SOURCE: “W. C. Handy,” in Men of Popular Music, Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1944, pp. 65-76.

In the following essay, Ewen summarizes the blues technique employed by Handy, recounts the musician's life, and calls his “St. Louis Blues” “one of the undisputed masterpieces in our popular music.”

To the texture of what soon was to be known as jazz had been added the element of ragtime. Other elements in harmonic and melodic color and in tonality were to be contributed by the blues of W. C. Handy. For years before Handy wrote his classics, “The Memphis Blues” and the “St. Louis Blues,” music similar in general character to the later blues had been in existence. But it was Handy who stylized its form, gave it nationwide recognition, and established it permanently.

The blues was, after all, the “sorrow music” of the lower strata of Negro society—gamblers, prisoners, prostitutes, beggars...