W. C. Handy, once so famous as the Father of the Blues that he was memorialized with a bronze monument in Memphis, is not nearly as well known today to people who are not either music scholars or copyright lawyers. It has been 35 years since James Baldwin paid tribute to Handy by employing a phrase from his Beale Street Blues as the title of a novel, and it has been almost as long since Joni Mitchell addressed Handy directly in her song about Beale Street, Furry Sings the Blues. Even then, what Mitchell sang was, W. C. Handy, Im rich and Im fey / And Im not familiar with what you played.
W. C. HANDY
The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues
By David Robertson
The reputations of other early blues artists have ballooned, in some cases to the verge of overinflation. Children of the rock era have worked hard to validate the music of their own time by historicizing it, adopting blues history as rocks prehistory, and canonizing a select group of blues founders who best fit the image rockers like to project. This narcissistic boomer retroactivism has codified a conception of blues-making as it was practiced by the great rural innovators Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson and others who worked in and around the Mississippi Delta during the first years of the last century. From this point of view, a legitimate historic blues artist must have been poor, unschooled, inadequately recognized in his time and perhaps beset by tragedy, as well as African-American and male (despite the prevalence of women among the most prominent singers and composers in early blues).
William Christopher Handy (1873-1958), who was the son of ex-slaves and who was raised in a log cabin in Alabama, had most of that ground covered. He even went blind twice, once recovering his sight only to lose it years later. The main problem with Handy is one of image. Formally trained, he taught music on the college level, and through the blues compositions he astutely copyrighted and published out of an office on Broadway, he became internationally renowned and prosperous. Handy exuded erudition, urbanity, polish and affluence. That statue in the park off Beale Street portrays him well, dressed fastidiously in a double-breasted suit and tie, smiling and looking less like our received version of the Father of the Blues than the Moneyed Out-of- Town Uncle of the Blues. Maybe if he hadnt been so rich and fey, people like Joni Mitchell would have been familiar with what he played.
In W. C. Handy, David Robertson, who has previously written a lucid biography of the slave rebel Denmark Vesey, casts overdue light on Handys essential role in establishing the blues as a popular art, and he does this, much to his credit, without resorting to dubious claims that Handy was the first or the best of the blues multiple progenitors. A mark of both the evenhandedness of his scholarship and the delicacy of his writing is Robertsons resistance to the idea of Handy as the Father of the Blues a notion that Handy himself advanced and exploited deftly during his lifetime.
