W. C. Handy

person · earth · Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee

An American cornetist, bandleader and publisher whose importance to this Journey is documentary rather than creative: he is the first literate musician known to have written down what he heard rural Black Southern musicians playing, and then to have published it. Handy led an orchestra in Clarksdale, Mississippi from 1903 to 1905 and travelled the Delta; his account of waiting at Tutwiler station around 1903 and hearing a ragged man press a knife against guitar strings while singing "Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog" is the most frequently cited early description of blues performance in existence. He recorded it in his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues, nearly four decades later, and noted that the knife technique resembled what Hawaiian guitarists did with a steel bar — an aside that is itself a small piece of circulation history. His published blues from 1912 onward turned an oral practice into sheet music that could be bought, and thereby into something that could travel without a traveller.