Posted by Jim Lindgren:
Blues Capitalist W.C. Handy.
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_05_10-2009_05_16.shtml#1241984272
In the New York Times, David Hajdu, of the New Republic, has a nice
review of a [1]biography of W.C. Handy W.C. Handy. The review is
entitled [2]�Blues Capitalist.�
In �[3]W.C. Handy ,� David Robertson, who has previously written a
lucid biography of the slave rebel Denmark Vesey, casts overdue
light on Handy�s essential role in establishing the blues as a
popular art, and he does this, much to his credit, without
resorting to dubious claims that Handy was the first or the best of
the blues� multiple progenitors. A mark of both the evenhandedness
of his scholarship and the delicacy of his writing is Robertson�s
resistance to the idea of Handy as the Father of the Blues � a
notion that Handy himself advanced and exploited deftly during his
lifetime. . . .
In another sense of �making� the blues, Handy, through the songs he
published and their widespread use onstage, in recordings and on
film, played a dominant role in the popularization of the music
across a wide spectrum of the general population. �St. Louis
Blues,� the best known of the many songs to bear his name as a
composer, has been recorded more than 1,600 times by artists from
Louis Armstrong to the contemporary jazz saxophonist Greg Osby,
with Bessie Smith, Bing Crosby, Chet Atkins, Chuck Berry, Leonard
Bernstein, Pete Seeger and Doc Watson in between. Through the
royalties from �St. Louis Blues� and dozens of other songs under
his copyright (most notably �The Memphis Blues,� �Yellow Dog Blues�
and �Beale Street Blues�), Handy achieved a status rare among
composers associated with the blues of the early 20th century: he
grew wealthy. He was skillful at both music and business, as a
great many hip-hop artists are today, and he took obvious pleasure
in the status his prosperity conferred among blacks and whites.
His facility with commerce as well as art has tainted Handy in the
eyes of rock-era blues buffs, as if the only proper compensation
for a life of blues-making were the adulation of those fans, as if
the point of the blues were not to cry out against suffering,
subjugation and marginalization, but to preserve those things.
David Robertson harbors no such delusions.
Here is Bessie Smith singing St. Louis Blues in 1929:
[EMBED]
Here is an audio of Louis Armstrong and Velma Middleton doing the same
song in 1954:
[EMBED]
References
1.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001VT3L64?ie=UTF8&tag=thevolocons-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B001VT3L64
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/books/review/Hajdu-t.html
3.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001VT3L64?ie=UTF8&tag=thevolocons-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B001VT3L64
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