Tuneful Tuesday–I Got the Blues!

No, not the Rolling Stones kinda 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, Alabama, 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 writes 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 of 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 developing skill, and having formed his own musical publishing company, Handy began to make a name for himself by depressing the emerging jazz idiom by flattening the scale tone, and introducing the improvisational blues element into his music.

His most famous piece of music is St Louis Blues, composed in 1914.  In 1949.  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.”

Earl Scruggs was born on January 6, 1924 in Cleveland County, North Carolina–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 enjoyment 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–distinguishing himself from most mainstream banjoists of the day  and allowing him to generate complex, rhythmic, melodies.  By the age of 21, he’d been invited to join Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, a group which 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:

Subsequently, 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 eclectic and sometimes incoherent love of so many different forms of music, and for inspiring this post.