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Father of the Blues: An Autobiography (The Roots of jazz)

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W.C. Handy is well known in Memphis, TN because of the blues, but his story begins in Florence, Alabama. I teach 8th graders a unit comparing and contrasting his life with his neighbor from Tuscumbia, Helen Keller. Handy's life was rich with music, travel, hard times, discrimination, and fame. The picture he paints of minstrel days and struggling to live on the road sticks in your mind. His words provide a rich setting for the birth of music that my students listen to today. The book is too long to require them to read, but I read them sections to give them a flavor of the South they do not comprehend. I highly recommend this book to lovers of jazz, Southern history and stories about people who overcome great adversity and succeed.

This is a look at how jazz and blues began, from the man who was instrumental in getting it started. W.C. Handy tells us how the transition was made from marches, classical music, dance music, Stephen Foster, vaudville tunes and folk blues to the arranged and orchestrated blues and jazz of the 20th Century. Not only did Handy help create the music, but he also helped preserve it through recordings and publications. In this book, he tells in detail how he came to compose his most famous pieces, including Memphis Blues, St. Louis Blues and Beale Street Blues. Handy is a superb storyteller who paints a vivid picture of life in the Reconstruction South, and the world of the African-American entertainer during the minstrel show days and the birth of the jazz era.

W. C. Handy's autobiography is a fascinating story. The historical information about early blues provides an excellent overview of his experiences with different musical groups. The descriptions of his performances on street corners, with minstrel groups, in nightclubs such as Pee Wee's on Beale Street, and on the concert stage are especially vivid and engaging. I also was interested in his descriptions of the various musical genres that formed the basis for the development of blues and jazz. His descriptions of various style of music helps readers piece together the history of this "pre-blues" music, and Handy's observations show that the story is far more complex than the contention that blues evolved from "simple" field hollers. Handy also provides an interesting discussion of his own role in shaping blues music. He modestly describes his contributions in publishing and popularizing the genre, and he doesn't make any claim to be the "Father of the Blues." Instead, he suggests that its roots are with the forgotten singers such as the blues guitarist whom he listened to in Tutwiler, MS in 1903. Handy's autobiography also challenges the idea that Memphis was the original home of the blues. He writes that Memphis gained that credit because of its publishing industry, and he suggests that other cities, such as New Orleans, also were homes to blues singers prior to the Memphis blues connections. Along with the wealth of historical information and personal reminiscences, the book also is finely written. Handy was well read and eloquent, and he blends together the traditional proverbs and old sayings of African-American folk traditions with insights from contemporary writers, thinkers, artists, and musicians. Handy, himself, emerges as a man of integrity and perseverance, who openly discusses the racial tensions and overt bigotry that he faced, but who also emerged with an inspiring dignity and life-affirming peace-of-mind.

I am a blues fan and I thought this would be as far back in the beginnings as anyone should have to go. I wanted to know something of the man who brought the blues to the American mainstream. Wow, what a story. I don't care if you have any interest in the music at all, just as an American this was a great story. What a film this would be.

Forget the blues, and all he did for music, and you are still left with an amazing man who did more than I would have thought possible in the time he lived. This story was so much more than I bargained for. Inspiring, funny, and IMPRESSIVE. And in the mans own words.

I loved it!

Daniel Vickery

Like many autobiographies, this book is best before Handy becomes WC Handy the great and venerated music composer and publisher. Handy describes coming up in the hard world of the South in the years that Reconstruction was being demolished and Jim Crow segregation was being imposed.

Handy's childhood decision to become a musician flew in the face of his family's and much of the Black church (Handy's father was a minister) world's view that being a musician of any kind was hardly better than becoming a criminal.

Classically trained in both the violin and the trumpet and in composition and harmony, Handy always looked to the folk music of working class and farming African Americans and to rhythms and music he knew came from Africa as his source of inspiration. In fact, when Handy became a music professor at a Black state-run college in Alabama, he ended up resigning when the administration frowned on his teaching the students to venerate the music their people created.

Handy gives some interesting stories of life in the Black ministrel companies he worked in. These companies were a focal point of Black entertainment between the civil war and the second world war. Not only did 19th Century figures like Banjoist Horace Weston, and the early 20th Century dance and comedy men like Bert Williams and Bill Robinson graduate from minstrelsy to Broadway, but 20th century stars like Louis Jordan, Dizzy Gillespie, and Rufus Thomas got their start in minstrel shows. These shows trained musicians and singers who became the founding stars of blues and Jazz. One such minstrel troupe had Classic Blues Divas Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, and Bessie Smith, all on the same bill.

Handy discusses the danger and persecution Black minstrel companies faced in the Jim-Crow South. The railroad coach his company traveled in contained secret compartments to hide the Black entertainers from police and lynch mobs as well as places to store firearms for self-defense. Handy tells several stories that make clear that W.C. Handy might never have survived to write the Memphis and St. Louis Blues without the secret compartment or self defense with firearms.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the blues is not an ancient form of Black musical expression. It arose in the 1890s and early 20th century. Handy grew up in Alabama, lived in Kentucky, and Mississippi and was headquartered for years in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the big town in the area that produced Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters, and Johnny Lee Hooker, He had heard old time Black banjo and fiddle tunes since childhood. Yet, he did not hear the blues until the early 20th Century.

He points out that the real "inspiration" for him to incorporate the blues into the music he wrote for his dance band came in a small town in Mississippi where his band played a dance. The country people demanded that a ragged blues trio of mandolin, guitar, and bass play a few song. As Handy and his band were tired, they welcomed the opportunity to take a break. However with the three blusicians were finished, the crowd showered more money on them for a few songs than Handy's whole band received for a whole night's work.

Playing for Black dancers, Handy explained how he had to incorporate the blues and other rhythms and music that came from Africa into his music. Then, Handy is always insistence that the base of his music is working and farming Black folk.

As he enters fame, Handy remains interesting, especially when he explains the way he had to battle swindling and racism when he became a music publisher. He's also pretty adamant about demanding respect for African American entertainers and for song writers and composers as well.

He's a good, friendly and often humorous writer throughout.

Handy never claims to have invented Blues, but to have heard it second or third hand from folk sources in Mississippi and Memphis. His claim to fame was to have integrated folk bluses ideas into written compositions. Seeking to present himself as an innovator more than he actually was, he fails to mention that some of his early Blues, like the Memphis Blues were not actually Blues, but ragtime pieces with the title Blues appended to take advantage of the popularity the Blues was gathering among dancers and buyers of sheet music.

In the 1930s, Handy was quite willing to accept without protest media claims that he invented the Blues and was one of the early innovators of Jazz. This was not to Handy's credit, particularly since although his Memphis band was one of the great ragtime bands and played many of Handy's compositions well, Handy as a bandleader, a composer, or as a musican was never known for Jazz, although he appreciated it.

WhenIn the 1930s Jelly Roll Morton and others contested Handy's claims as the originator of Blues and Jazz. Morton pointed on that in the early 1900s, Handy had told Morton that it was impossible for a band to play the blues. This was at a time when Morton and other New Orleans musicians were leading Jazz bands that played the blues and. Indeed, Morton and the Jazz players had been preceded by pre-Jazz bands in New Orleans that played great Blues.

While Handy does confront discrimination he faced as an African American in the South, his final chapter a paen to Ascap, stains his reputation and record.

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers is a performing rights organization which licenses and collects royalties for performance of its members, composers and song writers. In the 1930s and early 1940s ASCAP demanded royalties from the recording industry, and especially from music venues and radio for music in general. However at the time ASCAP was notorious for its discrimination against African Americans composers who sought to join the organization while it maintained a few well-known African American members like Handy. For the few African Americans who were able to fight their way into ASCAP, royalties were distributed not based on the sales of music written by each composer, but an evaluation of the "value" of different forms of music. This evaluation out Jazz, Blues, and other African American music at almost no value, while white Broadway composers and classical compositions received huge sums.

Black composers and song writers, led by Jelly Roll Morton protested this. Morton wrote not only many pieces that became standards for early Jazz, but several pieces that became among the most recorded songs of the Swing Era, especially "The King Porter Stomp" which was the theme song for Benny Goodman. Royalties on this music was probably worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Yet, after a long struggle involving lawyers and appeals to the Justice department, when Morton fought his way into ASCAP, he was awarded less than 200 dollars per year for his compositions. Congress later investiged ASCAP and exposed ASCAP's discrimination against Black composers and song writers. The investigation and a series of court rulings forced ASCAP to change these practices.

However, this came long after Handy wrote his concluding chapter celebrating ASCAP. He makes no note that the organization is openly discriminating against allowing Blacks other than a few well known tokens like himself to join. He makes no note that ASCAP collects millions from the compositions of African Americans, but paid them a pittance. He talks about ASCAP like it was the greatest invention since The Blues