[In the following essay, Ewen summarizes the blues technique employed by Handy, recounts the musician's life, and calls his “St. Louis Blues” “one of the undisputed masterpieces in our popular music.”]

To the texture of what soon was to be known as jazz had been added the element of ragtime. Other elements in harmonic and melodic color and in tonality were to be contributed by the blues of W. C. Handy. For years before Handy wrote his classics, “The Memphis Blues” and the “St. Louis Blues,” music similar in general character to the later blues had been in existence. But it was Handy who stylized its form, gave it nationwide recognition, and established it permanently.

The blues was, after all, the “sorrow music” of the lower strata of Negro society—gamblers, prisoners, prostitutes, beggars, shifting laborers. It was the deep-throated lament of those harassed people bewailing their misfortunes. The blues was the simple, poignant cry of woe, and it was fraught with the profoundest feelings. With Handy, its elementary structure—as simple as the nature of the people who sang it—made it easy to remember. One line was repeated, then a new line was added to complete a three-line stanza, in the following manner.

I had been a bad, bad girl, wouldn' treat nobody right,
I had been a bad, bad girl, wouldn' treat nobody right,
They want to give me thirty-five years, someone wanted to take my life.
Judge, please don' kill me, I won't be bad no'
mo'—
Judge, please don' kill me, I won't be bad no' mo'—
I'll listen to ev'ybody, something I never done befo'.

The musical construction was equally simple. The melody was usually of twelve-bar length, with three equal phrases of four bars each. Certain technical features, now accepted as essentials of blues structure, were early established by Handy: the freedom of the rhythm; the alternation from major to minor and vice-versa; the unique intonation based upon an emphasis on the third and seventh notes of the major scale; the individual harmony arising from a repeated use of the dominant seventh chord.

In elaborating on the technique he adopted for his own gems, Handy has also indirectly thrown illumination on the style and idiom of all accepted blues: “The primitive Southern Negro as he sang was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same. Till then, however, I had never heard this slur used by a more sophisticated Negro, or by any white man. I had tried to convey this effect in ‘Memphis Blues’ by introducing flat thirds and sevenths (now called blue notes) into my song, although its prevailing key was major; and I carried this device into my melody as well. I also struck on the idea of using dominant seventh as opening chord of the verse of the ‘St. Louis Blues.’ This was a distinct departure, but as it turned out, it touched the spot.

“In the folk blues the singer fills up occasional gaps with words like ‘Oh Lawdy,’ or ‘Oh, Baby!’ and the like. This meant that in writing a melody to be sung in the blues manner, one would have to provide gaps or waits. In my composition I decided to embellish the piano and orchestra score at these points. This kind of business is called a ‘break’ … and ‘breaks’ became a fertile source of the orchestral improvisation which became the essence of jazz. In the chorus of ‘St. Louis Blues’ I used a plagal chord to give ‘spiritual’ effects in the harmony. Altogether I aimed to use all that is characteristic of the Negro from Africa to Alabama.”¹

The blues was half-brother to the spiritual, for both had their origins in the compulsion of a musical people to express the tragedy of its fate. The spiritual was the Negro's escape into religion, and was sung by groups. The blues—the Negro's awareness of his trials and frustrations on earth—was a lonely man's lament, and was sung by a single voice. The songs of the spirituals were of Jesus and Heaven; those of the blues were of earthly realities, of the dreary events and experiences in an everyday world. “De blues ain't nothing! No, de blues ain't nothinn't, but a good man feelin' blue,” is the refrain of an early blues heard in honky-tonks in the Southwest. Good men feeling blue, singing intensely of their feeling, gave birth to the blues. It was an emotional outlet. There is a good deal of astuteness in the observation made by Hughes Panassie that “when the Negro sings the blues it is not to give way to his sadness but to free himself of it.”²

Soon after the Civil War, many of the emancipated Negroes turned to music for a livelihood, playing their guitars or banjos, and singing their tunes on street corners, in bawdy houses, and in saloons. They sang various types of song; but the one that came most naturally to them was that which reflected their usually somber moods. These musicians might travel from town to town (frequently alone) singing their laments, often with improvised words. Some of these troubadours had no other occupation but to make music all night; during the day they slept. Others would supplement the income from an occasional job with the pennies and nickels earned from public performances. These musicians found employment in the lowest dives of the South and the Southwest, in the North and Northwest, singing their sad tunes in Memphis' Beale Street, in New Orleans, or on the levees of St. Louis.

The early Negro lamentations moaned over many things: tornadoes, storms, hard times, cruelty, the coldness of a loved one, racial oppression, prisons, boll weevils. Similar subjects—and others like Joe Turner, the white officer who (like the personification of an implacable Fate) would come to Memphis to carry off handcuffed Negroes to Nashville for prison sentences—were exploited for the blues. The blues were elemental. Their crudity was that of the Negro “shout,” with its primitive emotion and intense speech. But their mood and poignant expression were those of the “sorrow song” in which the tragedy of an oppressed people is voiced in unforgettable accents.

2.

It was W. C. Handy who gave the blues its name, and who popularized the form it was henceforth to know.

Born in Florence, Alabama, on November 16, 1873, William Christopher Handy was the son of a pastor who considered the practice of music the devil's pastime. Young William was innately musical, giving signs of his musical nature in ways more pronounced than a pair of large ears to which his grandmother always pointed with pride as proof that the boy was a born musician. His musical urges, however, had to be stifled, or given a secret outlet. Once, at school, he confessed to his teacher that it was his ambition to become a professional musician. The teacher, shocked, gave him a severe lecture and sent a note of protest to his father. “Son,” Father Handy said to the boy, “I'd rather see you in a hearse than have you a musician!” On another occasion, when his father discovered that William had secretly bought a guitar (with pennies he had saved over a period of many months from earnings at any and every job that presented itself), he insisted that the boy return the instrument and take in exchange a copy of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.

A trumpeter from Birmingham, who had come to play with the local Baptist choir, inspired in the boy the desire to play the instrument. William fashioned one out of a cow's horn, which provided scant satisfaction to a boy with music in him crying for an outlet. Finally, he bought a trumpet from a visiting circus musician for one dollar (twenty-five cents cash, the remainder paid in installments). Handy practiced diligently, and in great secrecy. It was not long before he became a member of a band. Neither the hickory stick nor the stern disapproval of his father could keep him from his appointed mission. He joined a minstrel show and went on tour with it. The show was left stranded on the road, and Handy was compelled to jump rides on freight trains for his passage home.

That experience may have convinced him, temporarily at any rate, that the life of a musician was too precarious for comfort. He decided to become a teacher. He passed the necessary examination in Birmingham, but when he learned that his salary would be less than that of an ordinary day laborer, he abandoned the thought of teaching and became a foundry hand.

But music was too strong a compulsion to be permanently abandoned. Handy combined foundry work with organizing and directing a brass band. Then—when the panic during Cleveland's second administration closed many factories throughout the country—Handy returned to music professionally. For the next few years his was a nomadic existence. He came to St. Louis and, unable to find employment, slept for a week on the levee, penniless and hungry. He heard the strange, soft strains of songs with which Negro hands at the docks lightened their tasks, songs which impressed themselves permanently on his memory. As they worked, and as they sang, Handy thought of his old driving ambition. He became more determined than ever to devote himself entirely to the making of music.

His was a trying existence. Musical jobs were not plentiful, and those that turned up paid poorly. But, in 1896, a permanent musical post brought an end to destitution. He was engaged as cornetist for Mahara's Minstrels, combining the playing of the cornet with the preparation of orchestral arrangements and with personal appearances with a quartet in the “olio.” Eventually, when the minstrels carried two bands, Handy was assigned to lead one of them.

Handy remained with Mahara's Minstrels until 1903 except for a brief interval in 1900 when he served as teacher of music in a small agricultural college. For a period he led the colored Knights of Pythias Band in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

It was at this time that he heard a lonely Negro sing one of the laments of his race at a deserted railroad station. As he listened to this poignant singing, Handy knew that he had undergone a profound musical experience. What he could not realize at the time was that this experience was ultimately to shape his musical future; for the singing of that Negro was one of several important influences that were to bring Handy to the writing of his blues.

3.

The hearing of the Negro song was, however, only one of several steps in the education of W. C. Handy, and in his development as a composer. The second of his great experiences took place soon afterward, when he and his band performed in Cleveland, Mississippi. He was asked to play some “native” music and, not understanding the request, he played a Southern melody. What was really wanted was a slow drag. A second request succeeded the first: Would Handy object if a band of local colored musicians performed a few numbers?

The enthusiasm with which this music was greeted—dollars, half-dollars, quarters were showered on the musicians by the appreciative audience—brought to Handy the realization that there was something vital in this popular music, something which made a direct appeal to masses and which could not be neglected. “They had the stuff people wanted,” he wrote in his autobiography. “It touched the spot. Their music wanted polishing, but it contained the essence. Folks would pay money for it. … That night a composer was born, an American composer. Those country blackboys had taught me something that could not possibly have been gained from books, something that would, however, cause books to be written.”

From that moment on Handy began experimenting with this new kind of popular music, featuring it at his band concerts. As if by sudden magic, the popularity of the band grew, until it became known far and wide—eagerly invited and enthusiastically received. At the same time Handy began writing a new kind of music (he had been composing songs all this while) in which he hoped to capture something of the appeal of the melancholy, spiritual-like wail he had heard the Negro chant at the railroad station. At the same time he aspired to combine it with the appeal of popular music. The pieces he had composed up to this time were in the formal pattern of the popular song of the period. Now, for the first time, he was guided by the necessity of evolving a new style for himself—a style which, when perfected, would become his own, his identifying speech.

It is now well known how the first of Handy's blues was born. A mayoralty campaign was held in Memphis in 1909 in which one of the candidates, a man named Crump, was running on a reform ticket. Handy decided to write a campaign song called “Mr. Crump.” Because he wanted to rally the votes of Beale Street to a platform as decidedly unpopular as that of reform, Handy decided to write a tune in his new idiom which he knew would appeal strongly to all the habitués of Memphis' street of pleasure. He thought of the strange melody he had heard at the lonely railroad station. Inspired by that recollection, he wrote a melody of his own.

The melody Handy wrote for his candidate refused to die, even long after the excitement of the election had ebbed. It remained alive in Memphis because Memphis had recognized it as a native expression. Its continued popularity inspired Handy to publish the song at his own expense. Under a new title, “Memphis Blues,” it eventually achieved national fame. It was the first of the blues to be published.

“Memphis Blues” came to New York by way of a shrewd publisher who had bought all the rights of the song from Handy for fifty dollars. Originally refused by every established publisher before Handy had issued it himself, it now became a sensation. Single-handed it was destined to start a vogue for a new kind of popular music.

Disappointed that the great national success of his “Memphis Blues” had brought him no revenue, Handy turned to the writing of a successor from which he might profit more directly. He rented a room in Memphis' Beale Street—away from his family—and, in solitude, explored his imagination for a new “Memphis Blues.”

To quote from his autobiography: “A flood of memories filled my mind. First there was the picture I had of myself, broke, unshaven, wanting even a decent meal, and standing before the lighted saloon in St. Louis without a shirt under my frayed coat. There was also from that same period a curious and dramatic little fragment that till now seemed to have little or no importance. While occupied with my own miseries during the sojourn, I had seen a woman whose pain seemed even greater. She had tried to take the edge off her grief by heavy drinking, but it hadn't worked. Stumbling along the poorly lighted street, she muttered as she walked, ‘My man's got a heart like a rock cast in the sea.’ … By the time I had finished all this heavy thinking and remembering, I figured it was time to get something down on paper, so I wrote ‘I hate to see de evenin' sun go down.’ If you ever had to sleep on the cobbles down by the river in St. Louis, you'll understand the complaint.”

And so the “St. Louis Blues” was born. It was Handy's masterpiece, the high-water mark of his career. What happened thereafter—his triumphs and his tragedies—was anticlimactic. He was to write more than sixty other blues—among them such famous pieces as “Beale Street Blues,” “Yellow Dog Blues,” “John Henry Blues,” “Aunt Hagar's Children,” “Sundown Blues,” “Friendless Blues,” “Basement Blues,” “Harlem Blues,” “Joe Turner Blues,” etc.

If Handy is today a hero to Memphis (a public park is named after him), if he is one of the great men in American popular music (he was listed at the New York World's Fair among the six hundred leading contributors to American culture), and if on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday a stirring tribute was paid to him at Carnegie Hall, it was not because of his many melodies, some of which are poignant and effective, but because of the “St. Louis Blues.”

It was not an immediate hit. Despite the fact that the “Memphis Blues” was known and helped to spread the blues nationally, the “St. Louis Blues” was refused by every important publisher. It was in order to publish his song that Handy finally organized a publishing house of his own in partnership with Harry Pace. Before long the company moved to New York and, now solidly entrenched with a hit which Sophie Tucker helped to make famous, it set out to sell the “St. Louis Blues” to America. The Victor Company was induced by Pace to make a recording of it. The record sold well, and every rival company issued it in one form or another. Player-piano rolls next were released. Then the sheet music began to move. It was a success. Bands throughout the country played it and found that audiences asked for it more and more insistently.

But the “St. Louis Blues” was destined for a more important fate than the popularity that attends an attractive novelty. It has become one of the classics of our popular musical literature; if any popular song survives our own day, surely it will be the “St. Louis Blues.” It has been featured in special arrangements by every popular band and orchestra in existence, and it has helped to make stars of performers like Gilda Gray and Sophie Tucker. It has sold more records than any other single work in either the classical or the popular field. It has been used in a Broadway revue, in a movie short, in a full-length film. It has provided the title for three different movies and for a radio program. It is still reputed to earn about $25,000 a year from royalties.

Few will deny that it is one of the authentic native voices in our music. As such it has become a reigning favorite throughout the world. When Premier MacDonald of Great Britain visited America, a special orchestra conducted by Nathaniel Shilkret performed for him four distinctive American works, one of which was the “St. Louis Blues.” King Edward VIII asked the pipers of Scotland to play it for him, and Queen Elizabeth of England has listed it as one of her favorite numbers. When Prince George of England and Princess Marina of Greece were married, the royal pair danced to its strains. When Ethiopia was invaded by Italy, Handy's classic became something of an Ethiopian battle hymn, frequently performed by the royal band in front of Haile Selassie's palace.

But much of this is only the tinsel with which to decorate and glamorize one salient fact: the “St. Louis Blues” is one of the undisputed masterpieces in our popular music. More than that, it has been a great influence. Without it jazz would hardly have developed in the form and style that it did. The “blues note,” the “blues chord,” the “break”—all became indispensable features of jazz. Beyond this, Handy's blues contributed technical features to hot music and to sweet music, to swing, to symphonic jazz, and to boogie-woogie. No other single work played such a decisive role in our popular musical development, and no other single work is more likely to remain one of the indestructible monuments in our popular musical expression.

Notes

1. W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues: An Autobiography, edited by Arna Bontemps (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1941).

2. Hughes Panassie, The Real Jazz (New York: Smith & Durrell, 1942).