Racial violence, "primitive" music, and the blues entrepreneur: W. C. Handy's Mississippi problem. (Essay).(Critical Essay)

From: Southern Cultures | Date: September 22, 2002| Author: | Copyright information

Composer of the best-selling "Memphis Blues" and "St. Louis Blues," author of an autobiography titled Father of the Blues (1941), W. C. Handy (1873-1958) has a curious place in the history of American blues music. He was not, after all, a bluesman; he was a pre-jazz cornetist and bandleader, a skilled sight-reader and arranger who plied his trade on the black minstrel-show circuit of the 1890s. Educated to be a schoolteacher, a member of Florence, Alabama's, black elite, Handy scandalized his family, at least at first, with his willful class descent into show business. "A box," ...

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