Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,817

This is the grave of W.C. Handy.

Born in 1873 in Florence, Alabama, William Christopher Handy grew up in the poor but respectable Black community there. His father was a minister at a small AME church. Handy had a strict religious upbringing and of the kind that thought music was the devil. American protestantism has always been divided on this issue, regardless of race. Some think music is great if it is sacred music, others think all instruments are the work of Satan. Well, Handy’s parents were of the latter. Handy himself though never took any of that too seriously. He saved up money and bought himself a guitar, horrifying his father. He had to take it back, but compromising on the issue, his father bought him organ lessons, figuring that could be useful in a church setting. But that still didn’t stop him and he picked up a cornet on the side and kept it from his parents.

None of this rebellion meant that Handy wasn’t religious; in fact, he held very tightly to religion, but he just loved music too much to buy into what his father was selling. He worked from the time he was young, as was normal in poor communities. He just couldn’t escape music. One of the jobs Black men could get in the area was shoveling coal into furnaces at local factories. He walked into a whole other musical tradition there, where the workers woudl bang their shovels in unison. This influenced Handy deeply as he grew up and started making music professionally. As he would later state, “In this way, and from these materials, they set the mood for what we now call Blues.”

Now, Handy intended to be a professional. He went to Birmingham in 1892 to take a teaching exam. Passing it, he got a job at the school that is today Alabama A&M. But he decided the pay was so low that he bailed on it. In fact, he got a job at a pipe factory instead, serving the Bessemer steel industry. He created little bands that he could tour on if they worked along the way and spent quite a bit of the 1890s doing so, often through the Midwest. He was good at basically all parts of music–playing of course, but also composing, arranging, and managing other musicians. So he became the head of Mahara’s Colored Minstrels and they toured for three years in the mid-1890s, going as far as Cuba and Mexico.

Alabama A&M approached Handy again in 1900 for work and this time he took it, so he became a professor there for a couple of years. He wasn’t happy though. The pay still sucked and he also did not like the whitening aspect of the education there, teaching only European classical music as more civilized. He quit in 1902 and started another band, based out of Clarksdale, Mississippi. He would live there for the rest of the first decade of the 20th century and while there, he engaged deeply in the guitar and banjo and piano based folk music that was becoming what today we call the blues.

Being a very good musician with a good eye for business, Handy decided to take this music and turn it into something more commercial. So he moved to Memphis in 1909 and started doing his version of this music on Beale Street. He reworked an old political song as “The Memphis Blues” and sold the rights for its sheet music (which is how musicians made money back then). It sold well and became the inspiration for the Foxtrot when it reached New York. He did other hits along these lines. Because he had both actual musical training and a deep knowledge of Black folk music, plus the ambition to put it all together, Handy turned out a lot of other songs along these lines, creating some of the standard norms of recorded blues. He also knew how to make money off these songs and so published them the right way, with all the copyrights taken care of and such. He hired the banker Harry Pace, a friend of W.E.B. DuBois to run the business side of his work, for example. Not too many musicians had that kind of wherewithal.

Handy moved to New York City in 1917 and was wealthy enough to rent offices on Times Square. “Memphis Blues,” “St. Louis Blues,” “Beale Street Blues” and other Handy songs were becoming standards. Handy himself disliked jazz, but jazz bands often recorded his works in the early years of recordings and he of course made money that he very much did like. He had his own publishing company and he published other Black writers songs as well, in addition to adaptation of folk songs. Interestingly, Handy had a lot more success getting white bands to cover his songs than Black bands. Evidently, this had to do with Black bands wanting to focus on current hits and white bands looking for novelty songs. I am sure there is a racial aspect to that.

Handy was so well connected that when talkie films came out, he and the director Dudley Murphy collaborated on the film St. Louis Blues, starring Bessie Smith. Hearing that voice was very much a new experience for most of the folks who saw the picture! Handy became well known around the world. Maurice Ravel wrote Violin Sonata No. 2 inspired by him and the music he had published. He was that influential in part because he was such a public figure, writing about the music, being a man about New York, promoting other artists. In 1926, he published Blues: An Anthology—Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs, explaining the music and providing the tunes to these classic songs while explaining their roots in the South. He published other works after this, including Unsung Americans Sung, Book of Negro Spirituals, and Negro Authors and Composers of the United States.

In his later years, Handy lost his sight. That happened after he fell off a subway platform in 1943. But he remained musically active. He moved to Yonkers after the accident. But he went to his publishing office, played some, and remained mostly the man he was before the accident. He did not slow down until a 1955 stroke forced him into a wheelchair. He died in 1958. 25,000 people attended his funeral. That same year, he got his own biopic (which is highly fictionalized), called St. Louis Blues, and starring Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt, and Ruby Dee.

W.C. Handy is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other great artists of early recorded Black music, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Bessie Smith is in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania and Ma Rainey is in Columbus, Georgia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.