W. C. Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues

The first major biography in decades of the man who gave us such iconic songs as "St. Louis Blues," "Memphis Blues," and "Beale Street Blues," and who was responsible, more than any other musician, for bringing the blues into the American mainstream.David Robertson charts W. C. Handy's rise from a rural Alabama childhood in the last decades of the nineteenth century to become one of the most celebrated songwriters of the twentieth. The child of former slaves, Handy was first inspired by spirituals and folk songs, but his passion for music pushed him to leave home as a teenager. It was in a minstrel show, touring the country, that he got his first real exposure as a professional musician, but it was in Memphis, where he settled in 1909, that Handy hit his full stride as a composer. By the time of his death in 1958, at the age of eighty-five, he had become a major influence on pop culture, his music recorded by countless musicians, from Bessie Smith to Django Reinhardt.Robertson weaves a rich tapestry of the worlds Handy inhabited: post-Reconstruction South; the minstrel shows in all their racial ambiguity; the Mississippi Delta; Memphis, with its jumping music scene; New York's Tin Pan Alley. At once a testament to the power of song and a chronicle of race and black music in modern America, W. C. Handy's life story is riveting.

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