W. C. Handy

W. C. Handy

Handy in July 1941, photographed by
Carl Van Vechten
Background information
Birth name William Christopher Handy
Born (1873-11-16)November 16, 1873
Florence, Alabama, United States
Origin Memphis, Tennessee, United States
Died March 28, 1958(1958-03-28) (aged 84)
New York City
Genres Blues, jazz
Occupation(s) Musician, bandleader, teacher
Instruments Trumpet
Years active 1893–1948

William Christopher Handy (November 16, 1873 – March 28, 1958) was an American composer and musician,[1] known as the "Father of the Blues".[2]

Handy was one of the most influential American songwriters. He was one of many musicians who played the distinctively American blues music, and he is credited with giving it its contemporary form. Handy did not create the blues genre and was not the first to publish music in the blues form, but he took the blues from a regional music style (Delta blues) with a limited audience to one of the dominant national forces in American music.

Handy was an educated musician who used elements of folk music in his compositions. He was scrupulous in documenting the sources of his works, which frequently combined stylistic influences from various performers.

Early life

Handy at age 19

Handy was born in Florence, Alabama, the son of Elizabeth Brewer and Charles Barnard Handy. His father was the pastor of a small church in Guntersville, a 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 Handy's birth has been preserved near downtown Florence.

Growing up he apprenticed in carpentry, shoemaking and plastering.

Handy was deeply religious, and his musical style was influenced by the church music he sang and played as a youth. It was also influenced by the sounds of the natural world. He cited as inspiration the sounds of "whippoorwills, bats and hoot owls and their outlandish noises", the sound of Cypress Creek washing on the fringes of the woodland, and "the music of every songbird and all the symphonies of their unpremeditated art".

Handy's father believed that musical instruments were tools of the devil.[3] Without his parents' permission, Handy bought his first guitar, which he had seen in a local shop window and secretly saved for by picking berries and nuts and making lye soap. Upon seeing the guitar, his father asked him, "What possessed you to bring a sinful thing like that into our Christian home?" and ordered him to "take it back where it came from", but he also arranged for his son to take organ lessons. The organ lessons did not last long, but Handy moved on to learn to play the cornet. He joined a local 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.

Musical development

Handy, ca. 1900, director of the Alabama Agriculture & Mechanical College Band

He worked on a "shovel brigade" at the McNabb furnace and described the music made by the workers as they beat shovels, altering the tone while thrusting and withdrawing the metal part against the iron buggies to pass the time while waiting for the overfilled furnace to digest its ore. "With a dozen men participating, the effect was sometimes remarkable...It was better to us than the music of a martial drum corps, and our rhythms were far more complicated."[4] He wrote, "Southern Negroes sang about everything....They accompany themselves on anything from which they can extract a musical sound or rhythmical effect..." He would later reflect that "In this way, and from these materials, they set the mood for what we now call blues".[5]

In September 1892, Handy travelled to Birmingham, Alabama, to take a teaching exam, which he passed easily, and gained a teaching job in the city. Learning that it paid poorly, he quit the position and found employment at a pipe works plant in nearby Bessemer.

In his time off from his job, he organized a small string orchestra and taught musicians how to read music. He later organized the Lauzetta Quartet. When the group read about the upcoming World's Fair in Chicago, they decided to attend. To pay their way, they performed odd jobs along the way. They arrived in Chicago only to learn that the World's Fair had been postponed for a year. Next they headed to St. Louis, Missouri, but found working conditions were bad.

After the quartet disbanded, Handy went to Evansville, Indiana. He played the cornet in the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. In Evansville, Handy joined a successful band that performed throughout the neighboring cities and states. His musical endeavors were varied: he sang first tenor in a minstrel show, worked as a band director, choral director, cornetist and trumpeter.

At the age of 23, Handy became the bandmaster of Mahara's Colored Minstrels. In a three-year tour, they traveled to Chicago, throughout Texas and Oklahoma, to Tennessee, Georgia and Florida, and on to Cuba. Handy was paid a salary of $6 per week. Returning from Cuba, the band traveled north through Alabama, where they stopped to perform in Huntsville. Weary of life on the road, he and his wife, Elizabeth, decided to stay with relatives in his nearby hometown of Florence.

Marriage and family

Bronze statue of Handy in Handy Park, Beale Street, Memphis, Tennessee

In 1896, while performing at a barbecue in Henderson, Kentucky, Handy met Elizabeth Price. They married on July 19, 1896. She gave birth to Lucille, the first of their six children, on June 29, 1900, after they had settled in Florence.

Teaching music

Around that time, William Hooper Councill, the president of the Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes (AAMC) (now Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University), in Normal, Alabama, recruited Handy to teach music at the college. Handy became a faculty member in September 1900 and taught through much of 1902.

His enthusiasm for the distinctive style of uniquely American music, then often considered inferior to European classical music, was part of his development. He was disheartened to discover that the college emphasized teaching European music considered to be "classical". Handy felt he was underpaid and could make more money touring with a minstrel group.

Studying the blues

Footstone of Handy's grave in Woodlawn Cemetery

In 1902 Handy traveled throughout Mississippi, listening to various styles of black popular music. The state was mostly rural, and music was part of the culture, especially in cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta. Musicians usually played the guitar or banjo or, to a much lesser extent, piano. Handy's remarkable memory enabled him to recall and transcribe the music heard in his travels.

After a dispute with AAMC President Councill, Handy resigned his teaching position to rejoin the Mahara Minstrels and tour the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. In 1903 he became the director of a black band organized by the Knights of Pythias, located in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Handy and his family lived there for six years. In 1903, while waiting for a train in Tutwiler, in the Mississippi Delta, Handy had the following experience:

A lean loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept... As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars....The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.[5][6]

About 1905, while playing a dance in Cleveland, Mississippi, Handy was given a note asking for "our native music".[7] He played an old-time Southern melody, but was asked if a local colored band could play a few numbers. Three young men with a battered guitar, mandolin, and a worn-out bass took the stage.[8] [9]

They struck up one of those over and over strains that seem to have no beginning and certainly no ending at all. The strumming attained a disturbing monotony, but on and on it went, a kind of stuff associated with [sugar] cane rows and levee camps. Thump-thump-thump went their feet on the floor. It was not really annoying or unpleasant. Perhaps "haunting" is the better word.[8][10]

Handy noted square dancing by Mississippi blacks with "one of their own calling the figures, and crooning all of his calls in the key of G."[11] He remembered this when deciding on the key of "Saint Louis Blues".

It was the memory of that old gent who called figures for the Kentucky breakdown—the one who everlastingly pitched his tones in the key of G and moaned the calls like a presiding elder preaching at a revival meeting. Ah, there was my key – I'd do the song in G.[12]

In describing "blind singers and footloose bards" around Clarksdale, Handy wrote, "surrounded by crowds of country folks, they would pour their hearts out in song ... They earned their living by selling their own songs—'ballets,' as they called them—and I'm ready to say in their behalf that seldom did their creations lack imagination."[13]

Popularity, fame and business

In 1909 Handy and his band moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where they played in clubs on Beale Street. The genesis of his "Memphis Blues" was a campaign song written for Edward Crump, a successful Memphis mayoral candidate in 1909 (and future political boss). Handy later rewrote the tune and changed its name from "Mr. Crump" to "Memphis Blues."

Handy's first popular success, "Memphis Blues", recorded by Victor Military Band, July 15, 1914

The 1912 publication of the sheet music of his "Memphis Blues" introduced his style of 12-bar blues; it was credited as the inspiration for the foxtrot dance step by Vernon and Irene Castle, a New York dance team. Some consider it to be the first blues song. Handy sold the rights to the song for US$100. By 1914, when he was 40, he had established his musical style, his popularity had greatly increased, and he was a prolific composer.

Handy wrote about using folk songs:

The primitive southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same. Till then, however, I had never heard this slur used by a more sophisticated Negro, or by any white man. I tried to convey this effect... by introducing flat thirds and sevenths (now called blue notes) into my song, although its prevailing key was major..., and I carried this device into my melody as well... This was a distinct departure, but as it turned out, it touched the spot.[14]
Handy (back row, center, holding trumpet) with his 1918 Memphis Orchestra
The three-line structure I employed in my lyric was suggested by a song I heard Phil Jones sing in Evansville ... While I took the three-line stanza as a model for my lyric, I found its repetition too monotonous ... 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.[15]

Regarding the "three-chord basic harmonic structure" of the blues, Handy wrote that the "(tonic, subdominant, dominant seventh) was that already used by Negro roustabouts, honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of the underprivileged but undaunted class from Missouri to the Gulf, and had become a common medium through which any such individual might express his personal feeling in a sort of musical soliloquy."[14] He noted,

In the folk blues the singer fills up occasional gaps with words like 'Oh, lawdy' or 'Oh, baby' and the like. This meant that in writing a melody to be sung in the blues manner one would have to provide gaps or waits.[16]

Writing about the first time "Saint Louis Blues" was played, in 1914, Handy said,

The one-step and other dances had been done to the tempo of Memphis Blues.... When St Louis Blues was written the tango was in vogue. I tricked the dancers by arranging a tango introduction, breaking abruptly into a low-down blues. My eyes swept the floor anxiously, then suddenly I saw lightning strike. The dancers seemed electrified. Something within them came suddenly to life. An instinct that wanted so much to live, to fling its arms to spread joy, took them by the heels.[17]

His published musical works were groundbreaking because of his ethnicity, and he was among the first blacks to achieve economic success from publishing. In 1912, Handy met Harry H. Pace at the Solvent Savings Bank in Memphis. Pace was the valedictorian of his graduating class at Atlanta University and a student of W. E. B. Du Bois. By the time of their meeting, Pace had already demonstrated a strong understanding of business. He earned his reputation by recreating failing businesses. Handy liked him, and Pace later became the manager of Pace and Handy Sheet Music.

W. C. Handy Place in Yonkers, New York

While in New York City, Handy wrote:

I was under the impression that these Negro musicians would jump at the chance to patronize one of their own publishers. They didn't... The Negro musicians simply played the hits of the day...They followed the parade. Many white bands and orchestra leaders, on the other hand, were on the alert for novelties. They were therefore the ones most ready to introduce our numbers. [But] Negro vaudeville artists...wanted songs that would not conflict with white acts on the bill. The result was that these performers became our most effective pluggers.[18]

In 1917, he and his publishing business moved to New York City, where he had offices in the Gaiety Theatre office building in Times Square.[19] By the end of that year, his most successful songs had been published: "Memphis Blues", "Beale Street Blues", and "Saint Louis Blues". That year the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a white New Orleans jazz ensemble, had recorded the first jazz record, introducing the style to a wide segment of the American public. Handy initially had little fondness for this new form, jazz, but bands dove into his repertoire with enthusiasm, making many of them jazz standards.

Handy encouraged performers such as Al Bernard, "a young white man" with a "soft Southern accent" who "could sing all my Blues". Handy sent Bernard to Thomas Edison to be recorded, which resulted in "an impressive series of successes for the young artist, successes in which we proudly shared." Handy also published the original "Shake Rattle and Roll" and "Saxophone Blues", both written by Bernard. "Two young white ladies from Selma, Alabama (Madelyn Sheppard and Annelu Burns) contributed the songs "Pickaninny Rose" and "O Saroo", with the music published by Handy's company. These numbers, plus our blues, gave us a reputation as publishers of Negro music."[20]

"Ole Miss Rag", a ragtime composed by Handy and recorded by Handy's Orchestra of Memphis in 1917 in New York

Expecting to make only "another hundred or so" on a third recording of his, "Yellow Dog Blues" (originally entitled "Yellow Dog Rag"[21] ), Handy signed a deal with the Victor company. The Joe Smith[22] recording of this song in 1919 became the best-selling recording of Handy's music to date.[23][24]

Handy tried to interest black women singers in his music but was initially unsuccessful. In 1920 Perry Bradford persuaded Mamie Smith to record two of his non-blues songs, published by Handy, accompanied by a white band: "That Thing Called Love" and "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down". When Bradford's "Crazy Blues" became a hit as recorded by Smith, African-American blues singers became increasingly popular. Handy's business began to decrease because of the competition.[25]

In 1920 Pace amicably dissolved his long-standing partnership with Handy, with whom he also collaborated as lyricist. As 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."[26]

Although Handy's partnership with Pace was dissolved, he continued to operate the publishing company as a family-owned business. He published works of other black composers as well as his own, which included more than 150 sacred compositions and folk song arrangements and about 60 blues compositions. In the 1920s, he founded the Handy Record Company in New York City. Bessie Smith's January 14, 1925, Columbia Records recording of "Saint Louis Blues" with Louis Armstrong is considered by many to be one of the finest recordings of the 1920s. So successful was Handy's "Saint Louis Blues" that in 1929, he and director [Dudley Murphy] collaborated on a RCA motion picture of the same name, which was to be shown before the main attraction. Handy suggested the blues singer Bessie Smith for the starring role, since she had gained widespread popularity with her recording of the song. The picture was filmed in June and was shown in movie houses throughout the United States from 1929 to 1932.

In 1926 Handy wrote and edited a work entitled Blues: An Anthology—Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs. It is probably the first work to attempt to record, analyze and describe the blues as an integral part of the South and the history of the United States. To celebrate the publication of the book and to honor Handy, Small's Paradise in Harlem hosted a party, "Handy Night", on Tuesday October 5, which contained the best of jazz and blues selections provided by the entertainers Adelaide Hall, Lottie Gee, Maude White and Chic Collins.[27]

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 Handy's hallmark, that 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

Handy

Following the publication of his autobiography, Handy published a book on African-American musicians, Unsung Americans Sung (1944). He wrote three other books: Blues: An Anthology: Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs, Book of Negro Spirituals and Negro Authors and Composers of the United States,

During this time, he lived on Strivers' Row in Harlem. He became blind following an accidental fall from a subway platform in 1943. After the death of his first wife, he remarried in 1954, when he was 80. His new bride was his secretary, the former Irma Louise Logan, whom he frequently said had become his eyes.

In 1955, Handy suffered a stroke, after which he began to use a wheelchair. More than eight hundred attended his 84th birthday party at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Death

Handy's grave at Woodlawn Cemetery

On March 28, 1958, Handy died of bronchial pneumonia at Sydenham Hospital in New York City.[28] Over 25,000 people attended his funeral in Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church. Over 150,000 people gathered in the streets near the church to pay their respects. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx.

Compositions

Handy's songs do not always follow the classic 12-bar pattern, often having 8- or 16-bar bridges between 12-bar verses.

Performances and honors

US Postage Stamp 1969

Awards, festivals and memorials

Discography

Handy’s Orchestra Of Memphis

Handy’s Memphis Blues Band

Handy’s Orchestra

Handy’s Sacred Singers

W. C. Handy’s Orchestra

Notes

  1. ↑ Obituary Variety, April 2, 1958, p. 68.
  2. ↑ "On This Day" New York Times. Retrieved 2015-7-3.
  3. ↑ Chenrow, Fred; Chenrow, Carol (1973). Reading Exercises in Black History. Vol. 1. Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania: Continental Press. p. 32. ISBN 08454-2107-7.
  4. ↑ Handy, William Christopher (1941). Father of the Blues. New York: Macmillan. p. 140.
  5. 1 2 Handy (1941). p. 74.
  6. ↑ "Waiting for the Train at Tutwiler", Triple Threat Blues Band, archived 4 June 2011
  7. ↑ "Blues Marker", Waymarking
  8. 1 2 Handy, W. C. (1991). Father of the Blues: An Autobiography. Arna Wendell Bontemps, ed. Da Capo Press. pp. 76, 77.
  9. ↑ Dorthy Scarborough, assisted by Ola Lee Gulledge (1925). On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs. Harvard University Press. p. 269. In recounting the same story to Dorthy Scarborough about 1925, Handy remembered a banjo, guitar, and fiddle.
  10. ↑ Crawford, Richard (2001). America's Musical Life: A History. New York: W. W. Norton. pp. 536, 537.
  11. ↑ Handy (1941). p. 85.
  12. ↑ Handy (1941). p. 119.
  13. ↑ Handy (1941). p. 87.
  14. 1 2 Handy (1941). p. 99.
  15. ↑ Handy (1941). pp. 142–143.
  16. ↑ Handy (1941). p. 120.
  17. ↑ Handy (1941). pp. 99–100.
  18. ↑ Handy (1941). p. 195.
  19. ↑ Bloom, Ken (2003). Broadway: An Encyclopedia. 2nd ed. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-93704-3.
  20. ↑ Handy (1941). pp. 196–197.
  21. ↑ Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Standing at the Crossroads of the Blues. HarperCollins. p. 283. ISBN 0-06-052423-5.
  22. ↑ Joseph C. Smith and His Orchestra
  23. ↑ "Joseph C. Smith and His Orchestra"
  24. ↑ Handy (1941). p. 198.
  25. ↑ Handy (1941). pp. 200–202.
  26. ↑ Handy (1941). p. 202 .
  27. ↑ Pittsburgh Courier, Saturday, October 16, 1926, p. 10. Retrieved September 10, 2014.
  28. ↑ "W.C. Handy, Blues King, Dies at 84". Associated Press. March 28, 1958. Retrieved 2010-12-27. ... composer of 'St Louis Blues' and other jazz classics, died today at Sydenham Hospital. The blind Negro songwriter was taken to the hospital Sunday night ...
  29. ↑ Handy (1991). Father of the Blues: An Autobiography. Arna Wendell Bontemps, ed. Da Capo Press. p. 267. ISBN 0-306-80421-2, ISBN 978-0-306-80421-2.
  30. ↑ Information on Handy's Orchestra of Memphis on redhotjazz.com
  31. ↑ Fargnoli, A. Nicholas; Golay, Michael (2009). Critical Companion to William Faulkner. Infobase Publishing.
  32. ↑ "July 18th – 27th, 2014 – Florence, AL – The Shoals". W.C. Handy Music Festival. Retrieved 2014-06-27.
  33. 1 2 3 Rust, Brian; Shaw, Malcolm (2002). Jazz and Ragtime Records (1897-1942). Littleton, CO: Mainspring Press. p. 723. ISBN 978-0967181929.

References

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