W.C. Handy

Artist Bio:

Highly-influential cornetist, bandleader, songwriter, teacher and music publisher known as the “Father of the Blues,” credited with mainstreaming rural Southern roots music to its contemporary form, published hundreds of new and re-written songs, including the widely popular “The St. Louis Blues” (1914), led a variety of groups from string quartets to minstrels to brass bands, died from bronchial pneumonia on 3/28/1958, age 85