W. C. Handy
The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
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David Robertson charts W. C. Handy’s rise from a rural-Alabama childhood in the last decades of the nineteenth century to his emergence as one of the most celebrated songwriters of the twentieth century. The child of former slaves, Handy was first inspired by spirituals and folk songs, and his passion for music pushed him to leave home as a teenager, despite opposition from his preacher father. Handy soon found his way to St. Louis, where he spent a winter sleeping on cobblestone docks before lucking into a job with an Indiana brass band. It was in a minstrel show, playing to racially mixed audiences across the country, that he got his first real exposure as a professional musician, but it was in Memphis, where he settled in 1905, that he hit his full stride as a composer. At once a testament to the power of song and a chronicle of race and black music in America, W. C. Handy’s life story is in many ways the story of the birth of our country’s indigenous culture—and a riveting must read for anyone interested in the history of American music.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
W.C. Handy wrote "The St. Louis Blues" and the "Beale Street Blues," a song that helped make the Memphis thoroughfare famous, but his reputation in the pantheon of blues legends has been maligned by some who scoff at his self-declaration as the Father of the Blues, the title of Handy's 1941 autobiography. Robertson (Denmark Vesey) undertakes a study to vindicate Handy's life from his birth in 1873 to his death in 1958, tracing his roots as the musically educated son of a minister and an ex-slave in Florence, Ala., to his success as a composer, band leader and music publisher in New York. Handy, whose initial ambition was to write marches in the style of John Philip Sousa, first heard folk blues in Cleveland, Miss., around 1903 and soon became one of the very first to publish blues scores and write songs for a national audience. Robertson's work is a fascinating look at not only Handy's life but the history and business of American music, particularly regarding late 19th century and early 20th century African-Americans, many of whom performed, as Handy did, in traveling minstrel shows.
