The Great American Songbook: Father of the Blues

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Friday, March 21st. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Up next, our next installment of The Great American Songbook with Bob Case. Today, an introduction, to the Father of the Blues.

BOB CASE: There are so many wonderful African American composers included in the Great American Songbook, that trying to identify the most influential is next to impossible.

Some of the artists in the running would include the famous Duke Ellington, the Big Band leader, best known for “It Don’t mean a Thing…”.

MUSIC: [IT DON’T MEAN A THING (IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT SWING) by Duke Ellington]

Then there’s James P. Johnson…credited with writing the theme song for the 1920s: “The Charleston.”

MUSIC: [THE CHARLESTON by James P Johnson]

American poet and African royalty, Andy Razaf, wrote over 500 songs…his best known piece is “Ain't Misbehavin'.”

MUSIC: [AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’ sung by Fats Waller]

Scott Joplin—the “King of Rag”—wrote the piano standard “Maple Leaf Rag.”

MUSIC: [MAPLE LEAF RAG by Scott Joplin]

And there are others, but I think that many of these artists would agree with me, that the most significant black composer in the Great American Songbook is W.C. Handy: “The Father of the Blues.”

MUSIC: [JOE TURNER BLUES by W.C. Handy]

It might be unfair to Mr. Handy to identify him as the most influential “black” composer of his generation. He didn’t want to be known as a “black composer”…rather, he wanted to be recognized as a great “American composer.” He loved the marches of John Philip Sousa.

MUSIC: [STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER by John Philip Sousa]

Mr. Handy was born in 1873 in Florence, Alabama…only eight years after the end of the Civil War. He lived until I was in high school in 1958.

His conservative Methodist clergyman father did not approve of secular music. Despite this, W.C. bought a guitar when he was a teenager. Upon seeing the guitar, his father asked: “What possessed you to bring a sinful thing like that into our Christian home?”

Rev. Handy made Willy take the guitar back to the store and exchange it for a dictionary. However, young Bill’s maternal grandmother—equally devout as her grandson—noticed Bill’s big ears and encouraged him to learn and play all kinds of music. She interpreted his physical traits as a sign from God that he was to be a musician.

His first break came in 1909…when a Memphis Democrat mayoral candidate named Edward Crump asked W.C. to write a campaign song—hoping to cater to the black population. Mr. Handy did—naming it after “Crump.” After the successful election, Handy changed the name of the campaign song to “Memphis Blues” … his first international hit.

MUSIC: [MEMPHIS BLUES by W.C. Handy]

“Memphis Blues” introduced “blues” to the American Songbook canon. Years later, Handy said the song set a new fashion in American popular music and contributed to the rise of jazz, swing and even the boogie-woogie.

Five years later, Handy published his masterpiece, “St. Louis Blues” in 1914. The song is, by far, the most recorded “blues” in the history of popular music.

MUSIC: [ST. LOUIS BLUES by W.C. Handy]

When England’s ill-fated Prince George married Greece’s Princess Marina in 1934 they danced to the “St. Louis Blues” at their wedding. England’s late Queen Elizabeth once singled it out as one of her favorite songs.

Ethiopia even used it as a war song to provide inspiration when the country was invaded by Italy in 1935.

A couple of years after the “St. Louis Blues”, in l916, Handy wrote his third “blues” standard, “Beale Street Blues.”

MUSIC: [BEALE STREET BLUES by W.C. Handy]

The title refers to Beale Street in Memphis, the main entertainment district for the city's African-American population in the early part of the 20th century. It’s a place closely associated with the development of the “blues”—both good and bad.

Handy has been described as a deeply religious man…incurably optimistic…finding inspiration in spirituals and God’s creation. Handy cited for inspiration the sounds of Creation such as, “whippoorwills, bats and hoot owls and their outlandish noises.”

He liked the “sounds of Cypress Creek in Florence, Alabama washing on the fringes of the woodland.”

And he said he copied "the music of every songbird and all the symphonies of their unpremeditated art.”

And of course, Handy used the rhythm of church spirituals with which he grew up and heard as “the sound of a sinner on revival day.”

Even though W.C. Handy is known as the “Father of the Blues,” his love of the artform is secondary to his true love. He closes his autobiography with this sentence, “I also hang a memory on these words from my mother’s prayer which so aptly express my inmost feelings, ‘Lord, I thank thee that we are living in a Christian land and a Bible country. God bless America.’”

I’m Robert Case.

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