CHAPTER 11 | THE BLUES 257
rooted in folk culture came to be earmarks of blues performance. First, blues
involves a fl exible approach to pitch, in which some notes of the melody are lowered,
or “bent,” for expression. Second, the blues included a variety of vocal timbres not
found in other types of singing. Third, blues musicians developed a technique of call
and response between voice and instrument. And fi nally, the rhythms are “swung”:
that is, each beat is divided, not into the even eighth notes of other styles, but into
swung eighths, a relaxed long-short pattern sometimes called a shuffl e.
To write down a blues song goes against the idea that the blues is a sponta-
neous kind of music. Yet current knowledge about the early history of the blues
comes from printed sheet music, which predates the fi rst blues recordings. Our
survey of the blues thus begins with sheet music publications before 1920, then
proceeds to the recording artists of the 1920s and, in chapter 14, of the 1930s.EARLY BLUES PUBLICATIONS
A tale that demonstrates the folk origins of the blues was told by W. C. Handy, an
A labama-born musician who came to be called “the Father of the Blues.” Not long
after the turn of the century, he and his band were playing a dance in Cleveland,
Mississippi, when “an odd request” reached the bandstand: “ Would we object if a
local colored band played a few dances?” Happy to be offered a paid break, Handy
agreed, and three young instrumentalists, with “a battered guitar, a mandolin
and a worn-out bass,” took the stage. “They struck up one of those over-and-over
strains that seem to have no very clear beginning and certainly no ending at all.
The strumming attained a disturbing monotony, but on and on it went, a kind of
stuff that has long been associated with cane rows and levee camps.”
Handy could not imagine that anyone would fi nd this music appealing, but
he was wrong:A rain of silver dollars began to fall around the outlandish, stomping feet. The
dancers went wild.... There before the boys lay more money than my nine
musicians were being paid for the entire engagement. Then I saw the beauty
of primitive music. They had the stuff the people wanted. It touched the spot.
Their music wanted polishing, but it contained the essence. Folks would pay
money for it.... That night a composer was born, an American composer.After witnessing the effect of this humble music on a paying audience, Handy lis-
tened to the simple tunes more closely, wrote some down, and arranged them for
his band. When he later published his own popular songs as sheet music, the blues
began to be disseminated in printed form. Handy’s story offers one version of how
the marketplace discovered the blues.
The son of a Methodist minister in Florence, Alabama, Handy studied vocal
music with a graduate of Fisk University, learned to play hymns on the organ,
and received cornet lessons from a local bandleader. Once he left home, he
directed the band for a black minstrel troupe (as described in chapter 10), taught
music briefl y at a black college in Huntsville, Alabama, and led dance orchestras
in Mississippi and Tennessee. While in Memphis he adapted a folk song into a
1909 campaign song for a mayoral candidate, a song that in 1912 he published as
“Memphis Blues,” the fi rst blues song in sheet music form. Two years later Handy
followed that up with his greatest hit, “St. Louis Blues.”W. C. Handy172028_11_254-279_r3_ko.indd 257 23/01/13 8:42 PM