music to a wide segment of the American public.
Soon many other bands were recording, including the great early black bands
like the one led by King Oliver. The New Orleans jazzmen were
quick to use Handy’s blues compositions as the basis for their
improvisations. Initially, Handy disapproved fearing that the core of the
folk-rooted music had been corrupted. But he grew to appreciate, over
time, this new thing called jazz as a natural outgrowth of his work.
Handy was also surprised by how quickly white artists,
particularly band leaders looking for novelty
songs and new dance music, were picking up the music and spreading it
widely. Al Bernard was a young white singer whose soft southern
accent was perfect for Handy’s music. He took the young man to Thomas
Edison who recorded Bernard singing several of Handy’s creations.
When Bernard began writing his own blues, Handy was glad to publish the songs
including a tune called Shake, Rattle and Roll, not to be
confused by the later blues and rock and roll song recorded by Big
Joe Turner and Bill Haley and the Comets. Handy also published
songs by Madelyn Sheppard and Annelu Burns, two “young white
girls from Selma” The catalog of songs by Handy, other Black
composers as well as the white-aping-black pieces became central to the
emerging repertoire for black artists on record and on the segregated
vaudeville circuit.
By 1919 Handy recognized that Edison was not the best
possible company with which to place his songs. Not only was Edison
personally musically tone deaf, he disapproved of the “wild new styles” and
instructed his artists to record songs “straight.” He also notoriously
did not pay well and his business
methods and distribution models
were passé. That year Handy
signed with Victor, the emerging titan
of the recording industry. On that label Joe Smith’s recording of Yellow
Dog Blues became one of the first hit records in a modern sense of
being mass produced and nationally marketed.
In 1920 Mamie Smith recorded Crazy Blues,
a tune written by Perry Bradford but published and promoted by
Handy. The success of that record “set off a craze for Colored girl blues singers.”
Unfortunately many of these singers did not record from Handy’s catalog sending
his business into a tail spin. When Harry Pace left the company to set up
his own publishing business and Black Swan Records, he took much of
Handy’s business with him. Handy’s own attempt to launch a record label
in the mid-1920’s, the Handy Record Company, was less successful than
the company launched by his former partner. Despite remaining on friendly
terms with Pace, Handy complained that people thought he associated with Black
Swan.
Handy’s
reputation got a big boost in 1925 when Columbia Records released Bessie
Smith singing St. Louis Blues with accompaniment by Louis
Armstrong. It became the definitive blues recording of the decade and
made Smith a huge star. In 1928 Handy collaborated with director Kenneth
W. Adams to produce a dramatic
short film with Smith singing the St. Louis Blues. The film was so
successful that it continued to be run in Black movie houses for four years.
The Twenties
also saw Handy establish himself as a scholar and folklorist of the
blues. In 1926 he published Blues: An Anthology—Complete
Words and Music of 53 Great Songs, the first comprehensive study of the
genre. Not only did he preserve the words and music, he gave detailed
descriptions of how he found songs in the field and how he incorporated themes,
shouts, rhythms, and other elements into his own “composed” songs. In
doing so he acknowledged a great cultural debt.
In the late 1920’s blues recordings and music from the
Delta itself, where traditional musicians had adopted many of Handy’s
sophisticated innovations, were also beginning to percolate into White Hillbilly
music with recordings by Jimmie
Rodgers (the Mississippi Blue Yodeler) and other performers.
It became foundational to modern country music. By the 1950’s
Handy would live long enough to see his beloved rural southern blues link with
blues tinged country music in his own town of Memphis to help create
modern rock and roll.
Elder statesman of blues, godfather of jazz |
Handy went on to write four more books, considered indispensable
classics to this day: the Book of Negro Spirituals, Father
of the Blues: An Autobiography, Unsung Americans Sing, and Negro
Authors and Composers of the United States. He was much honored
in the rest of his life and sometimes took to the stage with his old cornet for
special appearances with the likes of Cab Callaway. He was honored
when Memphis named a street for him and preserved his old home there as a
museum.
In 1943 Handy was blinded in a fall in the New York
Subway. He was fully conscious of the irony of becoming like the
blind country blues singers he encountered at the turn of the Century
supporting themselves with handouts for their shouts and moans. After his
first wife died in 1947 he married his long time secretary, who had become his
“eyes and ears.” He suffered a stroke in 1955 but felt well enough to
attend an 84th birthday party a year later at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel
attended by 800 admirers including many of the greatest names in music.
Handy died of pneumonia on March 28, 1958 in New
York City. 25,000 tried to attend his funeral at Adam Clayton Powel’s
Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Hundreds of others lined
the streets to watch the hearse carry his body to Woodlawn Cemetery in
the Bronx.
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