W.C. Handy and the Birth of the Blues

On a train platform in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in nineteen oh three, a Black composer named W. C. Handy heard a man playing guitar in a way he had never heard before, sliding a knife along the strings, singing a lyric that repeated the same phrase three times in a way that seemed to press down on the air.

Handy wrote later that it was the weirdest music he had ever heard, and the most compelling. He spent the next decade turning that musical form into something he could write down and publish. William Christopher Handy was born in Florence, Alabama, in eighteen seventy-three, in a log cabin that still stands.

His grandfather was a former enslaved man who became a Methodist minister; his father followed the same path. Young William wanted to be a musician, which his father considered a disreputable profession for a man of their standing. He bought a guitar with money he had saved and his father made him trade it for a dictionary.

Handy persisted. He played cornet in traveling minstrel bands, taught school in Tennessee, and led his own orchestra. After the Tutwiler encounter and years of listening to the music of the Mississippi Delta, he began arranging what he heard into a published form.

His Memphis Blues of nineteen twelve was among the very first published blues compositions. His Saint Louis Blues of nineteen fourteen became one of the most recorded songs in American popular music for decades. Handy did not invent the blues, he was careful to say so himself, crediting the unnamed musicians he had heard in the Delta.

What he did was codify a form that had existed in oral tradition and make it available to audiences and musicians who could read music. The twelve-bar blues structure that Handy popularized became the foundation of jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and virtually every form of American popular music that followed. Florence celebrates its native son with a museum on the site of his birth.

The father who made him trade the guitar for the dictionary did not live to hear what the exchange cost the world.