"He understood that the same strong emotions he had felt in Tutwiler were not some aberration, not the haphazard response to the mood of a specific time and place, but stood as genuine testimony to the power of this strange, roughshod style of performance. In an instant, he saw that people would pay for these songs, audiences would flock to them."
This is Ted Gioia writing in Delta Blues in regards to W.C. Handy's reaction to local black musicians. The group was playing at a dance in Cleveland, Mississippi, and consisted of a guitarist, a mandolin player, and a bassist. The songs were akin to what Handy heard during his much-ballyhooed encounter with a musician at the Tutwiler train station in 1903 -- the apocryphal moment when the blues was "born."
The music at the dance had no clear beginning or end, few harmonic and melodic variations, and was driven by a relentless, rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the musicians' feet. Today, this music would be classified as proto-blues or pre-blues; back then, it was often referred to as native music or primitive music or simply dance music.
At any rate, as the musicians played "a rain of silver dollars began to fall around the outlandish, stomping feet" (more Gioia) and now Handy began to understand fully "the beauty of primitive music."
This is when the blues became commercialized. We've been wringing every last penny out of them ever since.
We recently papered the immediate area with colorful flyers depicting two cartoons. In the first, W.C. Handy is seen chasing after music notes (blue notes, in fact) with a butterfly net; in the second, he is selling them at a makeshift stand. At the bottom it simply read: "Fairo Records." It's modestly clever.
