{"id":19678,"date":"2014-12-13T10:30:23","date_gmt":"2014-12-13T16:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=19678"},"modified":"2015-10-28T11:15:39","modified_gmt":"2015-10-28T16:15:39","slug":"the-weirdest-music-he-ever-heard-by-rafael-alvarez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/the-weirdest-music-he-ever-heard-by-rafael-alvarez\/","title":{"rendered":"“THE WEIRDEST MUSIC HE EVER HEARD” by Rafael Alvarez"},"content":{"rendered":"

BIRTHDAY GREETINGS TO W.C. HANDY (1873\u20131958)\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Today we honor W.C. Handy<\/strong>, born 141 years ago on November 16.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"WCHandyAlvarez\"<\/a>A few decades ago, the newspaperman Wayne Countryman\u2014<\/strong>a copy editor with a rock and roll heart\u2014made a pilgrimage to W.C. Handy\u2019s Memphis home at 352 Beale Street. The gate was locked.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSome guy said he\u2019d get the key and let me in,\u201d remembered Countryman, who grew up grooving to Kool & The Gang<\/strong> at Catholic school dances in Rome, New York. \u201cHe pointed to the Daisy Theater and asked if I\u2019d like to see that too\u2014said he had a hoochie band that played there on Saturday nights.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Countryman, who has crossed the Great Magnolia State chasing blue ghosts, described his Beale Street guide as \u201cfascinating\u2014a real motor-mouth who commingled Scripture, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution\u2014all inaccurately\u2014for about two hours.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe sold me a half-warm Coke that ended up costing $10.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A hoochie band and warm Coca-Cola for a sawbuck!<\/span><\/p>\n

Holy Race Records!<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf you listen carefully to Handy\u2019s \u201cSt. Louis Blues\u201d (1914) it\u2019s actually a tango despite the title\u2014tango was hip at that time,\u201d said Alan P. Marcus<\/strong>, a guitarist and Maryland professor of geography who often takes his classes on blues field trips to Mississippi.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tango, rag or blues, like the more fortunate characters in a Faulkner novel (if there are any), the music endures.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe flamboyant New Orleans pianist Esquerita [Eskew Reeder, 1935\u20131986] transformed \u201cSt. Louis Blues\u201d into a minor cult hit in 1963 called \u201cUndivided Love,\u201d said Larry Benicewicz<\/strong>, a Baltimore blues scholar and collector of 45 rpm records.<\/span><\/p>\n

For $8.91 you can download \u201cW.C. Handy Blues (As Sung by His Daughter Katharine Handy Lewis in Traditional Style)\u201d and listen across the 90 miles south on Highway 61 from Memphis to Tutwiler in Tallahatchie County.<\/span><\/p>\n

At a Tutwiler train depot in 1903, Handy\u2014by then a classically-trained composer and bandleader\u2014heard a black man playing slide guitar with a knife blade while singing \u201c\u2026 where the Southern cross the dog \u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"yellow<\/a>Handy memorably called the heart-rending tune, \u201cthe weirdest music\u201d he\u2019d ever heard, this some six decades before Don Van Vliet released, \u201cTrout Mask Replica.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The true blues\u2014skinning tomcats with slide guitars\/fattening frogs for snakes\u2014still seems like the weirdest music made by man, especially as practiced in the North Mississippi Hill Country once made by Junior Kimbrough<\/strong> and kept alive by his kin.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1976, former newspaperman turned physician David M. Brown<\/strong> was writing for the Commonwealth <\/em>of Greenwood, Mississippi. That June, he interviewed Thomas F. Clay<\/strong>, M.D. [1885-to-1985], who remembered meeting Handy in Clarksville as a young boy.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTutwiler was nothing at that time,\u201d Clay told Brown. \u201cThere was nobody here.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Clay recalled that before blues became pop music, Handy was primarily a violinist.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe offered my Daddy $500 for a Stradivarius violin that had belonged to one of my father\u2019s uncles,\u201d said Clay, who also said that the young Handy worked for a time as a janitor at the Planters Bank in Clarksdale.<\/span><\/p>\n

(Neither the Stradivarius claim nor the reference that Handy worked as a janitor could be confirmed.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Clay said his father played the instrument \u201cfor a little while and put it up on top of a wardrobe in his room, he let it stay up there and the darn rats got it \u2026 had cut it slab-dab in two \u2026 a Stradivarius absolutely eaten up by the rats [and] old Handy offered daddy $500 for the thing \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat was way back yonder \u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Rafael Alvarez can be reached via <\/em>orlo.leini@gmail.com<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\"The<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"WCHandyQuoteAlvarez\"<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

–<\/span>
\nThis article was originally printed in <\/span>The Local Voice #218 (<\/span>published\u00a0December 4, 2014).
\nTo download\u00a0the PDF of this issue, click here.\u00a0<\/a><\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BIRTHDAY GREETINGS TO W.C. HANDY (1873\u20131958)\u00a0 Today we honor W.C. Handy, born 141 years ago on November 16.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":19679,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[314],"tags":[208,939,4911,4315,1094,1380],"class_list":["post-19678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-history","tag-blues","tag-delta","tag-father-of-the-blues","tag-history","tag-local","tag-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/WCHandyFEAT.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}