W.C. Handy Publishes 'The Memphis Blues'
What Happened
On September 27, 1912, W.C. Handy self-published 'The Memphis Blues,' the composition widely credited as the first blues song issued as sheet music — the moment the blues left the back porches, train platforms, and juke joints of the Mississippi Delta and entered the American music industry. Handy, a classically trained bandleader from Florence, Alabama, had written the piece in 1909 as 'Mr. Crump,' a campaign song for Memphis mayoral candidate Edward Crump, years after his famous encounter at a Tutwiler, Mississippi train platform, where he heard a man slide a knife across guitar strings and sing what he called the weirdest music he had ever heard. History calls him the Father of the Blues.
Why It Matters Today
Before September 27, 1912, the blues was a folk music that existed nowhere the music business could find it. Handy put it on paper, put it in stores, and put it on the world's turntables — 'The Memphis Blues' was arranged for the foxtrot, recorded within months, and led directly to 'St. Louis Blues,' the most successful blues composition ever written. Every blues record, club, and festival since traces its commercial legitimacy to the sheet music Handy sold that day.
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