"The main problem with Handy is one of image. Formally trained, he taught music on the college level, and through the blues compositions he astutely copyrighted and published out of an office on Broadway, he became internationally renowned and prosperous. Handy exuded erudition, urbanity, polish and affluence. That statue in the park off Beale Street portrays him well, dressed fastidiously in a double-breasted suit and tie, smiling and looking less like our received version of the Father of the Blues than the Moneyed Out-of-Town Uncle of the Blues. Maybe if he hadn’t been so rich and fey, people like Joni Mitchell would have been familiar with what he played."
In The New York Times, David Hajdu reviews David Robertson's W. C. Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues.
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