"Make My Getaway": The Blues Lives of Black Minstrels in W. C. Handy's Father of the Blues

Abstract

St. Louis observed Langston Hughes in summer of 1941, sung more than any other song on air waves, is known in Shanghai and Buenos Aires, Paris and Berlin--in fact, is heard so often in Europe a great many Europeans think it must be American National Anthem..... in a Tok[y]o restaurant one night heard a Louis Armstrong record of St. Louis Blues played over and over for a crowd of Japanese diners there (144-45). If W. C. Handy's universally celebrated 1914 composition--the most influential American song ever written, according to Jasen and Jones (235)--was powerless to prevent Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, then Handy's autobiography, published to general acclaim six months before bombing, soon put to use in Allied war effort, a morale booster on Western Front. may please you to know, Handy wrote composer William Grant Still in 1944, that Council on Books in War Time has our permission to send 100,000 books of my autobiography Father of Blues to boys overseas without cost, and received a letter from an Army Chaplain stating this book has furnished many texts for his sermon (Southern, In Retrospect 231). At time of Father of Blues' publication in 1941, according to Handy's white literary associate Abbe Niles, Handy the most famous and most affectionately regarded American Negro (Father v)--the benign obverse, as it were, of Richard Wright, whose infamous and scarifying Native Son, published year before, decidedly not sort of propaganda Council on Books in War Time wanted to place in hands of an uneasily segregated U.S. military. [1] If Wright's Bigger Thomas avatar of African-American rage and despair, Handy's popular acclaim as what Newsweek called the Beethoven of Beale Street (Beethoven 46) grounded in story of a Southern black boy who makes good, creatively and financially, in an fully prepared to honor his musical gifts, if not always his rights as a citizen. Nor this implicit comparison lost on Handy's editorial collaborator, Arna Bontemps, who assumed Father of Blues would be vetted by its editors with an eye on mainstream sales. Just read in a P[ublishers] W[eekly], Bontemps wrote Langston Hughes several months after delivering finished manuscript, summarizing 1940 in book marts, one of sensations of year sudden boom and abrupt decline of Native Son as a best seller. It concluded boom due to novelty of such book being chosen by Book-of-the-Month and fade out followed discovery on part of readers (who thought they were getting a murder thriller) book contained a argument.... The Handy book should go to press soon--vastly diluted since last saw it, no doubt. take no credit or blame for its final shape. (qtd. in Nichols 54) [2] Native Son, in other words, a filial indictment; Father of Blues, dictated by Handy on eve of world war and ending with words God Bless America (a nod to Irving Berlin's 1939 anthem) a paternal benediction, a Washingtonian refusal of bitterness in service of uplift and national unity, anti-Native Son. Or it? While political argument residing within pages of Handy's autobiography has long remained obscure, it is worth remembering Handy initially entitled his life-story Fight It Out. Since title 'Fight It Out' did not express a musical career, he notes in Author's Acknowledgments, I have changed it to 'Father of Blues' (xiii). The original title resonates nowhere more than in opening chapter, in which Handy sketches lives of his two grandfathers, both of whom had struggled in different ways against confines of slavery. His paternal grandfather William Wise Handy had run away from his master in Princess Anne, Maryland, then was overtaken and sold into Alabama where, still urged by desire for freedom, he started an insurrection for escape, and shot but not killed. …