W.C. Handy

The first major biography in decades of the man who gave us such iconic songs as "St. Louis Blues," "Memphis Blues," and "Beale Street Blues," and who was responsible, more than any other musician, for bringing the blues into the American mainstream.David Robertson charts W. C. Handy's rise from a rural Alabama childhood in the last decades of the nineteenth century to become one of the most celebrated songwriters of the twentieth. The child of former slaves, Handy was first inspired by spirituals and folk songs, but his passion for music pushed him to leave home as a teenager. It was in a…