Lay for the Day 28th March

The bandleader, composer and publisher W.C. Handy died on this day in 1958 in New York City.

There is a famous story told in Handy’s autobiography, Father of the Blues. “One night at Tutwiler [a small town deep in the Mississippi Delta], as I nodded in the railroad station while waiting for a train that had been delayed by nine hours, life suddenly took me by the shoulder and wakened me with a start.” The revelation came from the music of a “lean, loose-jointed Negro” who played a guitar while sliding a knife-blade along the strings and sang a song in which each line was repeated three times. It was Handy’s first encounter with the blues.

Now consider, Handy was a black man born in the Deep South (in Florence, Alabama, on 16th November 1873), and he had been playing in bands professionally and moving about the country on and off for more than ten years, but the blues struck him as something new and strange – “the weirdest music I had ever heard”. Whatever the degree of mythologising in his account, and however much the music was the product of a long-developing tradition, it seems reasonable to take him at his word, and accept the implications of his surprise: that the blues was either something recently created, or something strictly confined to the rural backwaters of the Delta – and probably both. And yet by the time he died, the blues, particularly through its vastly successful offspring, rock’n’roll, had risen up from its obscure origin to take a central place in American popular music.

Handy himself, through his writing and adaptation, orchestration and publication of blues, was a key figure in this process, and his title, ‘Father of the Blues’, if not entirely accurate, was well-deserved.

The poem and picture are from The Improvised Version, Volume 1, one of the Inkjet Books.

Blues Hit

Whine of the twined steel
the glass gadget glides on,
dodging along and back
to the fingernail’s pluck,
the tapping and thump of a bootsole and heel,

and the thumbtack-studded rubbed-out felt
on the hammers of a split-backed,
ivory-cracked and ebony-(black-paint)-
worn-away upright
bonging and plinking the big rigid strings

while the wheezing and wail
of a breath-rattled sliver of metal
in the toylike tinplate instrument ’s
humming and moaning in sidesucked air,
cupped in one hand while the other hand’s
clapping the end,

and the crash, bump, rattle of the three-piece kit,
kickdrum and traps and ride
keep time, a kind of time
with the belligerent bullfiddle’s shoving:
Oohee babe, I need your kind of, kind of loving.

John Gibbens

 

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