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3 Abbe Niles, Blues Advocate ELLIOTT S. HURWITT One day in the spring of 1925 a young Wall Street attorney walked into the Times Square office of Handy Brothers Music Company. He had an appointment to interview W. C. Handy, the fifty-one-year-old songwriter who had penned a string of blues hits between 1912 and 1922. The lawyer’s name was Abbe Niles, and he was visiting Handy not on a business matter but out of curiosity and for his own pleasure. Handy, who had enjoyed a period of great prosperity half a decade earlier, was now struggling to rebuild a company that lay in ruins.Any publicity a journalist could offer him was welcome, and Niles intended to write Handy up for the Wall Street Journal . Niles had an unquenchable fascination with American musical folklore; Handy was already known as the “Father of the Blues.” The two had much to offer each other and they hit it off immediately. Their thirty-three-year friendship would prove both productive and influential. Niles played a crucial role in W. C. Handy’s career, providing him with legal services at a reduced fee, helping him protect his copyrights, editing and annotating his books, and promoting him in the press from 1925 until the songwriter’s death in 1958.While newspaper columnists introduced Handy to the masses, Niles explicated him for the intelligentsia in the pages of the better magazines,in books,even in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Up to now, Niles’s role in shaping Handy’s image has gone largely undiscussed, although his work as an early jazz and blues authority has received some attention.1 Edward Abbe Niles was born in the northern New Hampshire village of Berlin in 1894.He was raised in the state capital of Concord,where his father, 106 . ELLIOTT S. HURWITT attorney Edward Cullen Niles, was head of the State’s Public Service Commission .EdwardC.Niles’sfather,theRightReverendWilliamWoodruff Niles, was the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire from 1870 to 1914.2 Young Abbe’s mother was musical, and he received piano lessons from Milo Benedict ,a Liszt pupil living in Concord.He was then sent to the Hoosac Preparatory School, where he studied piano for four years with Frank Butcher, former assistant organist at Canterbury Cathedral.ThisAnglo-Episcopalian upbringing was continued at Trinity College, Hartford, where Niles followed in the footsteps of his redoubtable father and grandfather. He won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1917, interrupted his education to serve as a flying instructor in Texas during World War I, spent 1919–20 at Oxford, and received his law degree from Harvard in 1921. Admitted to the New York bar in 1922, Niles was associated with the venerable Wall Street firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham , and Taft from 1925 until his death in 1963.3 Niles was a man of exceptionally broad interests.He collected earlyAmerican tunebooks and maintained an abiding interest in many kinds of music; literature, especially fiction, was an equally strong passion. Niles was an avid tennis player, nationally ranked in the amateur division as a young man. He died while serving as a linesman at Forest Hills on September 2, 1963, having played a match himself earlier in the day.4 Somehow Niles also found time to maintain a law practice in the financial district, although it is difficult to imagine his attending to corporate law with the same zeal he showed for his avocations. In fact, Niles was never made a partner at Cadwalader. Judging by what he was able to achieve in the pursuit of his hobbies, it appears that a legal partnership was not one of his central goals in life. Niles and Handy Abbe Niles’s first awareness of W. C. Handy can be dated to the appearance of “The Memphis Blues” in its second published version, a song with added words by George Norton. This edition of the song, published by Theron Bennett in New York, became an enormous hit, and its lyrics praising Handy ’s band gave the songwriter his first wave of national fame. As Niles himself put it at the beginning of his foreword to Handy’s autobiography,Father of the Blues,“To me in Connecticut in 1913,came the Memphis Blues, an olive among the marshmallows of that year’s popular music.”5 Niles turned nineteen in 1913 and was already at Trinity College,Hartford, when the vocal version of “The Memphis Blues” appeared (Handy turned forty that same year...

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