W. C. Handy

William Christopher Handy, who lived from 1873 to 1958, was an American composer and musician who called himself the Father of the Blues. He became one of the most influential songwriters in the country. While many musicians played the distinctly American blues music, Handy did not invent the genre. Instead, he was among the first to issue music in the blues form, which lifted the blues from a regional Delta style with a small following to much broader popularity. In his compositions, Handy incorporated folk music elements and carefully credited the sources of his work, which often blended stylistic influences from various performers.

Handy was born in Florence, Alabama, to Elizabeth Brewer and Charles Barnard Handy. His father, a pastor of a small church in Guntersville, believed musical instruments were tools of the devil. Without his parents’ knowledge, Handy bought his first guitar with money saved from picking berries, nuts, and making lye soap. When his father saw it, he demanded the boy return it, but also arranged for organ lessons. Those lessons ended quickly, and Handy taught himself the cornet, joining a local band as a teenager in secret. He bought a cornet from a bandmate and practiced constantly. As a child, he also apprenticed in carpentry, shoemaking, and plastering. He was deeply religious, and his musical style was shaped by church music and natural sounds—whippoorwills, bats, owls, the washing of Cypress Creek, and the songs of birds. Working on a shovel brigade at a furnace, he learned to beat his shovel against surfaces in complex rhythms with other workers, an improvisational spirit he later recalled as formative. He noted that Southern Black people sang about everything, using any object to make musical sounds, and from these materials they set the mood for what became blues.

In September 1892, Handy traveled to Birmingham to take a teaching exam. He passed easily and got a job at the Teachers Agriculture and Mechanical College in Normal, but quit when he found the pay poor. He then worked at a pipe works plant in Bessemer. In his free time, he organized a small string orchestra and taught musicians to read music, later forming the Lauzetta Quartet. The group headed to the Chicago World’s Fair, but upon arrival learned it was postponed. They moved on to St. Louis, finding no work. After the quartet dissolved, Handy went to Evansville, Indiana, where he played cornet at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. He joined a successful band that toured nearby states. He sang first tenor in a minstrel show, worked as a band director, choral director, cornetist, and trumpeter. At 23, he became bandmaster of Mahara’s Colored Minstrels, touring for three years through Chicago, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Cuba, Mexico, and Canada, earning $6 per week. Returning from Cuba, the band stopped in Huntsville, Alabama. In 1896, while performing at a barbecue in Henderson, Kentucky, he met Elizabeth Price. They married that July and had six children, the first, Lucille, born in 1900. Tired of traveling, he and Elizabeth settled in Florence. Around that time, William Hooper Councill, president of the same college Handy had refused to teach at in 1892, hired him to teach music. Handy became a faculty member in September 1900 and taught through much of 1902, but was disappointed that the college focused on European classical music. He felt underpaid and believed he could earn more touring with a minstrel group.

In 1902, Handy traveled through Mississippi, listening to various popular Black music styles. The state was mostly rural, and music was central to plantation life in the Delta, where musicians typically played guitar, banjo, or sometimes piano. Handy’s remarkable memory allowed him to recall and transcribe the music he heard. After a dispute with President Councill, he resigned his teaching position.