W. C. Handy took the blues out of the Mississippi Delta's oral tradition and put it on sheet music, earning him the enduring title Father of the Blues. His compositions, above all St. Louis Blues, carried the form's mournful, bent-note vocabulary into mainstream American popular song for the very first time. Nearly every blues-rooted genre that followed, from jazz to R&B to rock and roll, traces a line back to his manuscript paper.

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1914

St. Louis BluesW. C. Handy