William Christopher Handy (November 16, 1873 - March 28, 1958)
Compositions
1907 In the Cotton Fields of Dixie 1908 Mr. Crump [1] 1912 Memphis Blues 1913 Jogo Blues The Girl You Never Met [1] 1914 St. Louis Blues Yellow Dog [Rag] Blues 1915 Hesitating Blues Joe Turner Blues Shoeboot's Seranade 1916 Hail to the Spirit of Freedom Ole Miss Rag [w/Scott Joplin?] In the Land Where Cotton is King [1] 1917 Beale Street [Blues] Keep the Love Ties Binding     [w/J.P. Schofield] Thinking of Thee [1] The Hooking Cow Blues [w/Douglass     Williams] 1918 The Kaiser's Got The Blues [w/Dorner     Browne] 1919 Though We're Miles Apart [w/J. Russel     Robinson] 1920 Long Gone [2] The Rough Rocky Road 1921 Aunt Hagar's Children Blues [w/J.     Tim Brymn] Loveless Love	1922 John Henry Blues Southside Harlem Blues Aunt Hagar's Blues 1923 Sundown Blues Darktown Reveille [2] [w/Walter Hirsch] 1924 The Basement Blues Atlanta Blues The Chicago Gouge 1926 Golden Brown Blues [w/Langston     Hughes] 1929 Wall Street Blues [w/Margaret Gregory] 1932 Way Down South Where the Blues Began 1934 Opportunity 1935 Vesuvius [3] Friendless Blues [w/Mercedes Gilbert] 1937 East St. Louis Mozambique [w/Arthur Porter] I'm Tellin' You In Front (So You Won't     Feel Hurt Behind) [3] [w/Russell     Wooding] 1940 Black Patti [2] [w/Henry Troy] Remembered [w/Olive Lewis Handy &     Joe Jordan] Finis [3] 1951 The Big Stick Blues March [w/Charles L.     Cooke]    1. w/Harry Pace    2. w/Chris Smith    3. w/Andy Razaf

     Growing up in post-Civil War Alabama, the music of Black America and African heritage surrounded young Will Handy. He was born in a log cabin in Florence, Alabama, to Charles Bernard and Elizabeth Bewer Handy. Mr. Handy was the pastor of a small church near Florence, and had his son apprenticed in carpentry, shoemaking and plastering. After earning a little bit of money on the side, young Will brought home a guitar he had purchased, and his father immediately banned the "sinful thing" from the home. However, his parents were well enough off to get him music instruction, and after some failed organ lessons his first real instrument became the cornet. Much of his true musical desire and even his performance activities remained hidden from his parents.
     In his late teens Handy started touring the South with various troupes and shows. According to him, it was in 1892 in Mississippi that he had his first exposure to Delta Blues. Handy also obtained a teaching certificate in Birmingham, Alabama in 1892, and a teaching job in the same place. Poor wages, however, soon chased him off. His playing travels allowed him to perform at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He eventually took over one of the groups he traveled with in 1896, and built up a repertoire of light classics, cakewalks, and early rags. Most of their travels were in the Mississippi Delta area through the early 1900's. He was married around 1896 to Elizabeth V. Price, and they eventually had several children, including Lucille, Catherine, Elizabeth, William P. and Wyer. In 1900 he and Liz or Lizzie are shown in Alabama, and he lists his profession as musician. He had been traveling throughout the Midwest and South, and even to Cuba, but finally decided to stop the tiresome traveling for a while, settling with relatives back in Florence. This allowed him to teach music for a couple of years at the Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University. The family eventually migrated from Alabama to Mississippi where he taught for another six years, finally finding themselves in Memphis, Tennessee late in the decade.
     Although Handy called himself "the Father of the Blues," he did not invent the blues form. He was at least the third composer to use the term "blues" in a song title, preceded three weeks by Artie Matthews' arrangement of Baby Seals Blues. Handy's first blues piece was first put down in 1908 when he was commissioned to write a campaign song for the mayor of Memphis, Edward H. Crump. The song was published as Mr. Crump and went over well. When the blues was finally acknowledged as a publishable genre in 1912, Handy retooled the piece and published under the name Memphis Blues. This time it included "blue notes" (flatted thirds and sevenths) and a more definitive 12 bar blues section. The publication of this and other early pieces like the train oriented Yellow Dog Blues, started a veritable flood of blues-styled compositions. Mishandling of sales of the Memphis Blues also pushed him into publishing with a new partner, Harry H. Pace, and their firm stayed in business for eight years. (Pace would later leave to form Black Swan Records in 1920 in an effort to facilitate black artists recording black-composed pieces.)
     Handy's new fame put him in the forefront of blues presenters. His band made many recordings of his and other composers' compositions, and he even ran his own blues record label for a while. Even so, he occasionally criticized the format as being a "primitive music" that suffered from "disturbing monotony". But as long as the dollars kept rolling in, he kept on championing the genre. Handy's St. Louis Blues quickly became the standard by which other blues were measured, and his Beale Street Blues with mildly questionable lyrics was recorded by many early blues singers.
     By 1917, Handy, his wife and some of their children were living in Manhattan. On his WWI draft card he refers to himself as a music publisher. On the 1920 census he has changed this to music conductor. In 1926 he published his first book, Blues: An Anthology: Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs. This is considered the first analytical look at the genre, and a groundbreaking effort. In 1930, still in Manhattan, Handy listed himself as the manager of a music office, which could imply either publishing or theatrical, if not both. He had been involved with recording and consulting with early movie shorts that featured blues music, including the famous St. Louis Blues starring hard-living singer Bessie Smith.
     In the 1930's when the playing jobs started to disappear, W.C. Handy wrote his autobiography, Father of the Blues. Three other books also appeared, including a collection of Negro spirituals, Unsung Americans Sing (1944) including sketches of selected race musicians, and Negro Authors and Composers of the United States. On a 1938 Ripley's Believe It Or Not radio program, Handy's role was lauded as not only the father, but the inventor of the blues. This incensed one of it's listeners, Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, who knew better. In a letter that was sent to Ripley and later read on the air, Morton made it clear that it was more likely that HE introduced the blues, not to mention, jazz, to the world, but stopped short of claiming invention rights. In truth, no one man invented the genre, but both certainly spread it throughout the world. While not the originator of the blues, Handy was certainly its most effective spokesperson, and continued to promote the music form and push for its inclusion in the early 1900s American music vernacular.
     In the 1940s the Handys moved to Harlem. Sadly, in 1943, he suffered a fall from a subway platform which resulted in blindness. To compound things, Lizzie died within a few years. He remarried in 1954 to Irma Louis Logan who had been his personal secretary, and who had personally helped him through many of the issues of blindness. In his 80th year in 1955 Handy suffered a debilitating stroke that confined him to a wheelchair. He finally died of acute bronchial pneumonia at 84 years old. That same year a movie of his life, St. Louis Blues, was released starring Nat King Cole as Handy, as well as many other prominent black musicians of the time. His legacy will forever remain with us on a daily basis, as the influence of his blues can be felt and heard in Gospel, Country, R&B, and Rock and Roll music, all truly American music forms.