W.C. Handy | Biography, Songs, Books, & Facts (2024)

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W.C. Handy | Biography, Songs, Books, & Facts? ›

Handy (born November 16, 1873, Florence, Alabama, U.S.—died March 28, 1958, New York, New York) was an American composer who changed the course of popular music by integrating the blues idiom into then-fashionable ragtime music. Among his best-known works is the classic “St. Louis Blues.”

Although he lost his eyesight at age 30, he conducted his own orchestra from 1903 until 1921. His sight partially returned, but he became completely blind after a fall from a subway platform in 1943. Composing the blues began in 1909 when Handy wrote an election campaign song for the mayor of Memphis, Edward H.

Handy continued to operate the publishing company as a family-owned business. He published works of other black composers as well as his own, which included more than 150 sacred compositions and folk song arrangements and about 60 blues compositions.

In 1943, he lost his balance and fell from a subway station which caused him to go totally blind. In addition to composing, Handy worked laboriously at compiling blues tunes which he published in a book called Blues: An Anthology in 1926.

He was a particularly skilled cornetist and trumpet player. Longing to experience the world beyond Florence, Alabama, Handy left his hometown in 1892. He traveled throughout the Midwest, taking a variety of jobs with several musical groups.

After a sojourn in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Handy headed up the band the Black Knights of Pyhtias and immersed himself in the local variation of the blues, by the end of the first decade of the 20th century, Handy had settled in Memphis, Tennessee, where he performed frequently at the Beale Street clubs.

In 1912, Handy helped raise the public profile of the blues when he became one of the first people to transcribe and publish sheet music for a blues song—"Memphis Blues." Eight years later, listeners snapped up more than a million copies of "Crazy Blues" by Mamie Smith, the first black female to record a blues vocal.

Two years later, at the age of 40, Handy published his most famous composition, "St. Louis Blues,” followed by the popular “Beale Street Blues.” As his fame and reputation soared, Handy moved his publishing company to New York City, where it still flourishes today. “St.

Handy changed the course of popular music by integrating blues and Latin rhythms he heard in vaudeville minstrel shows into then-popular ragtime music. He was a bedrock musician in blues, ragtime, and jazz. He brought Southern Black music into the mainstream by copyrighting old songs along with his new compositions.

He died on March 28, 1958, and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, not far from his home (Duke Ellington is also buried there). That same year saw the release of St. Louis Blues, a highly fictionalized Handy film biography starring Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and other greats.

Where did WC Handy live? ›

Florence

W. C. Handy / Places lived

The blues emerged from the oppressed, economically disadvantaged African-American communities in the rural southern states of America in the years following the American Civil War (1861–1865). Blues singers were descendants of slaves and elements of their music reach back to African origins.

For his efforts in making Blues famous, W.C. Handy is known as the “Father of the Blues.”

Handy was waiting for a train here at the Tutwiler railway station circa 1903 when he heard a man playing slide guitar with a knife and singing “Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog.” Handy later published an adaptation of this song as “Yellow Dog Blues,” and became known as the “Father of the Blues” after he based ...

During his life, Handy was called the “Father of the Blues” as a nod to the pioneering role he took in making the folksy blues of the American South accessible to a larger audience. The Amistad Research Center has two small collections of letters and sheet music produced by Handy later in his life.

Buddy Bolden is considered the father of jazz music. Bolden was born in 1877 in New Orleans. Bolden was an African American band leader and a musician who played the cornet. Bolden's band was popular throughout New Orleans from 1900 - 1907.

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Bessie Smith's discography contains 160 recorded songs. Three of her songs have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame: “Empty Bed Blues” (1983), “St. Louis Blues” (1993), and “Downhearted Blues” (2006).