by Maisah B. Robinson, Ph.D.

William Christopher (W.C.) Handy was born on November 16, 1873 in Florence, Alabama. His parents were Charles Bernard Handy, an African Methodist Episcopal minister and Elizabeth Brewer Handy. As a youth, Handy apprenticed in carpentry, shoemaking and plastering. However, he was always interested in music. Handy’s first instrument was a guitar, which he purchased without asking his parents. His father was upset at this purchase and sternly asked Handy, “What possessed you to bring a sinful thing like that into our Christian home?” and ordered him to “Take it back where it came from.” After Handy returned the guitar to the store, his father enrolled him in organ lessons. Handy was not satisfied with the organ lessons and began to learn how to play the trumpet.

As a teenager, Handy performed in minstrel shows and with a local band. He became a member of a quarter in which he sang first tenor. He left Alabama to pursue a musical career and worked as a trumpet player, band director, singer, and choral director. He became bandmaster of Mahara’s Colored Minstrels when he was twenty three years old. He married Elizabeth Price in 1898. He taught music at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes from 1900 to 1902.

He moved from Alabama and settled in Memphis, Tennessee where he met Harry H. Pace who was a cashier at the Solvent Savings Bank. Pace was a lyrist and teamed with Handy to collaborate on writing songs. They founded the Pace and Handy Music Company Publishers. In 1909, Handy wrote a song for Edward Crump a mayoral candidate. The original song was titled “Mr. Crump,” and later was rewritten and titled “Memphis Blues.”

One of the most popular songs ever published was Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” released in 1914. Some of the other successful blues compositions he wrote were “Yellow dog Blues,” “Harlem Blues,” “Mississippi Blues,” and “Beale Street Blues.” In 1920, the Pace and Handy partnership was dissolved and Handy continued the publishing company as a family business. Handy’s company published works of other black composers as well as his own, which included more than 150 sacred compositions and folk song arrangements and about sixty blues compositions.

W. C. Handy in collaboration with the New York Urban League presented concerts in which black musical talent was showcased. On April 27, 1928, Handy held a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. The program consisted of jazz, blues, plantation songs, work songs, piano solos, spirituals and a Negro rhapsody. Handy also held concerts at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 and 1934 and the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and 1940.

In addition to writing music, Handy wrote and edited five publications: Negro Authors and Composers of the United States, Blues: An Anthology, Book of Negro Spirituals, Father of the Blues (his autobiography) and Unsung Americans Sung.

In 1940, NBC broadcast an All-Handy program. Handy became blind in 1943 after falling from a subway platform. After the death of his first wife, he married his secretary Irma Louise Logan in 1954. He often said that she had become his eyes. W.C. Handy died on March 28, 1958. Over twenty-five thousand people were seated inside Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church where his funeral was held. Over 150,000 people were gathered in the streets near the church to pay their respects to one of the world’s greatest musicians and songwriters.

In 1958, a movie was released about his life entitled, St. Louis Blues. On May 17, 1969, a U.S. commemorative stamp was issued in his honor.