W.C. Handy2009

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...