Beale Street's Hero

A centre of celebration last week was Memphis' Beale Street, the garish Negro thoroughfare with its assortment of poolrooms and pawnshops, its gin parlors and its hot-fish restaurants. While Memphis whites were celebrating the annual Cotton Carnival, Beale Street was having its own fiesta, crowning its own king and queen, parading its own elaborate floats. The king was Undertaker Eddie Hayes. Queen was Ethyl Venson, pretty young wife of a Negro dentist. Highest honors throughout the fiesta were paid to a portly old Negro who had motored from his home in Manhattan for the occasion. A great hero in Beale Street is William Christopher Handy, 62.

On every possible occasion last week bands played his music-Memphis Blues, Beale Street Blues, St. Louis Blues. Whenever he sauntered down the street there was a clamor for his autograph, a crowd of pickaninnies with hands out for pennies. Paul Whiteman brought Handy to the stage of Municipal Auditorium when he played there for the big Floral Ball. Beale Street made him the leader of its grand parade. He stood in the first automobile, doffing his hat to left & right. At small Handy Park, named in his honor, he mounted a reviewing stand, settled down in an old-fashioned rocking chair, solemnly bowed as the marchers saluted him.

It was as a hobo that Handy began the musical career that has earned him mention in the Encyclopaedia Britannica for his fathering of the blues. He was the son of a Baptist preacher who considered it disgraceful to be a musician. Young Handy liked nothing so much as his battered cornet or a bit of close harmony with the boys on the street. When they heard of the World's Fair of 1893, four of them organized a quartet, hopped a freight to Chicago. There they remained jobless, finally had to work their way back South. But Handy's ambition persisted. By 1903 he had a nine-piece band of his own, went around playing for dances. Slowly it dawned on him that the music which went best was mournful and repetitious, akin to the way Negroes had long sung of their troubles.

Handy had 55 men playing for him when in 1909 he was hired to boost a Memphis politician named Edward Hull Crump, who was running for Mayor. Handy wrote a song, played it on Memphis street corners:

Mr. Crump don't 'low no easy riders here, Mr. Crump won't 'low no easy riders here. I don't care what Mr. Crump don't 'low, I'm gonna bar'l-house anyhow. Mr. Crump can go and catch hisself some air.

With all Memphis humming his song, Crump won the election, went on to become the Democratic boss of Shelby County and sit in Congress. Three years later when Handy attempted to publish the song as Memphis Blues, he met with repeated rejections, finally sold it, rights and all, for $100. St. Louis Blues (1914) might have had a similar fate, except that this time, when no publisher was interested, Handy decided to take a gamble and put it out himself. It made him a fortune, still sells so well that it brings in royalties of some $25,000 per year.

For the past 20 years Handy has devoted most of his time to his publishing business, though he has managed to turn out over 60 blues. His current complaint is that popular music has become too mechanical, that radio and cinema have proven big blights. As for "swing" music he says: ''It is the music I was playing 20 years ago, only with more brass and less rhythms."

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