I Got the Blues!

 

No, not the Rolling Stones kind of blues. March 28, it turns out, is the anniversary of the death of two giants of American music.

W.C. Handy was born November 16, 1873, in Florence, AL, to Charles and Elizabeth Handy. His strict Methodist minister father forbade musical instruments in the house, believing them to be tools of the devil, but the enterprising young man worked and saved secretly to buy his first guitar at the age of twelve. Perhaps bowing the inevitable, his father ordered him to return the guitar, but subsequently arranged for the young man to take organ lessons, after which he progressed to mastery of several other instruments.

As a youth, he apprenticed at many different jobs and wrote in his autobiography of his time on a “shovel brigade” at the McNabb furnace that the men beat their shovels on the ground and against the iron coal cars in between shifts. He wrote:

With a dozen men participating, the effect was sometimes remarkable…It was better to us than the music of a martial drum corps, and our rhythms were far more complicated…Southern Negroes sang about everything…They accompany themselves on anything from which they can extract a musical sound or rhythmical effect…In this way, and from these materials, they set the mood for what we now call blues.

Handy did not only use inanimate objects for inspiration in his musical interests: he also cites the “unpremediated art” of the sounds of nature–birds and flowing water especially–as formative to his tastes.

In his early twenties, Handy left his hometown, and embarked on several years’ teaching, and as a band member in numerous musical groups, during which time he developed some skill as an arranger, and began to write his own compositions. With growing skill, and having formed his own musical publishing company, Handy began to make a name for himself by diverging from the current jazz idiom, developing unique distinctive chord progressions (thanks to @dunstaple in comment #1 for making a very useful improvement), pitching notes between the tones of those on the piano and flattening particular notes on the scale.  The resulting, often improvisational, style came to be known as “the blues.” (I’m grateful to the late Mr. She for what I know (and almost understand) about the technique.  I’m sure there are plenty of folks here who can do better; if you’d like to, please jump right in.  Mostly, when it comes to the complexities of different types of music that I like, I follow the Justice Potter Stewart school of musical theory: I know it when I hear it.)

Handy’s most famous piece of music is St Louis Blues, composed in 1914. In 1949, at the age of 75, Handy performed his masterpiece on the Ed Sullivan Show:

William Christopher Handy died at the age of 84 on March 28, 1958. As the title of his autobiography indicates, he’s known as the “Father of the Blues.”

todd 2.jpgEarl Scruggs was born on January 6, 1924, in Cleveland County, NC – in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains – into a farming family whose patriarch died when Scruggs was four years old. His mother, Lula, kept the farm going, and cared for her five children on her own, punctuating days of backbreaking work with nights of musical entertainment in which each family member played a favorite instrument, whether organ, guitar, or banjo. Young Earl took to the banjo before he was quite big enough to hold it in the usual way, and moved it around on the floor in order to get to the right parts of the neck.

With time, Earl perfected a three-finger picking style – one fairly common in southwestern North Carolina where he grew up. This distinguished him from most mainstream banjoists of the day and allowed him to generate complex melodies and rhythms. By the age of 21, he’d been invited to join Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, a group that was hugely influential in the growth of Bluegrass as a popular musical form and which appeared regularly on country music’s premiere radio show, the Grand Old Opry. By 1948, though, Scruggs had left the group with another of its members, guitarist Lester Flatt, and formed The Foggy Mountain Boys. That partnership lasted over twenty years, and produced some of Bluegrass music’s greatest hits, the best-known of which is Foggy Mountain Breakdown:

After his partnership with Lester Flatt broke up in 1969, Earl Scruggs performed in the Earl Scruggs Revue with his sons, Gary, Randy, and Steve, before retiring from performing in 1980.

In 1991, Earl Scruggs, Lester Flatt, and Bill Monroe were the first inductees into the new International Bluegrass Hall of Fame.

Earl Scruggs died at the age of 88, on March 28, 2012.

*Many thanks to my mother, for passing along her largely uneducated, eclectic,  and sometimes incoherent, love of so many different forms of music, and for inspiring this post.

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  1. Dunstaple Coolidge
    Dunstaple
    @Dunstaple

    …Handy began to make a name for himself by diverging from the current jazz idiom, developing unique chord progressions, pitching notes between the tones of those on the piano and flattening particular notes on the scale.  The resulting, often improvisational, style came to be known as “the blues.” (I’m grateful to the late Mr. She for what I know (and almost understand) about the technique.  I’m sure there are plenty of folks here who can do better; if you’d like to, please jump right in…

    I’d say “distinctive” rather than “unique” chord progressions – it’s hard to call any chord progression in western tonal music truly unique – but otherwise that’s a good description.

    And thanks for the essay. I’d heard Handy’s name before, but didn’t know how significant he was.

    • #1
  2. She Member
    She
    @She

    Dunstaple (View Comment):
    I’d say “distinctive” rather than “unique” chord progressions – it’s hard to call any chord progression in western tonal music truly unique – but otherwise that’s a good description.

    Thanks.  That’s a very useful, umm, distinction, and I’ve noted it in the post.

    • #2
  3. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    I done did W. C. already!

    Oh, that’s all right. You’re a better writer than me anyway.

    But you left out my favorite part about Flatt and Scruggs and their time with the Blue Grass Boys. Flatt was already a member, and when Bill Monroe told him that he was bringing in a banjo player, Lester was agin’ it. Banjo players were typically slow and it would muddy up the sound. Then Earl showed up and started to play and that was the end of Lester’s objections.

    • #3
  4. thelonious Member
    thelonious
    @thelonious

    Aint American music great!!

    • #4
  5. Dunstaple Coolidge
    Dunstaple
    @Dunstaple

    thelonious (View Comment):

    Aint American music great!!

    You gotta love the blues. You just gotta.

    • #5
  6. She Member
    She
    @She

    Percival (View Comment):

    I done did W. C. already!

    So you done!  Err… did.  Wonderful post!

    Oh, that’s all right. You’re a better writer than me anyway.

    Thanks, but you’re much too kind. I wish you’d write more posts, @percival.

    But you left out my favorite part about Flatt and Scruggs and their time with the Blue Grass Boys. Flatt was already a member, wand when Bill Monroe told him that he was bringing in a banjo player, Lester was agin’ it. Banjo players were typically slow and it would muddy up the sound. Then Earl showed up and started to play and that was the end of Lester’s objections.

    Oh, that’s a great story. It reminds me of Bernard Cornwell’s story about the casting of Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe. Cornwell mentions a few times in the first couple of Sharpe books that his hero has black hair. So he was a bit worried about the casting decision. Then he watched the first episode, and said, “after that, I never mentioned the color of Sharpe’s  hair again.”

    • #6
  7. MWD B612 "Dawg" Member
    MWD B612 "Dawg"
    @danok1

    She: That partnership lasted over twenty years, and produced some of Bluegrass music’s greatest hits, the best-known of which is Foggy Mountain Breakdown:

    I don’t know, @She, I think this one is more well known:

     

    • #7
  8. She Member
    She
    @She

    MWD B612 "Dawg" (View Comment):

    She: That partnership lasted over twenty years, and produced some of Bluegrass music’s greatest hits, the best-known of which is Foggy Mountain Breakdown:

    I don’t know, @ She, I think this one is more well known:

    I almost used that one, then I thought better of it!

    • #8
  9. Vance Richards Inactive
    Vance Richards
    @VanceRichards

    I learned about Handy in music class and I learned about Scruggs by watching the Beverly Hillbillies.

    • #9
  10. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    She (View Comment):

    MWD B612 "Dawg" (View Comment):

    She: That partnership lasted over twenty years, and produced some of Bluegrass music’s greatest hits, the best-known of which is Foggy Mountain Breakdown:

    I don’t know, @ She, I think this one is more well known:

    I almost used that one, then I thought better of it!

    “Foggy Mountain” gets more radio play, but the “Ballad of Jed” has been burned into a lot of brains.

    • #10
  11. She Member
    She
    @She

    Careless Love, lyrics credited to W.C. Handy, (although the attribution is complicated, and there’s more than one version) sung from 1925 forward by Bessie Smith (with Satchmo on trumpet):

    Apparently it’s a very old melody, which Handy said he borrowed, after learning it in Alabama sometime in the 1890s.

    Here’s Bill Monroe, with his Blue Grass Boys, and Flatt and Scruggs, from the late 1940s:

    I love the history of music of this sort. There’s a nice little movie called Songcatcher about a musicologist collecting folk music from Appalachia which very loosely tells the story of Olive Campbell, who followed along from the English folk song collector Cecil Sharp, with the intention to trace the migration of the British folk song tradition across the Atlantic and into the mountains of the Eastern United States.

    The greatest proponent of this field of study was Francis James Child, Harvard scholar, who collected and catalogued what are known as the Child Ballads.

    The Smithsonian has a tremendous archive of folk music, a genre which, in my mind, never includes songs like Puff the Magic Dragon, or This Land is My Land.  YMMV.

     

    • #11
  12. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    It was Tutwiler, MS where W. C. heard the man singing a song that three times in a row mentioned “where the Southern crosses the Dog.” That man may have been Henry Sloan.

    This is definitely where the man was singing about, just a little way down the line.

     

    • #12
  13. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    It is further alleged that Sloan taught Charley Patton how to play the guitar.

    Somebody did.

     

    • #13
  14. Goldwaterwoman Thatcher
    Goldwaterwoman
    @goldwaterwoman

    I wonder if the history of Bluegrass in the Southern US has any relationship at all to the famous Cornwall reels and dancing in the UK? 

    • #14
  15. Dotorimuk Coolidge
    Dotorimuk
    @Dotorimuk

    Great post, and great comments, all.

    • #15
  16. Manny Coolidge
    Manny
    @Manny

    Totally enjoyed the three clips.  That includes the Stones. I don’t recall a live version of I Got the Blues. But my memory is terrible these days. Thanks. 

    • #16
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