William Christopher Handy (November 16, 1873 - March 28, 1958) was a composer and musician, known as the Father of the Blues. An African American, Handy is one of the most influential songwriters in the United States. One of many musicians who play American blues music, Handy did not create the blues genre and not the first to publish music in the form of blues, but he took blues from a regional blues style (Delta blues) with a limited audience. to a new level of popularity.
Handy is an educated musician who uses elements of folk music in his compositions. He was meticulous in documenting the sources of his work, which often combined the influence of styles from various players.
Video W. C. Handy
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Useful was born in Florence, Alabama, son of Elizabeth Brewer and Charles Barnard Handy. His father was pastor of a small church in Guntersville, a small town in northeastern Alabama. Handy wrote in his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues, that he was born in a wooden cabin built by his grandfather William Wise Handy, who was minister of Methodist Episcopal from Africa after emancipation. The Handy-born log cabins have been preserved near the center of Florence.
Growing up he was an apprentice in the field of carpentry, shoe making, and plastering. Handy is very religious, and his music style is influenced by the church music he sings and plays as a youth. It is also influenced by the sound of the natural world. He cites as the voice inspiration of "whippoorwills, bats and owls and their strange sounds", the sound of Cypress Creek washing on the edge of the forest, and "the music of every singer and all their unplanned art symphonies".
Handy's father believed that musical instruments were tools of the devil. Without his parents' permission, Handy buys his first guitar, which he sees in a local shop window and is secretly stored by picking berries and nuts and making alkaline soaps. After seeing the guitar, his father asked him, "What makes you bring such a sinful thing into our Christian home?" and ordered him to "take it back from its origin", but he also arranged for his son to take organ lessons. Organ lessons did not last long, but Handy moved to learn to play cornet. He joined the local band as a teenager, but he kept this fact a secret from his parents. He bought cornet from fellow band members and spent every free minute to train it.
Maps W. C. Handy
Music development
He worked on a "shovel brigade" in a McNabb stove and described the music made by the workers as they defeated the shovel, changing the tone as he pushed and pulled the metal section against the iron wagon to pass the time while waiting for the oven too full to digest the ore. "With a dozen participating men, the effect is sometimes overwhelming... It's better for us than the music of the martial drum corps, and our rhythm is much more complicated." He wrote, "Southern Negroes sing about everything.... They accompany themselves on anything from which they can extract musical sounds or rhythmic effects..." He would then reflect that "In this way, this material, they set the mood for what we now call blues ".
In September 1892, Handy went to Birmingham, Alabama, to take the teaching test. He graduated easily, and got a teaching job in town. Learning that it was badly paid, he quit his position and found a job at the pipe plant in nearby Bessemer.
In his time off from his job, he organized a small string orchestra and taught musicians how to read music. He then set the Lauzetta Quartet. When the group read about the upcoming World Expo in Chicago, they decided to attend. To pay their way, they do odd jobs along the way. They arrived in Chicago only to learn that the World Exhibition had been postponed for a year. Next they headed to St. Louis, Missouri, but found poor working conditions.
After the quartet broke up, Handy went to Evansville, Indiana. He played the cornet at Chicago World's Fair in 1893. In Evansville, Handy joined a successful band that performed across cities and neighboring countries. His musical endeavors are very diverse: he sings his first tenor in singing performances, works as a director of the band, director of choirs, draggers, and trumpet players.
At the age of 23, Handy became the bandmaster of Mahara's Colored Minstrels. In a three-year tour they travel to Chicago, across Texas and Oklahoma, to Tennessee, Georgia and Florida, and to Cuba. Useful paid a salary of $ 6 per week. Back from Cuba, the band traveled north through Alabama, where they stopped to perform in Huntsville. Tired of life on the road, he and his wife, Elizabeth, decided to live with relatives in his hometown of Florence.
Marriage and family
In 1896, while performing at a barbecue in Henderson, Kentucky, Handy met Elizabeth Price. They married on July 19, 1896. She gave birth to Lucille, the first child of their six children, on June 29, 1900, after they settled in Florence.
Teaching music
Around that time, William Hooper Councill, president of Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes (AAMC) (now Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University), in Normal, Alabama, recruited Handy to teach music on campus. Useful to be a faculty member in September 1900 and teaching through many 1902.
His enthusiasm for the unique style of American music, which is often considered inferior to European classical music, is part of its development. He was discouraged to find that the college emphasized the teaching of European music as "classical". Handy feels he is underpaid and can make more money touring with the singers group.
Studying blues
In 1902, Handy toured Mississippi listening to various styles of popular black music. The state is mostly rural, and music is part of the culture - especially in the cotton plantations of the Mississippi Delta. Musicians usually play guitar or banjo or, to a much lesser degree, the piano. Handy's incredible memory allows him to remember and transcribe the music he heard on his way.
After a dispute with the AAMC Presidential Council, Handy resigns from his teaching position to rejoin Mahara Minstrels and tour the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. In 1903 he became the director of a black band hosted by the Knights of Pythias, located in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Handy and his family lived there for six years. In 1903, while waiting for a train at Tutwiler, in the Mississippi Delta, Handy had the following experience:
A loose belching nigger had begun strumming the guitar next to me while I was sleeping... As he played, he pressed a knife on a guitar string in a way popularized by a Hawaiian guitarist who used a steel rod. The singer repeats the line three times, accompanying herself with the guitar with the most bizarre music I've ever heard.
Around 1905, while playing dance in Cleveland, Mississippi, Handy was given a note asking "our original music". He plays the melody of the South past, but was asked if the local colored bands could play some numbers. Three young men with outdated guitars, mandolins, and worn bass taking the stage.
They attack one of those who repeatedly and seem to have no beginning and certainly no end at all. Plucking reaches an annoying monoton, but continues and continues, sort of thing related to the cane line and the dike camp. Thump-thump-thump away their feet on the floor. It's not really annoying or unpleasant. Maybe "haunting" is a better word.
A square dance show practically by Mississippi blacks with "one of them herself calling the numbers, and singing all her calls in the G key." He remembers this when deciding the key "Saint Louis Blues".
It was the memory of an old man who cites the figures for the fall of Kentucky - a person who always wriggles his tone on the key of G and calls for calls like a chief elder who is preaching at a revival meeting. Ah, there's my key - I'll do the song at G.
In describing the "blind singer and bare-foot opponent" around Clarksdale, Handy wrote,
surrounded by a crowd of villagers, they will pour out their hearts in singing... They make a living by selling their own songs - "ballet," when they call them - and I am ready to say for the sake of them they rarely create their lack of imagination.
Popularity, fame and business
In 1909, Handy and his band moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where they played at clubs on Beale Street. The origin of his "Memphis Blues" was a campaign song written for Edward Crump, the successful mayor of Memphis in 1909 (and future political boss). Useful then rewrite the song and change its name from "Mr. Crump" to "Memphis Blues."
The 1912 publication of her "Blues Memphis" music sheets introduced her 12-bar blues style; it is credited as an inspiration for foxtrot dance steps by Vernon and Irene Castle, the New York dance team. Some regard it as the first blues song. Handy sold the rights to the song for US $ 100. In 1914, when he was 40 years old, he has shaped his musical style, his popularity has increased greatly, and he is a productive composer.
Useful writing on using folk songs:
The primitive southern bird, as he sings, is sure to bear the third and seventh tones of the scale, slowing down between major and minor. Whether in a cotton field in the Delta or on Levee Street until St. Louis, it's always the same. Until then, however, I had never heard this slander used by a more sophisticated Negro, or by a white man. I am trying to convey this effect... by introducing a flat and seventh third (now called a blue note) into my song, even though the key that applies is primary..., and I bring this device to my melody as well... This is different departures, but as it turned out, it touched the place.
The three-line structure I used in my lyrics was suggested by a song I heard Phil Jones singing in Evansville... While I took the three-line verse as a model for my lyrics, I found the repetition too monotonous... Consequently I adopted the style of making statement, repeating the statement in the second line, and then say in the third row why the statement was made.
Regarding the "three-chord basic harmonic structure" of the blues, Handy writes that "(tonic, subdomain, seventh dominant) is already used by the Negro roustabouts, honky-tonk pianos, nomads and others of the disadvantaged class but not to flinch from Missouri to the Gulf, and has become a common medium in which such individuals may express their personal feelings in some sort of musical soliloquy. "He noted,
In the folk blues, the singer fills the occasional void with words like 'Oh, lawdy' or 'Oh, baby' and the like. This means that in writing melodies to be sung by way of blues, one must give a gap or wait.
Writing about the first time "Saint Louis Blues" was played, in 1914, Handy said,
One-step and other dance has been done for the Memphis Blues tempo. When St. Louis Blues written tango is in tune. I cheated the dancers by arranging the introduction of tango, suddenly breaking into low blues. My eyes swept the floor anxiously, then suddenly I saw a flash of lightning. The dancers looked excited. Something in it suddenly comes alive. An instinct that desperately wanted to live, swung his arms to spread the joy, took them with heels.
His published works are innovative because of his tribe, and he was among the first blacks to achieve economic success from publishing. In 1912, Handy met Harry H. Pace at the Solvent Savings Bank in Memphis. Pace is her graduation grade giver at the University of Atlanta and a student of W. E. B. Du Bois. At the time of their meeting, Pace had shown a strong understanding of business. He earned his reputation by creating a failed business. Handy loved it, and Pace later became the manager of Pace and Handy Sheet Music.
While in New York City, Handy wrote:
I get the impression that these Negro musicians will jump at the opportunity to patronize one of their own publishers. They do not... Negro musicians just play day hits... They follow the parade. Many white bands and orchestra leaders, on the other hand, are wary of new things. Therefore they are most ready to introduce our number. [But] the Negro artist vaudeville... wanted songs that would not contradict the white action on the bill. The result is that these players become our most effective pluggers.
In 1917, he and his publishing business moved to New York City, where he had offices at the Gaiety Theater office building in Times Square. By the end of that year, his most successful songs had been published: "Memphis Blues", "Beale Street Blues", and "Saint Louis Blues". That year the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the white New Orleans jazz ensemble, has recorded the first jazz recording, introducing style to a broad segment of American society. Handy initially had a slight indulgence for this new form, jazz, but the bands seeped into his repertoire with enthusiasm, making many of them jazz standards.
Useful encourages players like Al Bernard, "a young white man" with a "soft southern accent" who "can sing all my Blues". Useful to send Bernard to Thomas Edison for recording, which resulted in "an impressive series of successes for young artists, a success we share with pride." Handy also publishes the original "Shake Rattle and Roll" and "Saxophone Blues", both written by Bernard. "Two young white women from Selma, Alabama (Madelyn Sheppard and Annelu Burns) donated the song" Pickaninny Rose "and" O Saroo ", with music published by the Handy company.These numbers, plus our blues, gave us a reputation as Negro music publisher. "
Hoping to make only "one hundred or more" on his third recording, "Yellow Dog Blues" (originally titled "Yellow Dog Rag"), Handy signed an agreement with Victor's company. Joe Smith's recording of this song in 1919 became the best-selling recording of Handy music to date.
Useful tries to attract the interest of black female singers in his music but initially did not work. In 1920 Perry Bradford persuaded Mamie Smith to record two of his non-blues songs, published by Handy, accompanied by a white band: "It's Called Love" and "You Can not Save a Good Man". When Bradford's "Crazy Blues" became a hit recorded by Smith, African-American blues singers became increasingly popular. Handy's business began to wane due to competition.
In 1920 Pace peacefully dissolved his long-term partnership with Handy, with whom he also collaborated as a lyricist. As Handy wrote,
To add to my misery, my partner withdrew from business. He disagrees with some of my business methods, but there are no harsh words involved. He just chose this time to break with our company so he can arrange Pace Phonograph Company, issue Black Swan Records and make a serious offer for the Negro market.... With Pace, many of our employees.... Still more confusion and sadness arose from the fact that people in general do not know that I do not own shares in the Black Swan Record Company.
Although Handy's partnership with Pace was dissolved, he continued to operate the publishing company as a family-owned business. He published the works of other black composers as well as his own, which includes over 150 sacred compositions and folk song arrangements and about 60 blues compositions. In the 1920s, he founded the Useful Recording Company in New York City. Bessie Smith on January 14, 1925, the recording of Columbia Records "Saint Louis Blues" with Louis Armstrong is considered by many to be one of the best recordings of the 1920s. As soon as the success of Handy "Saint Louis Blues" which in 1929, he and director Dudley Murphy collaborate on an RCA movie of the same name, which will be shown before the main attraction. Handy suggested blues singer Bessie Smith for the lead role, as she has gained wide popularity with her song recording. The picture was filmed in June and featured in cinemas across the United States from 1929 to 1932.
In 1926, Handy wrote and edited a work entitled Blues: An Anthology - Completing Words and Music from 53 Great Songs . This may be the first work to try to record, analyze, and depict blues as an integral part of the South and history of the United States. To celebrate the publication of the book and to honor Handy, Small's Paradise in Harlem hosted a party, "Handy Night", on Tuesday 5 October, which contained the best selection of jazz and blues music provided by entertainers Adelaide Hall, Lottie Gee, Maude White and Chic Collins.
Blues genre is a hallmark of American society and culture in the 1920s and 1930s. So great was his influence, and so much was recognized as a characteristic of Handy, that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his novel The Great Gatsby
All night the saxophone wailed hopelessly about "Beale Street Blues" while a hundred pairs of gold and silver slippers ruffled the shining dust. At gray tea time there was always a room that throbbed incessantly with this low and sweet fever, while fresh faces floated here and there like rose petals blown up by the sad horns on the floor.
Next life
After the publication of his autobiography, Handy published a book on African-American musicians, Unsung Americans Sung (1944). He wrote three other books: Blues: An Anthology: Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs , Book of Negro Spirituals and American Writers and Composers United
During this time, he lived at Strivers' Row in Harlem. He became blind following a falling accident from a subway platform in 1943. After the death of his first wife, he remarried in 1954, when he was 80 years old. His new bride is his secretary, former Irma Louise Logan, whom he often says has become his eyes.
In 1955, Handy suffered a stroke, after which he started using a wheelchair. Over eight hundred people attended his 84th birthday party at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Death
On March 28, 1958, Handy died of bronchial pneumonia at Sydenham Hospital in New York City. More than 25,000 people attended his funeral at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church. More than 150,000 people gathered in the streets near the church to pay their respects. She is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx.
Composition
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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