W. C. Handy
1873–1958
Bandleader and composer often billed the “Father of the Blues” — not its inventor, but the musician who first wrote blues themes down and carried a folk music into print and popular song.
William Christopher Handy was a formally trained cornetist and bandleader who, by his own account, first heard the blues at a Mississippi train station around 1903. He began publishing adaptations of blues themes in the 1910s — “Memphis Blues” (1912) and “St. Louis Blues” (1914) among them — and more than anyone put the form into sheet music and, soon after, the record industry. The “Father of the Blues” title (also the name of his 1941 autobiography) overstates a single origin; historians treat him as the great popularizer and notator of a music that already lived in the vernacular.