From a humble log cabin in Florence, Alabama to a stately home in Yonkers’ Colonial Heights neighborhood, W.C. Handy charted a path for his musical career that led to his place in history as the “Father of the Blues”.
Born on November 16, 1873, Handy was raised deep in the heart of the post-Civil War South. Surrounded by what he called, “whippoorwills, bats, and hoot owls”, he began to appreciate the diversity of sounds in nature. He found inspiration in “the music of every songbird and all the symphonies of their unpremeditated art.”
Handy’s early appreciation for music, especially gospel, grew from attending church services ministered by his father. Despite his father’s belief that rhythm and blues, soul, and jazz were unsavory and the instruments used to make that music were “tools of the devil,” Handy went against his wishes and bought an old guitar. When his father discovered the purchase, Handy was forced to quit and was sent for organ lessons instead. Eventually, he settled on the cornet.
Shovel Beats to String Quartet
In his youth, Handy apprenticed in a variety of trades, from shoemaking and carpentry to plastering and labor work. As a member of McNabb Furnace’s “shovel brigade”, he got his first exposure to musical improvisation through the syncopated drum beats of the crew’s shovels pounding the hard soil in unique tempos and rhythms.
Although Handy passed his teaching exam in 1892, he left his first role due to low pay. He took a job in a pipe works plant instead. His new job gave him time to practice his cornet and form a small group, the Lauzetta Quartet. His first major show was at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, but his roles in various other bands during this time saw Handy as a bandleader, choral director, trumpeter, and cornetist. As the bandmaster of Mahara’s Colored Minstrels, he toured the American South and locations in Canada and Mexico.
Finding His Style
Handy married his wife, Elizabeth Price, on July 19, 1896, with a baby girl following a year later. After teaching music in Huntsville, Alabama for three years, he settled with his family back in Florence and began traveling within Mississippi. There, he absorbed different styles of music in Black communities throughout the deep South. With his technical expertise, he could listen to others play and sing, and later transcribe the songs into sheet music.
Over the next several years, Handy and his family lived in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a hotbed of the blues sound forming in dance clubs and juke joints across the state. By 1905, he was playing with several bands on the blues scene, and coming into his own style and swing. However, it was a pair of musicians at a local dance hall who exposed him to the “thump-thump-thump” of their “haunting” blues sound. The unmistakable influence of that encounter is heard in Handy’s most famous song, “The Memphis Blues”.
Blues Classics and Fame
Handy shot to fame in 1909 and his success continued to grow with the popularity of his most notable trio of songs, “The Memphis Blues”, “Beale Street Blues”, and “Saint Louis Blues”. His style of 12-bar blues influenced many of his other compositions as well as other musicians. In 1917, Handy moved to New York and was firmly implanted within the music scene for the next forty years.
As a popular fixture in clubs throughout Manhattan, Handy was a tireless supporter of African American composers and artists. Handy was also a prolific writer and historian, creating the notable Blues: An Anthology—Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs in 1926 as a way to document the history of the blues as a Southern African American art form.
From Yonkers to Global Legacy
After a fall from a Harlem subway platform left him blind, Handy relocated with his family to Yonkers in 1943. For the next 15 years, he lived in a spacious Tudor-style home at 19 Chester Drive. A widow at the age of 80, he married his secretary Irma Logan in 1954 at the First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Colonial Heights. Although he continued to play music–even appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1949–his declining health led to a stroke in 1955. On November 17, 1957, Handy was honored when Minerva Place in Yonkers, at its junction with Chester Drive, was renamed W.C. Handy Place.
That same year, the Mayor of Yonkers, James F.X. O’Rourke, declared December 8-14 as W.C. Handy Week. A few months later, Handy fell ill with bronchial pneumonia and passed away at Sydenham Hospital in New York City on March 28, 1958. It is estimated that more than 150,000 people paid their respects outside the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. He was laid to rest in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
Among W.C. Handy’s numerous accolades are a bronze statue on Beale Street in Memphis, a 1969 commemorative stamp of the U.S. Postal Service, a Grammy Trustees Award for lifetime achievement, and a place in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is revered today for his ground-breaking contributions to African American music and for shaping the cultural landscape of rhythm and blues for generations of musicians worldwide.
