Biography
W.C. Handy earned the title “Father of the Blues” by securing copyrights on longstanding rural Southern Black melodies and composing fresh material that carried the genre into mainstream popular music across the 1910s and 1920s. Equally important, his formal training allowed him to conduct an unusually wide range of ensembles, among them string quartets, brass bands, and a traveling minstrel company.
Born William Christopher Handy in Florence, Alabama, in 1873, he spent his childhood inside a log cabin constructed by his grandfather, a local minister whose son also served the church. Music surfaced early; Handy studied cornet at a neighborhood barbershop. After finishing school near the head of his class, he accepted a teaching post in Birmingham in 1893, yet soon resigned because of meager pay and took a factory position instead.
He organized the Lauzetta Quartet and journeyed with it to the World’s Fair in Chicago. Although the group toured, Handy resumed classroom duties, this time at Huntsville Normal School, later renamed Alabama A&M. By 1896 he was again on the road, spending three years as cornetist with Mahara’s Minstrels and performing from Oklahoma westward to Cuba. Near the turn of the century he returned to Huntsville Normal as band director from 1900 to 1902. Following one more brief engagement with Mahara’s Minstrels—this time through the Northwest—he relocated to Clarksdale to lead the Colored Knights of Pythias, whose audiences included both Black and white listeners. Six years in that Delta town deepened his acquaintance with blues; in 1903, while awaiting a train in Tutwiler, he overheard a guitarist sliding a knife along the strings and chanting about the crossing of two railroads, an encounter he later described as “the weirdest music I’d ever heard.” The sound remained with him and eventually inspired the copyrighted “Yellow Dog Blues.”
By 1909 Handy had settled in Memphis and issued his first published piece, “Mr. Crump.” Although Edward H. “Boss” Crump, the city’s powerful mayoral candidate, cared little for music, an orchestra under Handy’s direction supplied entertainment at campaign events, and the number—despite pointed lyrics aimed at Crump—gained local renown. Three years afterward, re-lyricized by George Norton, it appeared as “The Memphis Blues,” a copyright Handy regrettably sold for one hundred dollars. He soon established Pace & Handy Music Co. with Harry Pace on Beale Street, the city’s thriving entertainment corridor. In 1914 he released his most celebrated composition, “The St. Louis Blues,” along with “Yellow Dog Blues.” “Beale Street Blues” followed in 1916, and in September 1917 Handy’s Orchestra of Memphis, twelve musicians strong, recorded several sides for Columbia in New York.
Handy transferred the entire enterprise to New York in 1918, founding Handy Brothers Music Company, Inc. on Broadway. Although later hits never matched the impact of his mid-1910s works, the move proved timely; Mamie Smith’s August 1920 recording of Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues” ignited a commercial sensation comparable to the earlier ragtime craze. Over time Handy secured copyrights for more than 150 secular and sacred pieces, while his orchestra continued to record for Paramount and OKeh. In 1926 he compiled Blues: An Anthology, pairing sheet music of major blues numbers with commentary on their origins. Sight began to fail in the late 1920s, yet he remained active, issuing Negro Authors and Composers of the United States in 1935, W.C. Handy’s Collection of Negro Spirituals in 1938, and Unsung Americans Sung in 1944. His autobiography, Father of the Blues, appeared in 1941. Complete blindness followed a severe fall in 1943. Handy remarried in 1954, his first wife Elizabeth having died in 1937; four years later Nat King Cole portrayed him in the film St. Louis Blues. Handy himself succumbed to pneumonia in March 1958. His influence endures through a Memphis park on Beale Street that bears his name and through the W.C. Handy Blues Awards, regarded as the foremost honors in the field.
Born William Christopher Handy in Florence, Alabama, in 1873, he spent his childhood inside a log cabin constructed by his grandfather, a local minister whose son also served the church. Music surfaced early; Handy studied cornet at a neighborhood barbershop. After finishing school near the head of his class, he accepted a teaching post in Birmingham in 1893, yet soon resigned because of meager pay and took a factory position instead.
He organized the Lauzetta Quartet and journeyed with it to the World’s Fair in Chicago. Although the group toured, Handy resumed classroom duties, this time at Huntsville Normal School, later renamed Alabama A&M. By 1896 he was again on the road, spending three years as cornetist with Mahara’s Minstrels and performing from Oklahoma westward to Cuba. Near the turn of the century he returned to Huntsville Normal as band director from 1900 to 1902. Following one more brief engagement with Mahara’s Minstrels—this time through the Northwest—he relocated to Clarksdale to lead the Colored Knights of Pythias, whose audiences included both Black and white listeners. Six years in that Delta town deepened his acquaintance with blues; in 1903, while awaiting a train in Tutwiler, he overheard a guitarist sliding a knife along the strings and chanting about the crossing of two railroads, an encounter he later described as “the weirdest music I’d ever heard.” The sound remained with him and eventually inspired the copyrighted “Yellow Dog Blues.”
By 1909 Handy had settled in Memphis and issued his first published piece, “Mr. Crump.” Although Edward H. “Boss” Crump, the city’s powerful mayoral candidate, cared little for music, an orchestra under Handy’s direction supplied entertainment at campaign events, and the number—despite pointed lyrics aimed at Crump—gained local renown. Three years afterward, re-lyricized by George Norton, it appeared as “The Memphis Blues,” a copyright Handy regrettably sold for one hundred dollars. He soon established Pace & Handy Music Co. with Harry Pace on Beale Street, the city’s thriving entertainment corridor. In 1914 he released his most celebrated composition, “The St. Louis Blues,” along with “Yellow Dog Blues.” “Beale Street Blues” followed in 1916, and in September 1917 Handy’s Orchestra of Memphis, twelve musicians strong, recorded several sides for Columbia in New York.
Handy transferred the entire enterprise to New York in 1918, founding Handy Brothers Music Company, Inc. on Broadway. Although later hits never matched the impact of his mid-1910s works, the move proved timely; Mamie Smith’s August 1920 recording of Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues” ignited a commercial sensation comparable to the earlier ragtime craze. Over time Handy secured copyrights for more than 150 secular and sacred pieces, while his orchestra continued to record for Paramount and OKeh. In 1926 he compiled Blues: An Anthology, pairing sheet music of major blues numbers with commentary on their origins. Sight began to fail in the late 1920s, yet he remained active, issuing Negro Authors and Composers of the United States in 1935, W.C. Handy’s Collection of Negro Spirituals in 1938, and Unsung Americans Sung in 1944. His autobiography, Father of the Blues, appeared in 1941. Complete blindness followed a severe fall in 1943. Handy remarried in 1954, his first wife Elizabeth having died in 1937; four years later Nat King Cole portrayed him in the film St. Louis Blues. Handy himself succumbed to pneumonia in March 1958. His influence endures through a Memphis park on Beale Street that bears his name and through the W.C. Handy Blues Awards, regarded as the foremost honors in the field.
Albums
Singles
