Memphis Blues

[ana_pirogova]

One hundred years ago, in the autumn of 1912, an African-American musician by the name of WC Handy published a song that would take the US by storm - Memphis Blues. It launched the blues as a mass entertainment genre that would transform popular music worldwide

In 1903 William Christopher Handy was leading a band called the Colored Knights of Pythias based in Clarksdale, in Mississippi's Delta country, when one day he paid a visit to the little town of Tutwiler.

"A lean loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me... His face had on it the sadness of the ages," Handy writes in his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20769518