On this day in 1958, William Christopher Handy died. He was an African American composer and musician, known as the “Father of the Blues.”

Handy was born in Alabama in 1873 and was raised in a middle-class family. His parents wanted him to have a career in the church. Handy’s parents and teachers felt that “Becoming a musician would be like selling my soul to the devil.” Despite these opinions, Handy decided to become a musician. It was hard choice, but it eventually came to something good. He became famous after he wrote his memoir, Father of the Blues, in 1941, though “Stepfather” could have been a clearer label for bringing Blues into the musical mainstream.

Even though Handy’s teachers didn’t consider music as respectable, they provided him with the tools needed to make his dream come true. With a fantastic ear, Handy was given formal musical notation during school. Handy wrote in Father of the Blues, “When I was no more than ten, I could catalog almost any sound that came to my ears, using the tonic sol-fa system. I knew the whistle of each of the river boats on the Tennessee….Even the bellow of the bull became in my mind a musical note, and in later years I recorded this memory in the ‘Hooking Cow Blues.’”

Handy’s talent to accurately record traditional African American music he heard during his years as a young traveling musician in correct sheet music would be his great professional contribution. He not only made “the Blues” music  playable for other musicians, he also made the fundamental elements of the Blues into a word most professional song-composers know today. The compositions of “The Memphis Blues” and “St. Louis Blues” are Handy’s most famous, but his musicality can be heard in pieces by many other composers, like George Gershwin and Keith Richards.

More than 25,000 fans, musicians, and composers filled the streets around Harlem’s Church for W.C. Handy’s funeral, who died at the age of 85.