The Song That Sold for Fifty Dollars

On September 28, 1912, the first thousand copies sold out in three days. W. C. Handy was told that his song had flopped.

The song was The Memphis Blues, though its first title was longer and more political: Memphis Blues of Mister Crump. Handy had written the tune in Memphis for Edward Crump, a mayoral candidate, and it had become popular enough to help carry the campaign. Now Handy had printed the music himself, put it on sale at Bry’s Department Store, and watched the copies disappear. Then somebody gave him the news that mattered more than the sales: nobody wanted it.

When the publisher Theron Bennett offered fifty dollars for the rights, Handy accepted. The bargain would become one of the most useful mistakes in American music. Handy lost the first big song he had written, but the song travelled without him. In leaving Memphis, it acquired a new title, new words, a new audience and, eventually, a place in the recording history of the blues.

A campaign song with a bent note

Handy was not a country singer who wandered into composition by accident. Born in Alabama in 1873, he had taught school and played cornet in travelling bands before settling in Memphis. He knew the respectable music of the day: brass bands, dance tunes and ragtime. He also collected and transcribed the music he heard on the road, including blues performances that belonged to a less formal tradition.

The important encounter, according to Handy’s account, came in 1903 in Cleveland, Mississippi. A local trio played for a crowd, and Handy noticed that the musicians were being paid less than the money their music seemed to be making for the people listening. He heard not a rough preliminary form of proper music, but a style with its own force. He began fitting elements of African American folk-blues into the musical language available to him: written notation, brass instruments, dance arrangements and the commercial sheet-music market.

That compromise is inside The Memphis Blues. Handy’s 1909 campaign tune for Crump combined a blues sound with ragtime. One of its signatures was the slightly flattened third, a note that refuses to sit comfortably inside the major-key world around it. The music could make a political candidate seem lively while carrying an ache that did not belong to campaign platforms.

The politics were messier than the title suggests. The original song, Mr. Crump, was loosely based on an older song and included words that mocked Crump’s reform programme. It is not known whether Crump heard those words, and he later said that he had not hired Handy himself. The tune survived the campaign by becoming something less local: an instrumental called The Memphis Blues, with two sections added to the original material.

The surviving 1912 sheet music preserves the transition: it gives the song both names, The Memphis Blues, or Mister Crump, and presents it as something a pianist could play far from the Memphis election that supplied its first title.

The fifty-dollar exit

Handy was both composer and businessman, which meant he had to pay for printing before he knew whether the music would sell. The early sales were discouraging enough for him to accept Bennett’s offer. The exact emotional shape of the transaction comes mostly from Handy’s later autobiography, where he described himself as having been taken advantage of. The contemporary commercial history is less dramatic: Bennett bought a song whose prospects were uncertain, then found a way to make it travel.

Bennett took the piece to New York. There he persuaded George “Honey Boy” Evans, a white performer associated with the Honey Boy Minstrels, to put it into a show. Edward Cupero arranged it for the vaudeville circuit. George Norton supplied new lyrics that removed the local political reference. The song became performable outside Memphis because it no longer required listeners to know who Crump was, and because it now came with a stage act ready to carry it from city to city.

This was not a simple story of a tune being discovered by a neutral marketplace. The route ran through the entertainment system of the period, including minstrelsy and its racial hierarchies. Handy’s name remained on the music, while other people refashioned its words, arrangement and public setting. The song became easier to sell partly by being detached from the Black Memphis context that had made it meaningful in the first place.

By the autumn of 1913, Bennett had sold fifty thousand copies of the sheet music, according to the Library of Congress account. The man who had accepted fifty dollars was watching his composition become a national product. The lesson was not merely that he had sold too cheaply. It was that a song had to be arranged for the pathways by which audiences encountered music: a shop, a stage, a travelling band, a printed score and, increasingly, a record.

The blues enters the machine

On July 15, 1914, the Victor Military Band recorded The Memphis Blues in Camden, New Jersey. The Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board describes it as the first blues song to be recorded. The Columbia catalogue also preserves a performance made nine days later by Prince’s Band, listed under the title Memphis blues of Mister Crump. Neither record is simply Handy sitting at a piano and transmitting the song unchanged. These were arrangements made for commercial recording, played by musicians working inside a studio system.

The Victor ensemble was a group of session players who were rarely credited individually. Its sound translated Handy’s tune into the available machinery: brass, reeds and percussion pressed into a two-sided 78 rpm disc. The Columbia record’s catalogue calls the piece a “fox-trot,” a reminder that categories were not yet fixed. A song could be blues in its ancestry, ragtime in its printed form, a dance number in a shop window and a recording for the new gramophone listener.

That instability helped the music spread. The Library’s recording-registry essay says that The Memphis Blues introduced Handy’s style to a wide audience and helped prepare the way for the jazz and blues crazes that followed. But “introduced” does not mean “invented.” The blues existed in Black communities before Handy notated it, named it for a commercial audience and made it legible to publishers. Handy’s importance was partly that he built a bridge between living musical practice and an industry that could reproduce, sell and circulate a song.

The bridge changed the music as it crossed. A performance heard once in Mississippi became a composed object with a credited author. Local political words became generic lyrics. A complex, sectional piece entered a recording format that rewarded brevity and repeatability. The result was not a fossil of the original blues, but a new thing made from several kinds of listening.

What the loss bought him

Handy went on to write St. Louis Blues and Beale Street Blues, and became known around the world as the “Father of the Blues.” The title is useful only if it is heard as a claim about popularization, not ownership of an entire tradition. The phrase gives one man credit for making a musical language visible to the people who controlled publishing and recording. It cannot make him the first person to feel, sing or play it.

The fifty-dollar sale stayed valuable because it taught Handy what authorship alone could not. A tune needed a publisher who knew where to take it, performers who could make it familiar, an arrangement that could survive a new room and a machine capable of carrying it farther than the composer could travel. Handy later became a publisher and record-company owner. His mistake became part of his education.

There is a final irony in the song’s journey. The first thousand buyers understood The Memphis Blues before its creator was persuaded that they did not. The market’s verdict was not false so much as badly timed. For three days the song was already a hit in Memphis. It only became valuable, in the eyes of the people who bought rights, when it had learned how to leave home.

The song’s real fortune was not the money Handy failed to collect. It was the discovery that music can change owners without changing its destination. A composer may lose the object and keep the consequence.