W.C.+Handy

William Christopher (W.C.) Handy was born in Alabama November 16, 1873. Both his father and grandfather were ministers and they expected W.C. to become a minister too. But W.C. loved music. When he told his father that he planned to become a musician, his father said that he would rather follow his hearse than see his son become a musician. Although his father did not support his musical dreams, W.C. took vocal lessons from a church singer. Then he bought a cornet and took lessons from the former owner. When he was 15, W.C. traveled and performed briefly in a minstrel show. When that didn’t work out, he returned home and graduated from Huntsville Teachers Agricultural and Mechanical College. He worked as a teacher for awhile then discovered he could make more money working in a pipe works factory. Later that year, W.C. Handy and his first musical group, the Lauzette Quartet, went to Chicago to play at the World’s Fair. Unfortunately, they got to Chicago a year early. Then W.C. Handy traveled to St. Louis, Missouri where he barely made a living playing his cornet while hanging out with the poor black population in that city. His fame and expertise as an excellent horn player was spreading so he was hired to play for a group of wealthy Southerners in Henderson, Kentucky. He says this experience was when he realized he was a professional musician instead of a hobo and a member of a road gang. While in Kentucky, he continued his music education with a local teacher. Over the next few years, W.C. Handy traveled extensively with a minstrel group called W.A. Mahara’s Minstrels. His father came to one of his performances and, seeing how talented W.C. was, forgave him for becoming a musician. The minstrels played to both black and white audiences. When the white audience asked for some of W.C. Handy’s own music and he refused, they were not happy. W.C. Handy realized that he needed to play “the blues.” After he became a successful blues musician, Handy said “each one of my blues is based on some old Negro song of the South…Some old song that is a part of the memories of my childhood and my race.” W.C. Handy’s first successful song was //Memphis Blues//. It was first written as a campaign song for Edward H. “Boss” Crump of Memphis, Tennessee. Handy changed the name to //Memphis Blues// in 1912. Many of his songs reflected his life experiences; for example the first line of //St. Louis Blues// came from his time in St. Louis when he was penniless and hungry as the sun was going down. //St. Louis Blues// is the most recorded song in musical history, earning Handy $25,000 in 1958, the year of his death. During his lifetime, W.C. Handy wrote and arranged over 150 songs. He also wrote an autobiography and a couple of other books. The log cabin where he was born is now a museum and he is known as the “Father of the Blues.” There is a statue of him in his hometown, a school named for him, and an annual weeklong W.C. Handy music festival. Memphis, the home of the blues, named a square and a theater in his honor. He was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 1987. W.C. Handy’s connection to the Harlem Renaissance was that he wrote songs in dialect. He says “I wrote in the Negro dialect to preserve something that I think is at times more beautiful than pure English—the way the Negro used to sing spirituals.” He moved to New York City in 1920 where he and a business partner founded a publishing/sheet music company. White record executives would come to listen to the songs and buy what they liked. W.C. Handy was the first musician to use the blues notes, flatted thirds and sevenths, in his music. He was also the first black performer to play in New York’s Carnegie Hall. I wonder if only whites were allowed in the audience?



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  Works Cited  //W.C. Handy. //Discovery Education. Corbis, 2011. Image. Web. 16 February 2011.   “W. C. Handy: Musician and Composer, 1873-1958.” //Extraordinary People of the Harlem Renaissance.// 2000. Print.   "W. C. Handy." //St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture//. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. //Gale Biography In Context//. Web. 16 Feb. 2011.  “William Christopher Handy." //Biography in Context//. Detroit: Gale, 2010. //Gale Biography In Context//. Web. 16 Feb. 2011.