Obstetrician of the Blues

FATHER OF THE BLUES--W. C. Handy --Macmillan ($3).

William Christopher Handy wrote several very good songs and one unkillable one, St. Louis Blues; but essentially he was less a musician than a good businessman whose business was music. He is often called "the father of the blues." He is not; their source is profound and nameless.

But he did bring this broad-shouldered musical form to its first public birth. Since, along with Negro spirituals, Negro blues are the most distinguished U.S. lyric art, that is no small achievement.

Handy's admirable autobiography makes all this clear, and a lot more. It is a rich, direct, engaging set of personal stories, extremely well told. He was born 67 years ago in Florence, Ala. His Grandma Thumuthis foresaw musical talent in his big ears, but his preacher father, to whom hot music was Satan's own cajolery, used to warn him: "You are trotting down to Hell on a fast horse in a porcupine saddle." The boy broke away and wandered, sounded the depths of dereliction in "that gay capital of the sporting world, St. Louis." He married, became bandmaster of Mahara's Minstrel Men. His story of those seasons is a homesick, gaily colored set of lantern slides about a form of entertainment that has vanished.

Later on, among the wide-open delights of pre-war Beale Street, came Mister Crump and Memphis Blues. He tells the familiar story with vivid authority, sorely tilts against "Mr. X--" and "Mr. Z--who gypped him out of the copyright to Memphis Blues for $50.

When business went bad in wartime Memphis, Handy went north, set up as a publisher in Manhattan's Gaiety Building. His account of the rise & fall of the firm of Pace & Handy, evoking the names of such hits as A Good Man Is Hard to Find and O Saroo* makes lively reading. Less lively, but by no means without charm are chapters in which he tells of later triumphs: the dedication of Handy Square in Memphis ("the greatest experience of my life"); the huge concerts he took part in at the San Francisco and New York World's Fairs.

One of the finest tributes to Handy was a letter in 1915 from an African trader in Sierra Leone: "Seeing that you are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, I desire to enter into some relations whereby we [in Africa] may avail ourselves of your music." Handy's book, like his music, is most significant as the life story of a talented Negro in the U.S. Handy makes neither much nor little of the racial question, but he does refer to it, on occasion. And now & again he speaks directly, for Jews as well as Negroes, with a lack of bitterness, a fearlessness and a dignity which lights up both the sins and the hopes of democracy.

* Others: Yellow Dog Blues, Beale Street Blues, Hooking Cow Blues, Aunt Hagar's Children Blues (all by Handy), Oh Death, Where Is Thy Sting, Pickaninny Rose.

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