Get the blues

W.C. Handy might not have been the father of the blues, but a new book suggests that at the very least he was the father of the commercialization of the blues.

William Christopher Handy was born in 1873 in Florence, Ala., the son of a preacher. He studied at Teachers Agricultural and Mechanical College in Huntsville and then joined a minstrel show as a cornet player. After touring for several years, he formed his own band in Memphis in 1903.

While waiting at a train station late one night in Mississippi, he heard something that changed his life. A black musician sat near Handy, and as he played his guitar, he pressed a knife on the strings. The sound was unforgettable, and it was one of Handy’s first encounters with the blues. The experience was electrifying and impacted everything in his life that followed.

Robertson’s highly readable account of Handy’s life is must reading for those interested in the history of American music. In addition to his successful musical catalog, in 1914 Handy composed the most celebrated blues song ever written: “St. Louis Blues.”

Recalling a visit to St. Louis years before, Handy incorporated the memory of a drunken woman stumbling down a street near the riverfront. As she passed him, she muttered, “My man’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea.” It became a fragment of one of the most important lyrics ever written.

This book weaves a rich tapestry of the worlds that Handy inhabited during his life. As Robertson points out, his life story is in many ways the story of the birth of our country’s indigenous culture, and that is why — more than a half century after his death — he is important and his contributions indelible.