[Dixielandjazz] "W.C. Handy" by David Robertson

[Stephen G Barbone]

NY TIMES - May 10, 2009 - by David Hajdu
Blues Capitalist

If Beale Street could talk, it would say, “Who the hell is the guy  
depicted in that big statue by the entrance to the park?” 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, I’m rich and  
I’m fey / And I’m not familiar with what you played.”

The reputations of other early blues artists have ballooned, in some  
cases to the verge of over inflation. Children of the rock era have  
worked hard to validate the music of their own time by historicizing  
it, adopting blues history as rock’s pre history, 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 hadn’t 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  
Handy’s 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 Robertson’s resistance to the idea of  
Handy as the Father of the Blues — a notion that Handy himself  
advanced and exploited deftly during his lifetime. The stationery for  
his publishing company promoted the phrase as a slogan, and Handy used  
it for the title of his autobiography, which was published in 1941,  
when he was 67 and performing only occasionally as part of a nostalgia  
act. (Handy’s book, which he wrote in collaboration with the  
journalist Arna Bontemps, is serious, not wholly spoiled by self-  
celebration and indispensable on his musical apprenticeship in black  
minstrelsy.)

Robertson portrays Handy as “the man who made the blues,” a phrase  
that’s a bit of a dodge. In one sense, it refers to Handy’s having  
constructed blues from found sources, just as every blues musician —  
and each artist in every style of folk music — draws from the work of  
pred ecessors, changing melody lines, adding words, dropping verses,  
recombining elements from many songs, making old materials new and  
seemingly one’s own. Handy’s breakthrough was at once a variation on  
this method, the folk process, and a refutation of it: he documented  
blues in the form of musical notation, freezing songs in modes that  
suited him, and he had the music copyrighted and published.

In his memoir, Handy describes as an epiphany a chance encounter he  
had with a blues guitarist and singer in 1903 (or around that time —  
Handy is vague about the date, although in 2003 the various sponsors  
of the centennial Year of the Blues hung the celebration on this  
event). He had been waiting at the Tutwiler, Miss., railroad station  
for a train delayed nine hours, Handy wrote.

“A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me  
while I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his  
shoes. . . . His song . . . struck me instantly.” The singer was  
“accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever  
heard.”

Handy’s complicated legacy involves both the preservation and the  
adulteration of that weirdness. He was a classically oriented musician  
working in the sheet- music era. While notating the blues and  
disseminating it through published scores may seem unexceptional  
today, these acts were nearly radical at the time for their implicit  
argument that blues, in its mere worthiness for notation, had parity  
not only with Tin Pan Alley tunes but also with Western concert music.  
Of course, musical notation is not merely documentation; it is a kind  
of translation, and the tonal elasticity and rhythmic volatility of  
the blues are simply impossible to get across with the tempered scale  
and metric limitations of conventional notation. Handy relished the  
blues but considered it “primitive,” and he clearly saw the  
“polishing” he did to the music as correction or improvement. Indeed,  
his readiness to clean up the blues so that it could be played by  
musicians geared to the Western tradition has long made him seem like  
an accommodationist.

In another sense of “making” the blues, Handy, through the songs he  
published and their widespread use onstage, in recordings and on film,  
played a dominant role in the popularization of the music across a  
wide spectrum of the general population. “St. Louis Blues,” the best  
known of the many songs to bear his name as a composer, has been  
recorded more than 1,600 times by artists from Louis Armstrong to the  
contemporary jazz saxophonist Greg Osby, with Bessie Smith, Bing  
Crosby, Chet Atkins, Chuck Berry, Leonard Bernstein, Pete Seeger and  
Doc Watson in between. Through the royalties from “St. Louis Blues”  
and dozens of other songs under his copyright (most notably “The  
Memphis Blues,” “Yellow Dog Blues” and “Beale Street Blues”), Handy  
achieved a status rare among composers associated with the blues of  
the early 20th century: he grew wealthy. He was skillful at both music  
and business, as a great many hip-hop artists are today, and he took  
obvious pleasure in the status his prosperity conferred among blacks  
and whites.

His facility with commerce as well as art has tainted Handy in the  
eyes of rock-era blues buffs, as if the only proper compensation for a  
life of blues-making were the adulation of those fans, as if the point  
of the blues were not to cry out against suffering, subjugation and  
marginalization, but to preserve those things. David Robertson harbors  
no such delusions. A biographer of admirable restraint, he explains  
the guy in the statue without stomping on the clay feet that we can’t  
help noticing peeped out of his shoes.

David Hajdu is the music critic for The New Republic and a professor  
at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.