MHL 155

11/22/10
The Memphis Blues: The Role of Beale Street Musicians

Memphis contained a variety of cultural influences, due to its “rich delta soil”. This soil helped contribute to the city’s high economic base as a market, travel and exchange center, attracting a highly diverse population. During the early 20th century many of the arriving African American musicians began moving to an area in Memphis known as Beale Street. Beale Street allowed musicians to create soulful and emotionally charged music relating to the struggles they faced involving racism throughout the country (Charlton 9-10). Beale Street musicians such as W.C Handy later helped popularize a form of music throughout Memphis known as “the blues,” which would eventually become a nationwide craze throughout the United States. During the early 20th century Beale street contained the “largest urban black population in the south” (Robertson 4). Thousands of African Americans traveled from all over the U.S to Beale Street for a chance at a better lifestyle (Robertson 4). Beale Street attracted many former slaves to its union territory between the 1860’s and the 1870’s (Williams). With them the music they brought “was a blending of European form (12-bar structure) and African traditions (rhythm), accompanied by narrative lyrics (Conover 10). This synthesis of musical cultures helped to shape the development of the music of Memphis, and aided early musicians in creating a style of music later known as the blues. One important musician who incorporated these styles into the early shaping of the blues was William Christopher Handy. Handy was born eight years after the civil war ended in Florence, Alabama (Robertson 21). He began playing the coronet in the early 1880’s, and one day wished to be part of a brass band, which at the time was “the nation’s most popular form of musical performance, for both black and white musicians and listeners” (Robertson 40-41). By the early 1900’s, Handy and his family relocated to Memphis, and moved to what was then called “Beale Avenue” (Robertson 106-107). Beale avenue gave Handy the opportunity to polish the raw folk music he heard, on the streets, into his own more sophisticated style, a style that later would become the blues (Robertson 9). Handy also incorporated the emotion driven human experience into his music, making his songs both a tale of hardship and resolve (Conover 10).
Handy himself experienced many of the hardships he so often sung about. There were many occasions in Handy’s life where he received repeated threats by lynch mobs, humiliation, and segregation while touring the country as a traveling minstrel, and blues musician (Gussow 5). By the mid 1900‘s Handy‘s music began to gain notoriety. His song “Beale Street” gained widespread popularity throughout Memphis, and the U.S. However many white audiences still considered his blues music to be “no more than an amusing racial novelty, a primitive music best appreciated and performed by African Americans” (Robertson 10). Despite negative comments, Handy’s approach towards the blues, and the experience he gained on Beale Street was vital to his success as a musician. Beale street gave Handy the opportunity to shape what he called “primitive music” (Robertson 9), into a genre that helped him to bring “African American music into the mainstream of commercial culture and changed the direction of the American popular song” (Robertson 18). Blues is a style of music that portrays the hardships and struggles of African Americans living in a country where segregation and racism was commonplace in the early 1900’s. Beale Street allowed African American musicians to express themselves freely, and without restraint from white audiences. This freedom allowed blues musicians to create expressive music, which was a soulful reflection of the lives they actually led. W.C Handy played a crucial role in the early shaping of the blues. If it was not his experiences on Beale Street, the music we hear today may have been very different. Many famous blues musicians began their career on Beale street, and it was there that those musicians learned the techniques that later helped shape the blues we hear today.

Works Cited
Conover, Kirsten A. “Singing the Blues.” Christian Science Monitor. 21 Nov. 1996: 10. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 02 Nov.2010
Charlton, Katherine. Rock Music Styles: A History. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2008. 9-11. Print.
Gussow, Adam. “Make My Getaway’: The Blues Lives of Black Minstrels in W.C Handy’s Father of the Blues.” African American Review 35.1 (2001): 5. Academic OneFile. Web. 18 Nov. 2010.
Robertson, David. W.C Handy: the life and times of the Man who made the blues. 4-121. Google Books. Web. 02 Nov. 2010.
Williams, M. “History of Memphis.” City of Memphis. Web 19 Sept .2010.