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W.C. Handy

William Christopher Handy, known as “the father of the blues,” was the first person to notate and publish blues songs, and is recognized for integrating blues elements into ragtime, which was a seminal form of jazz, changing the course of popular music. He wrote over 60 blues, spirituals, and popular tunes, including the perennial blues standard St. Louis Blues. W.C. Handy was born in Florence, Alabama, November 16, 1873, the son of former slaves. His first instrument was the coronet, and he advanced from lessons in a barbershop to studying classical music. While still a teenager Handy began teaching school but left for better paying work in a factory. At the age of twenty, he organized a quartet to play the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, a gathering that attracted other musical luminaries of the time, notably ragtime pianist Scott Joplin. After the fair, Handy toured with various ensembles and taught music at Alabama A&M in Huntsville. He left teaching and joined Mahara's Minstrels in 1896 as a cornetist. Handy toured the country with the group, and quickly became their leader. In 1903, he moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to direct the Colored Knights of Pythias, an entourage that performed for both whites and blacks. During a performance for a white audience, a request was made to "play some of your own music." When the band resumed, the whites shouted that Handy was not honoring their request. During a break, three local black men with stringed instruments took the stage and played a primitive blues that brought an appreciative reaction from the crowd. The crowd's reaction caused the bandleader to reconsider the band's repertoire, noting the strong response that "primitive music" created. In 1903, while waiting for a train at a station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, Handy heard a black musician playing a guitar with a knife. The man was singing about going Where The Southern Crosses The Dog, and Handy recalled "it was the weirdest music I'd ever heard." The man's singing was answered by the crying sound that his guitar made as the knife slid along its metal strings. The influence of rural song forms on the classically trained Handy would find its celebrated outlet in his published work. Handy lived and worked in Clarksdale until 1909, when he moved to another musical hotspot: Memphis. There he published "Mr. Crump" in 1909. This political song for Memphis's mayor remained popular and was covered by Memphis musicians, including Frank Stokes, long after Crump left office.

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Radio

Fats, Hoagy & W.C. Handy: Music Made In America This Week On Riverwalk Jazz

Fats, Hoagy & W.C. Handy: Music Made In America This Week On Riverwalk Jazz

Source: Don Mopsick

This week Riverwalk Jazz explores the rich legacy of three jazz heroes whose work has inspired The Jim Cullum Jazz Band through the years—Fats Waller, Hoagy Carmichael and the work of W.C. Handy known as the “Father of the Blues." Series favorites Vernel Bagneris, Topsy Chapman and Shelly Berg join the band on the stage of Pearl Stable, a century-old limestone horse stable transformed into a state-of-the-art theater at San Antonio’s historic Pearl Brewery. The program is distributed in the ...

Radio

Fats, Hoagy And W.C. Handy This Week On Riverwalk Jazz

Fats, Hoagy And W.C. Handy This Week On Riverwalk Jazz

Source: Don Mopsick

This week Riverwalk Jazz explores the rich legacy of three jazz heroes whose work has inspired The Jim Cullum Jazz Band through the years—Fats Waller, Hoagy Carmichael and the blues-driven work of W.C. Handy. Series favorites Vernel Bagneris, Topsy Chapman and Shelly Berg join the band on the stage of Pearl Stable, a century-old limestone horse stable transformed into a state-of-the-art theater at San Antonio’s historic Pearl Brewery. The program is distributed in the US by Public Radio International, on ...

132

Event

Songs of Hoagy Carmichael, W.C. Handy, Harry Revel/Noble Sissle at 10/13 "Where We Come From"

Songs of Hoagy Carmichael, W.C. Handy, Harry Revel/Noble Sissle at 10/13 "Where We Come From"

Source: Reva Cooper

Kaufman Center and New York Festival of Song (NYFOS, www.nyfos.org) will present Where We Come From on Tuesday October 13, 8 PM at Merkin Concert Hall at Kaufman Center. This concert, which opens NYFOS’s 22nd season, celebrates the festival’s newly formed Artist Council with a musical journey that explores the backgrounds, the birthplaces, and the artistic homes of the cast, a team of highly acclaimed singers, ranging from Russia to Canada, and covering a wide swath of the United States. ...

180

Book / Magazine

Blues Capitalist W. C. Handy

Blues Capitalist W. C. Handy

Source: Michael Ricci

If Beale Street could talk, it would say, Who the hell is the guy depicted in that big statue by the entrance to the park?

W. C. Handy, once so famous as the Father of the Blues that he was memorialized with a bronze monument in Memphis, is not nearly as well known today to people who are not either music scholars or copyright lawyers. It has been 35 years since James Baldwin paid tribute to Handy by employing a ...

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Music Industry

W.C. Handy Said It

W.C. Handy Said It

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

"Then the depression came, and white people suffered the pinch along with their darker brothers. With us, of course, being broke and low-down is an old story. With us there has never been anything else but depression. We have known for years how to laugh under trying circumstances, how to go on living with nothing but song to sustain us. But it took a woeful depression to teach this trick to white America.

“Now there seems to be a much ...

150

Festival

W.C. Handy Music Festival 2008

W.C. Handy Music Festival 2008

Source: All About Jazz

"The Shoals" is a musical mecca in one of America's most isolated, beautiful places, Northwestern Alabama. Jazz great and “Father of the Blues" W.C. Handy hails from this tiny area of majestic waterways and down home living. (It's where Aretha Franklin, Tom Jones, Otis Redding and many others recorded music in the 1960s at FAME Studios. Later rock groups like Leonard Skynard and country musicians Vince Gill and Alabama have recorded there as well.)

To get a true taste of ...

Bob Effros
trumpet
Gaucho
band / ensemble / orchestra

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