W. C. Handy The Life And Times Of The Man Who Made The Blues

Here is the first major biography in decades of the man who gave us such iconic songs as "St. Louis Blues," "The 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. Robertson weaves a rich tapestry of the worlds Handy inhabited: the post-Reconstruction South; the ministrel shows in all their racial ambiguity; the mysterious, forbidding Mississippi Delta; Memphis, with its jumping music scene; and New York's Tin Pan Alley. At once a testament to the power of song and a chronicle of race and black music in America, W.C. Handy's life story is in many ways the story of the birth of America's indigenous culture.