American musician and composer and the Father of the Blues (1873-1958). William Christopher Handy was born in Florence, Alabama. His father was the pastor of a small church in nearby Guntersville, and he believed that musical instruments were literal tools of the Devil. Young William got in serious trouble when he was a kid because he saved up his money, went out, and bought a guitar. His parents made him get rid of it, but perhaps realizing they had a kid with strong musical talents, arranged for him to take lessons on the organ. When William got bored with playing the organ, he learned how to play the cornet, and then secretly joined a band when he was a teenager.
Despite his parents' disapproval of his love of instrumental music, Handy was deeply religious, and said his musical style was influenced by the music he sang in church, as well as the sounds of nature, including owls, whippoorwills, bats, the sounds of a local creek, and songbirds, citing "all the symphonies of their unpremeditated art." Handy also trained in carpentry, shoemaking, and plastering, and he still managed to find time to make music while he was working at other jobs. When working on a shovel brigade at a furnace, he and other workers would beat their shovels in rhythm to make music. He later remembered this as something that taught him an important lesson, as improvising music on whatever was close at hand was the kind of thing that made the blues possible.
Handy traveled to Birmingham, Alabama in 1892 to take a teaching exam. After passing it, he took at job at the Teachers Agriculture and Mechanical College (now Alabama A&M University), but soon learned the position didn't pay well, so he quit to take a job at a pipe works plant. In his time off the job, he put together a small string orchestra and instructed musicians, who were often self-taught in rural Alabama, how to read music.
Soon after this, Handy embarked on an incredibly varied musical career. He worked as a band director, choir director, cornetist, trumpeter, and was the bandmaster for a group called Mahara's Colored Minstrels. He organized a quartet which traveled to Chicago for the upcoming World's Fair, but found out when they got there that the fair had been postponed for a year. They broke up when they moved on to St. Louis but weren't able to find any gigs. He later returned to play cornet at the actual World's Fair in 1893. Over the next several years, he played in Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Florida, and Georgia, then in Mexico, Canada, and Cuba. He was rehired at the Teachers Agriculture and Mechanical College and became a music faculty member. He was disappointed that the college preferred to teach European classical music over music that was more popular with Black students. He also still felt that the college just wasn't paying enough money, especially considering how much he got paid to roam around the country playing in juke joints. It wasn't long before he again quit working for the college and returned to the Mahara Minstrels for a tour of the Midwest and Pacific Northwest.
While traveling all over the country, and especially the South, Handy had lots of opportunities to listen to other Black musicians playing a variety of instruments and musical styles. He had a good memory and transcribed as much music as he could, carefully documenting the musicians he heard. He spent a few years playing in clubs on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. At the time, there was a politician named Edward Crump who'd commissioned a campaign song called "Mr. Crump." Handy rewrote the song using what he'd learned from studying Black music all over the South and called it "Memphis Blues." It was the first of Handy's style of 12-bar blues, and it was an instant sensation. Vernon and Irene Castle, a pair of dancers from New York, credited it as their inspiration for the creation of the foxtrot.
Now "Memphis Blues" doesn't sound a lot like the traditional blues we're more accustomed to. It's fully instrumental, and it sounds a lot more like ragtime than the kind of blues we'd later hear from Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, or Howlin' Wolf. Handy certainly didn't invent the blues, which have their origin in the mid- to late-1800s. But Handy was one of the first to publish sheet music of the blues, which he wrote down for larger bands -- as a result, the style is much more formal and symphonic than later styles of the blues.
Handy's best known hits didn't sound a lot like the blues as we think of them now, but he is still important, in part because he was getting early blues music out to musicians nationwide, and partly because he was one of the first Black people publishing music. This led to some important business opportunities. In 1912, Handy met a young businessman, Harry Pace, a student of W.E.B. Du Bois and the valedictorian of his Atlanta University graduating class. Pace had already gotten a good reputation for saving a number of failing businesses. Handy and Pace got along well, and they formed Pace and Handy Sheet Music together. The company moved to a building in Times Square in New York City in 1917 and published more of Handy's compositions, including "Beale Street Blues" and "Saint Louis Blues."
Jazz really got going in the late 1910s, when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded the first jazz record. Handy's whole life was wrapped up in blues, so he really didn't care for jazz at all, but jazz bands really liked Handy's music, and they performed enough of them to turn several of them into jazz standards. In 1920, Handy and Pace amicably dissolved their partnership, with Pace going on to form a couple record companies, the Pace Phonograph Company and Black Swan Records (which is an outstanding name for a record company). Handy kept publishing sheet music, branching out into folk songs and sacred music. Later in the decade, he formed the Handy Record Company -- he didn't release any records, but he organized recording sessions through it, and eventually, some of those recordings were released through Black Swan and even Paramount Records.
Handy's influence even extended to classical music. After Handy had toured Europe in the early 1920s, composer Maurice Ravel was inspired by Handy, blues, and jazz to write his Violin Sonata No. 2, which was sometimes known as the Blues Sonata.
Handy solidified his reputation as a music historian and theorist in 1926 when he wrote a book called "Blues: An Anthology -- Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs" as an effort to analyze the blues as an important part of the musical history and culture of the South and the United States.
In 1929, Handy and film director Dudley Murphy collaborated on a movie called "Saint Louis Blues," after one of Handy's most popular compositions. Handy recommended blues singer Bessie Smith to be the star, since her recording of the song had been a big hit for her. The movie was filmed in June 1929 and showed in theaters in '29 through 1932.
In 1943, he lost his sight after he fell off a subway platform, but he remained active and continued his work composing and publishing music. In 1944, he wrote a book about Black American musicians called "Unsung Americans Sung." He finally started slowing his schedule down after suffering a stroke in 1955, at least in part because he was confined to a wheelchair and couldn't get around as easily anymore.
Handy died of bronchial pneumonia in 1958. Over 25,000 mourners attended his funeral and another 150,000 gathered in the streets near the church to pay their respects. Two weeks after his death, a film very, very, very loosely based on Handy's life, "St. Louis Blues," was released. It was directed by Allen Reisner and starred Nat King Cole as Handy (and Billy Preston as Handy as a boy), Eartha Kitt, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson, Ruby Dee, and Pearl Bailey.