W.C. Handy and the Day Blues Entered Sheet Music

Around nineteen oh three, William Christopher Handy was waiting for a train at the station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, when he heard a man playing slide guitar. In his autobiography, Handy described the player pressing a knife against the strings, producing a sliding, moaning sound he had never encountered before. He did not record the player's name. He wrote that the music was unlike anything he had heard in his training as a classical musician from Florence, Alabama, and that he could not get it out of his mind.

Handy was a cornet player and bandleader, formally trained, accustomed to written scores and arranged parts. The Delta musicians he encountered on Beale Street in Memphis and at railroad depots across the region played by ear, in a tradition that had been developing for decades in the cotton fields and juke joints of the Mississippi-Tennessee corridor. The music had no sheet music because the people who played it had no access to that system. It was transmitted by imitation, apprenticeship, and ear.

Handy changed that. In nineteen twelve, he published "Memphis Blues," originally written in nineteen oh nine as a campaign song for Memphis mayoral candidate Edward Crump, under the title "Mr. Crump." It was among the first blues compositions commercially published as sheet music, available in stores for people who could not hear the music live. In nineteen fourteen he published "St. Louis Blues." By nineteen seventeen, his compositions had made the blues commercially viable across the country.

Handy called himself the Father of the Blues. The title gave him credit he had not fully earned and obscured credit owed to others. The musicians he transcribed had been playing the form for decades before he encountered it. Their names are not attached to the compositions that grew from their tradition. They were unlettered, or they were women, or they were sharecroppers who could not publish their work. Handy could, and did.

His home in Memphis is preserved and open to visitors. The music he introduced to the world was already fully formed when he found it. He made sure the world could hear it. That was both something and not enough.