Joe Turner Blues - W. C. Handy (1915)

William Christopher Handy was born in Florence, Alabama, and lived from 1873 until 1958, and was an American composer and musician who was sometimes billed as the Father of the Blues. Although this was an exaggeration, he was undeniably one of the most influential songwriters and music historians in the United States. Although he did not actually create the blues genre, he was one of the first to actually publish music in the blues form (and was scrupulous in documenting the sources of his works), which helped begin the process of taking the blues from a regional music style known by very few to a new level of popularity and worldwide impact and influence. The importance of Handy's work crossed all genres, even influencing European composers like Maurice Ravel, who was inspired by Handy and his orchestra when they were in Paris. That is why Ravel's famous sonata #2 for violin and piano is known as the Blues sonata. Handy was born in a log cabin in Alabama built by his grandfather, an African Methodist Episcopal minister. The log cabin has been preserved near downtown Florence. I would like to visit it someday. If any of my viewers live in that area I recommend that you try to see it. Handy's father believed that musical instruments were tools of the devil, so Handy had to secretly save up for his first guitar by picking nuts and berries and making soap. When his father found out he asked, "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", but I think he felt bad because after that he signed Handy up for organ lessons. After that, he started to learn the cornet. Handy was deeply religious, like his father and grandfather. His music was influenced by the church music he sang and played as a young boy growing up and by the sounds of nature. In his autobiography he says that he was inspired by the "whippoorwills, bats and hoot owls and their outlandish noises", Cypress Creek washing on the fringes of the woodland, and "the music of every songbird and all the symphonies of their unpremeditated art." For a while he worked on a "shovel brigade" where he learned to use his shovel to make music with the other workers to pass the time. The workers would beat their shovels against hard surfaces in complex rhythms and he said later that this was a formative experience for him, writing that "Southern Negroes sang about everything....They accompany themselves on anything from which they can extract a musical sound or rhythmical effect. In this way, and from these materials, they set the mood for what we now call Blues." In 1902, Handy traveled throughout Mississippi to hear the various styles of rural black music, especially on cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta. Musicians there usually played guitar or banjo or, to a much lesser extent, piano. Handy had such a good memory that he could remember and transcribe the music he heard on his travels. He became a music teacher and a band director, and eventually had a very successful music publishing business in New York City, with offices in the Gaiety Theatre office building in Times Square. He published many popular and influential songs, including "Memphis Blues", Beale Street Blues", and "Saint Louis Blues".  In 1926 Handy wrote Blues: An Anthology—Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs. This was one of the earliest attempts to record, analyze, and describe the blues as an integral part of the South and the history of the United States. From 1943 until his death, he lived in Yonkers, New York. His grandson is the physicist Carlos Handy, who now leads the Handy Brothers Music Company. In 1969, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in his honor. He has been inducted into the National Academy of Popular Music Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame,  the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, and the Alabama Music Hall of Fame. Here is a recording of William Handy himself singing a portion of today's song. I probably need to learn to play the song in a more relaxed way, the way he sings it, although I have heard the piano version played in a similar lively way to how I performed it today.    • W.C. Handy "Joe Turner Blues"