Blues Capitalist W.C. Handy.

In the New York Times, David Hajdu, of the New Republic, has a nice review of a biography of W.C. Handy. The review is entitled “Blues Capitalist.”

In “W.C. Handy
,” David Robertson, who has previously written a lucid biography of the slave rebel Denmark Vesey, casts overdue light on Handy’s essential role in establishing the blues as a popular art, and he does this, much to his credit, without resorting to dubious claims that Handy was the first or the best of the blues’ multiple progenitors. A mark of both the evenhandedness of his scholarship and the delicacy of his writing is Robertson’s resistance to the idea of Handy as the Father of the Blues — a notion that Handy himself advanced and exploited deftly during his lifetime. . . .

In another sense of “making” the blues, Handy, through the songs he published and their widespread use onstage, in recordings and on film, played a dominant role in the popularization of the music across a wide spectrum of the general population. “St. Louis Blues,” the best known of the many songs to bear his name as a composer, has been recorded more than 1,600 times by artists from Louis Armstrong to the contemporary jazz saxophonist Greg Osby, with Bessie Smith, Bing Crosby, Chet Atkins, Chuck Berry, Leonard Bernstein, Pete Seeger and Doc Watson in between. Through the royalties from “St. Louis Blues” and dozens of other songs under his copyright (most notably “The Memphis Blues,” “Yellow Dog Blues” and “Beale Street Blues”), Handy achieved a status rare among composers associated with the blues of the early 20th century: he grew wealthy. He was skillful at both music and business, as a great many hip-hop artists are today, and he took obvious pleasure in the status his prosperity conferred among blacks and whites.

His facility with commerce as well as art has tainted Handy in the eyes of rock-era blues buffs, as if the only proper compensation for a life of blues-making were the adulation of those fans, as if the point of the blues were not to cry out against suffering, subjugation and marginalization, but to preserve those things. David Robertson
harbors no such delusions.

Here is Bessie Smith singing St. Louis Blues in 1929:

Here is an audio recording of Louis Armstrong and Velma Middleton doing the same song in 1954: