'W.C. Handy': new book about the man who brought blues to the mainstream

"W.C. Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues"

by David Robertson

Knopf, 288 pp., $27.95

When I was growing up in the Mississippi Delta, the go-to big city was Memphis, a city that in the 1950s was starkly divided along black/white, rich/poor lines. So how was it that a statue of a nattily dressed black man, frozen in the act of moving his cornet into play, stood sentinel over Memphis' Beale Street?

"Oh, that's Mr. Handy," said my father, as if I should already know. The question of how a black musician came to be enshrined in the memory of a white-dominated city remained, for the time being, unanswered.

Fifty years later, "W.C. Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues" answered my questions.

Many musical biographies are technical, verbose and inaccessible. But "W.C. Handy," the story of the musician, composer and bandleader who brought the blues to American ears, is an overdue recounting of a life story for whom the phrase "the power of positive thinking" seems to have been coined, and a readable history of how the music of black field hands powered into the American mainstream.

Born in 1873 in a log cabin in Florence, Ala., William Christopher Handy was encouraged by his minister father to take up education or the ministry, the only sure path to success for an educated black man of those times.

Instead, Handy jumped the rails. The small-town preacher's boy bought a cornet for $1.75 (payable in installments) from a circus performer stranded in Florence and desperate for money. Handy served his musical apprenticeship in traveling brass bands. Though the money was generally good, his signature "St. Louis Blues" — I hate to see that evening sun go down — was inspired by a low time when Handy was jobless, homeless and "reduced to sleeping in the open air upon the cobblestone levees of the city's Mississippi River docks."

He traveled as a minstrel musician. Author David Robertson, an Alabama native, advances the theory that though minstrel music appeared to be a debased form of racist buffoonery, black minstrels were slyly mocking the racist attitudes of their white listeners. Minstrelsy was the precursor to vaudeville and ragtime, "the final innovation of the minstrel show."

When a job as a bandleader in Clarksdale, Miss., in the heart of blues country, opened up, Handy discovered the music of black blues players, notably the "blue note," the minor-themed undercurrent in blues music that invariably strikes an emotional chord with its listeners.

Handy worked the bones of the blues into his formal compositions, and the music began to make its way into the white world. Though he did not really "make" the blues, between 1904 and 1920, Handy's "genius" "was his realizing the commercial potential of the Mississippi Delta blues music to reach beyond a regional and racial folk song and become part of mainstream American music," Robertson writes.

Handy left Mississippi for Memphis. He became a musical entrepreneur, a leader of several dance bands and a composer who eventually would give the world "Memphis Blues," "St. Louis Blues" and other American classics.

He suffered the indignity of being forced to sell the rights to "Memphis Blues" in 1912, in a period of economic straits, and lost thousands of dollars in royalties. But once he moved to New York City, his sheet-music company on Broadway was perhaps the largest black-owned business in the city in the 1920s and early 1930s. In 1940 he bought back the rights to "Memphis Blues." Aided by Wall Street attorney and music scholar Edward Abbe Niles, Handy made a good living off his music until his death in 1958.

In the '60s, when blues was being rediscovered by a new generation, it was fashionable to dismiss Handy's contributions to the blues form. Robertson sets the record straight — W.C. Handy's musicianship propelled American music from the age of Sousa to the birth of jazz.