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PROLOGUE A View of Mr. Handy ONE AFTERNOON IN MEMPHIS, 1918 Beale Street is where the blues began. —George William Lee, black civic leader of Memphis, social historian, and friend of W. C. Handy, in Beale Street, 1934 Early afternoons would have been the best time to see William Christopher Handy walking along Beale Avenue. The leader of a cabaret dance band tends to be a late-morning riser, particularly when, like Handy, he has a regular late-night engagement at the Alaskan Roof Garden. This was the most prestigious supper club in Memphis, Tennessee, on the top floor of the Falls Building downtown . There until well into the night W. C. Handy and his orchestra played his new blues music for the affluent white patrons. How gracefully had the young white ladies’ dance slippers the night before shuffled in and out of the rhythms of two-four beats of his blues song “Beale Street”—If Beale Street could talk / If Beale Street could talk / Married men would have to take their beds and walk—while on the bandstand he had played cornet, occasionally along with Charles Hillman on piano, Sylvester V. Bevard on trombone, and Jasper Taylor on drums. Then, at some time in the evening’s entertainment , the musicians in Handy’s band would introduce in their songs what he called his “Tangana” rhythm, also known as the tango. The stocky, light-skinned bandleader and his musicians played it as if for no other reason than to see if these pale, lovely young dancers before them could match their privileged footsteps against the Latin rhythms, which Handy now hears in his mind playing alongside African American blue notes as he walks down the sidewalks of Beale. “The Main Street of Negro America” is what his friend George Lee calls this thoroughfare, known officially in Handy’s day as Beale Avenue. The avenue stretches in an almost straight east-west line for one mile through the African American neighborhood of a city that in 1918 has the largest urban black population in the South. The possibilities of a better economic life here have drawn thousands of people of color from the neighboring rural states of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama to the Beale Avenue neighborhood. A significant number have become comparatively prosperous business owners and professionals, such as Lee, who has his own insurance company on Beale and is prominent in the local Republican Party. Unlike in most of the South, the political franchise is available in this Tennessee city to men of color. Black males are permitted to vote in the Beale wards, albeit under the watchful eye of E. H. “Boss” Crump, the white arbiter of Memphis politics. Handy, shortly after his arrival in Memphis in 1905 with his family from Clarksdale, Mississippi , even had been commissioned by the Crump political machine to write a campaign song for their leader. His composition “Mister Crump,” later reworked and published as “The Memphis Blues,” had helped gain him his first national notice, and by 1918 he is not only a hardworking performer but also the most celebrated composer and publisher in Memphis of the increasingly popular blues songs. Handy this day continues his progress down Beale Avenue. People of color are everywhere about him on the street, coming in and out of the barbershops, law offices, dry goods stores, and groceries. Many greet him. He returns their handshakes—“ebony hands, brown hands, yellow hands, ivory hands” as he later lyrically recalled the population on Beale Avenue in the first decades of the century—or he tips his hat genteelly to the ladies. He is, after all, the man who has celebrated this avenue and its inhabitants in his most popular song for the uptown white audiences. W. C. Handy 4 At this hour in the early afternoon, the sun is high overhead behind him, having risen over the eastern, or residential, blocks of Beale, near where Handy and his wife own a small house. The sun is now beating down on the westward blocks between the intersections of Beale with Fourth Street and with Hernando Street, the vice and entertainment center of Beale Avenue. In addition to being a thoroughfare of respectable vocations and middle-class residences, Beale at its western end near the Mississippi River is also the weekend destination for African American lumber camp workers and plantation hands from Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi. They seek out the pleasures of the avenue’s well-known blocks of Jim Crow...

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