W. C. Handy

CTL-E-6042 · Person · musician · 1873-1958

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07266 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-6042.

William Christopher Handy, born November 16, 1873, in Florence, Alabama, was the composer, cornetist, and bandleader who carried the blues from Black folk practice into published, orchestrated popular music. The son and grandson of Methodist ministers, he left home in 1892, worked with traveling musical groups, and from 1903 to 1921 conducted his own orchestra out of Clarksdale, Mississippi, steeping himself in the music of the Delta and Memphis. Unable to find a publisher, he co-founded the Pace and Handy Music Company, later Handy Brothers. His Memphis Blues, published in 1912, and above all St. Louis Blues in 1914, built blues harmony and the flattened blue seventh into songs the whole country could buy, play, and record; Beale Street Blues and Loveless Love followed. Handy also edited landmark anthologies of blues and spirituals and studies of Black musicians, and titled his 1941 autobiography Father of the Blues, the name by which he is still known. He died in New York on March 28, 1958.

The record

• Also known as: William Christopher Handy, Father of the Blues

Notes

Staged 2026-10-16 under CTL-GOV-006 (Scan Tail Wave 3 — 747 Program, Wave 10; third Scan Tail packet at the founder's 40-record size). Gate A (2026-10-16): no W. C. Handy entity in the live graph at 3,683 entities (exact / normalized / alias + token containment); ID CTL-E-6042 free. Supply: 747 Supply Ledger, Tier 4 — corpus scan tail tranche, ranks #1401–#2050 (corpus-gap-candidates-2026-10-15.json ranked clean survivor #1688). The scan supplied the NAME STRING ONLY; no fact in this record is sourced to it (CTL-GOV-004). SCOPE GATE: PASS — The publisher-composer who made the blues a national commercial form; upstream of the Chicago blues tradition the graph documents extensively, and the composer of the St. Louis Blues that Bessie Smith (CTL-E-5940) recorded in 1925 — a tie carried in prose, not staged as an edge (see BLOCKED_E). Vital status: DECEASED — died March 28, 1958, New York (Britannica). Tribute treatment in the Curator's Judgment. STATISTICS (sourced, dated): CONFLICT SHOWN, NOT BLENDED: Beale Street Blues is dated 1916 by Britannica and 1917 by the Columbia Encyclopedia account; CTL prints both and follows Britannica in the description. No sales or recording-count figure is staged: the often-repeated claim for St. Louis Blues as among the most recorded songs of its era was not quantified from a sourced count in this pass. MEDIA: photo HELD (W. C. Handy portrait photograph, Handy Brothers Music Company era — named candidate only; file-level verification per CTL-PHOTO-001 still required named as candidate; no file-page verification in this pass); chart FILLED (charts/chart-ctl-e-6042-w-c-handy.svg); video HELD (no matching-entity CTL Short or verified-rights archival video staged); audio HELD (no rights-cleared matching-entity audio staged). MEDIA LAYER (staged 2026-10-16; full per-asset PHOTO-001 records + embed specs in the packet's staged JSON, Drive packet folder): map = N/A (Non-place record; no map attaches at the entity layer.) | visual_assets = HELD: | chart = FILLED (CTL-created SVG (black / deep red / gold) built only from this record's sourced facts) | video = HELD (No matching-entity CTL Short in the Shorts Link Map catalog (checked by name and variants), and no official/em) | audio = HELD (No audiobook excerpt or author recording with a CTL rights basis was staged in this pass.)

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, W.C. Handy (accessed 2026-10-16) — November 16, 1873 Florence birth and March 28, 1958 New York death, the Knights of Pythias orchestra 1903-1921, Pace and Handy Music Company with Harry Pace, Memphis Blues published 1912, St. Louis Blues 1914, Beale Street Blues 1916, Loveless Love 1921, the anthologies, and Father of the Blues (1941) — https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-C-Handy (primary source · build store)
• Columbia Encyclopedia, via FactMonster, Handy, W. C. (accessed 2026-10-16) — independent encyclopedia confirmation of the 1873-1958 life, minstrel-show cornet start in 1896, Memphis Blues (1912) rising from the 1909 Mr. Crump campaign song, the 1918 move to New York, and the song and book catalog — https://Www.Factmonster.com/encyclopedia/arts/performing/pop-jazz-bios/handy-w-c (build store)

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Record CTL-E-6042 · Combined Graph record U-07266 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 2 sources.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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