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##### March 29, 1958 OBITUARY ## W. C. Handy, Composer, Is Dead; Author of 'St. Louis Blues,' 84 ##### By THE NEW YORK TIMES W. C. Handy, composer of the jazz classic "St. Louis Blues," died before dawn yesterday at the age of 84. He had been in Sydenham Hospital in Harlem since Sunday with acute bronchial pneumonia. Mr. Handy suffered a stroke three years ago. Since then he had been able to travel only in a wheelchair. With the exception of a few special occasions, he had been confined to his home at 19 Chester Drive, Yonkers. At his bedside when Mr. Handy died were his wife, Mrs. Irma Louise Logan Handy, whom he married three years ago; two sons, William C. Handy Jr. and Wyer Handy; a daughter, Mrs. Katherine Lewis; a brother, Charles, and a grandson, William C. Handy 3d. Mr. and Mrs. Handy had planned to fly to St. Louis on April 7 for the opening of the Paramount film "St. Louis Blues," a fictionalized biography of the composer, and featuring, of course, many of his blues songs. The film will open also in New York and other major cities on the same date. In announcing Mr. Handy's death, radio stations throughout the country played "St. Louis Blues," "Memphis Blues," "Beale Street Blues" and other of his songs in tribute to him throughout the day. Honored at Party Here Mr. Handy's last public appearance was on Nov. 17, 1957, at a birthday party for him in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. More than 800 actors, musicians and public personalities gathered in the Grand Ballroom to hail the "father of the blues." President Eisenhower, Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Governor Harriman were among the notables who sent telegrams of congratulations. Mayor Wagner proclaimed "W. C. Handy Week" in New York. William Christopher Handy, son of emancipated slaves, rose from an Alabama log cabin to a Westchester mansion by capturing in song the melancholia of all loneliness and the sadness of his race. Yet the composer of more than sixty other melodies, was outwardly cheerful, despite blindness during his later years. Moon-faced and benign, with the deep chest of the trumpet player, the chunky composer was a bit of a philosopher. One day, in his eighties, he told school children how, in his youth, he had slept on cobblestones and Mississippi levees "and heard the roustabouts singing on the steamboats and it hung in my ears." He patted his trumpet and said: "Life is something like this trumpet. If you don't put anything in it you don't get anything out. And that's the truth." By then most of his friends were dead and, though the music for "I hate to see that evenin' sun go down" was still in most jazz repertoires, his blues style, so popular for thirty years, seemed to have yielded to new jazz fads. This did not disturb Mr. Handy's good cheer. "The Negroes," he said, "invented jazz, and the white folks made an industry out of it." In a sense politics started the "blues" in 1910. In that year Mr. Handy wrote a campaign song for Edward H. Crump that helped the "Boss" to become Mayor of Memphis. The song became more widely known than the Mayor after it was recorded in 1917 as "Memphis Blues," which described "that melancholy strain, that ever-haunting strain is like a darky's sorrow song." Mr. Handy was born on Nov. 16, 1873, in Florence Ala. His father and grandfather were Methodist preachers, pastors of the first Negro church in that community. Describing his early childhood in his autobiography published in 1941 under the title "Father of the Blues," Mr. Handy recalled that his upbringing was rather more strict than that of most of his white contemporaries. "With all the differences," he wrote, "most of my forebears had one thing in common: if they had any musical talent, it remained buried. My mother admitted a fondness for the guitar, but she could not play it because the church put a taboo on such instruments." When a small boy, Mr. Handy saved enough money to buy a guitar of his own, but his father ordered him to trade it for a dictionary. At 15 he graduated into a minstrel show from his school singing class, only to return home when the traveling show ran out of money. His second venture from home, with 20 cents in his pocket, had as its goal the World's Far in Chicago in 1893. The years following found him alternately employed, penniless, hungry and cold, and in St. Louis he reached his nadir. "I have tried to forget that first sojourn in St. Louis," he once said. But he must never quite have obliterated it all from his memory, for out of the experience grew "St. Louis Blues." Written in 1914, it set the pattern for hundreds of blues songs. Upon that melancholy composition a whole new school of popular music writing was based. From its simple, sobbing lyric of frustration grew scores of songs that later were to become the "torch numbers." Organized Minstrels Mr. Handy's break into the theatre occurred at the turn of the century. Before that he had eked out his musical education at the Negro Agricultural and Mechanical College near Huntsville, Ala. From this time on he was increasingly successful in organizing orchestras and minstrels and in arranging the popular tunes of the day for minstrel performance. In 1898 Mr. Handy married his boyhood sweetheart, Elizabeth V. Price. They had six children. She died in 1937. In 1954, when he was 80 years old, Mr. Handy married his secretary. President and treasurer of the Handy Brothers Music Company, Mr. Handy was a member of the American Federation of Musicians and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. He also belonged to the Negro Actors Guild. Mr. Handy had been totally blind since he fell from a subway station platform in 1943 and suffered a skull fracture. He had lost his sight after World War I, but had partially regained it. In later years, his works had been performed at the Stadium Concerts here. He was in the audience a few years ago when Louis Armstrong wound up a world tour there by playing "St. Louis Blues."
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