1909: W.C. Handy, ‘Memphis Blues’ and the Crump Machine

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Posted Friday, March 18, 2022

By Matt Chaney, for chaneysblog.com

©Copyright 2022 for historical arrangement and original content by Matthew Chaney, Four Walls Publishing

“The blues” was breaking out, music purely conceived of the American South. Blues pickers sang about sorrow and elation in the delta, and vice, violence. From Memphis joints on Beale Street, “there came the sound of banjos, of automatic pianos, and of the weary blues.” Machine politics inspired music at Memphis, dating to the prison chain of deputy Joe Turney, the ballad of Joe Turner.

Edward H. Crump campaigned for Memphis mayor in the 1909 election. A police commissioner, Crump ran on the reform platform, promising to eliminate gambling and liquor sales to square with dry laws of Tennessee. The red-headed Crump, 34, blamed crooked cops and officials for debauchery. He was a native of Mississippi, son of a Confederate, a hard-working, successful merchant, and a crafty politician.

Crump upstaged the police and sitting mayor, gathering his own deputy posse to raid “Negro dives” from Memphis south into Mississippi. Newsmen went along, recording scores of arrests, and Crump enjoyed good press. The Commercial Appeal hailed him as “pathfinder” for local law enforcement. “He has done a good service for the city, and members of the legislative council applaud him.”

Memphis was “wide open,” recalled Luke Kingsley, former jug musician and bartender at the Monarch Saloon on Beale. “You had to check your knife and gun at the front door before you could get in.”

“I could remember counting 14 opium dens in town. Drugstores made a fortune selling nothing but opium. Whorehouses were all over town. The going rate was 50 cents. They were thought of as being just as legitimate as grocery stores. And the only kind of policemen you had were down-and-outers.”

In political ads and rhetoric, Crump made examples of two Memphis criminals: black saloonist Hammitt Ashford and white dive-keeper Bill Latura. Crump branded them thug cronies of the mayor’s office, immune from prosecution in exchange for their delivering black votes, by whatever means. Afro-Americans constituted the rising voting bloc of Memphis and western Tennessee, harnessed by politicians through dangerous associates, black and white. Election fraud was a delta staple and simple for Ashford and Latura, reputed racketeers and killers who were bitter enemies on Beale.

Beale Street stood urbanized by the 20th century, from the 1845 muddy lane named for a cotton dealer. On east end of the avenue, residential development hemmed around old antebellum mansions, estates dwindling for parcels sold. Back west of the Beale intersection with DeSoto, center of modern action, former stately homes were boardinghouses. Beale’s large commercial buildings clustered near Main Street, down to the riverfront.

A newsman took in Beale on a Saturday night, strolling eastward from Main. “The street itself, the peculiar mixed style of its architecture, its crooked topography, and the curious jumble it presents of pretentious buildings looking down in lofty contempt upon the mean shanties that surround them, these things alone are worth the visit,” he reported. “But the life of the street itself, the cosmopolitan character of its inhabitants, the dense mass of humanity that bars the progress of pedestrians on its sidewalks, the multiplex character of the shops that line the populous thoroughfare, the indescribable variety of goods that fill the shelves of the shops—all these present points of interest.”

“Pass by the cheap [whiskey] barrelhouse, where a small placard labeled ‘Drinks 5 cents’ describes the character of the commodities sold within.”

Beale Street was “Negro America,” declared George Washington Lee, resident writer. “There are many other streets upon which the Negro lives and moves, but only one Beale Street… Adventurers, drawn to it by some hidden attraction, wander up and down this old avenue of gray buildings where golden balls above pawnshops glisten in the sun; where Jewish vendors stretch their racks of clothing across the store fronts, and glib-tongued barkers call to passersby to come in and view the bargains; where laughter and song ring out from the cafes and dance halls, and electric pianos join with the traffic noise to create a sound triumphant.”

At nightfall on Beale, electric lights cast colorful hues, “red, pink and yellow” on storefronts aglow. A writer met “throngs of people on the sidewalks” at sundown one holiday. “The colored folks were out in force [with] broad grins and boisterous laughter, with oft recurring ‘snorts’ taken at barrelhouses… everywhere the utmost good humor prevailed.”

But some folks frowned passing Hammitt Ashford’s saloon, 352 Beale, for its open doors and windows, wall paintings of nudes blaring visible outside, among elements. The joint sat at northwest corner of the raucous DeSoto intersection, with gamblers, drug dealers and prostitutes cavorting day and night. Pimps, or “mashers,” sold mere kids, such as the 17-year-old dead of her botched abortion in Ashford’s home. Ashford distributed a masher business card, “bearing his picture and offensive language,” remarked the Commercial Appeal. A woman notified the mayor, alleging “she has suffered at the hands of the notorious Negro… Ashford is enticing young girls into his place and ruining them.”

Hammitt Ashford’s publicized assaults and victim complaints demonstrated his brutality against females for a decade in Memphis, yet he avoided prison time. Ashford also committed cowardly attacks on males, cutting and shooting them in ambush. The “payback” assassination of Fatty Grimes was legend, occurring at the front door of Ashford’s dive, with the saloonist one of four accused gunmen acquitted of murder charges.

Jim “Bad Eye” Musgrove fought a friend of Ashford in Robert Church’s saloon, 324 Beale. Ashford and his hyenas jumped in, knifing Musgrove viciously, leaving entrails “protruding from several abdominal wounds.” Musgrove survived but others did  not, tangling with Ashford crews. George “Cousin Hog” Flynn, gambler and bouncer, shot Ashford in M.L. Clay’s saloon, 351 Beale. While Hammitt recovered Cousin Hog busied himself on DeSoto Street, where he stabbed a man to death. Back on Beale he chased Clay with gunshots, and Cousin Hog probably sensed fate at hand. An assassin appeared at his door beside the Monarch and shot him dead.

“Wild Bill” Latura was worse than Ashford. A serial killer, Latura’s carnage began at his family’s Italian grocery and barroom in 1902. A drunk wielded a knife and Latura beat him to death with a baseball bat. Latura ran Negro gambling houses and frequented brothels, acquiring girlfriends and racist grudges. Ashford thrashed a black mistress of Latura, cracking her with a buggy whip. Latura, enraged, shot the woman in an argument and afterward targeted black males, numerous incidents. He struck one man with a car and shot at others, wounding a porter in the Dixie Saloon on South Third, surprising M.L. Clay at his joint on Beale. Clay dodged bullets and fired back. Beat cops were terrified of Latura, a crazed “Negro Hater,” everyone said, who sought a showdown with Hammitt Ashford.

On a December night in 1908, Bill Latura strode into Ashford’s place on Beale, looking for the dive-keeper. Learning Ashford wasn’t present, Latura brandished an automatic pistol and strafed blacks around a pool table. Four males died and a female was hit, shielding her fallen man. At trial doctors testified Latura was insane, a delusional paranoiac, and a white jury astonished the public, dismissing quadruple murder charges. Critics objected, alleging political protection for Latura, 28, a cousin of the sheriff. Predictably, a judge ordered Latura released from mental care after one year, and he continued to intimidate cops, court witnesses, juries, newsmen and rivals. Roaming as the most feared man in Memphis, Latura would kill again.

For corrupt officials, Ashford and Latura, Democrat E.H. Crump made political hay in 1909, ripping them all on campaign. Crump won the mayoral election, edging Joseph John Williams by 79 votes. Afro-Americans favored Williams, who topped voting precincts along Beale, but Crump “reform” carried the white bloc and enough blacks. Crump’s victory set in motion his political machine to become infamous above predecessors. But a larger mark of the Memphis time swept America—milestone music by W.C. Handy, bandleader and composer.

Handy, three years in the city with his family, had clawed to the top of black bandsmen, rivaled only by Charles Bynum. Handy’s dance band was a headliner at Church’s Park on Beale, Dixie Park on the Southside, and on excursion steamers like the Pattona and White Light. During the last week of October 1909, Handy and his players worked both sides of the political aisle, first welcoming Republican President William Howard Taft to Memphis, belting their patriotic tunes from Steamer Kate Adams.

Handy also contracted with local Democrats for Crump. Jim Mulcahy, saloon owner and Crump operative, hired the band for campaign music. Mulcahy wanted a Crump theme song but Handy wasn’t interested in covering familiar melody, pop or otherwise. “Hot-cha music was the stuff we needed, and it had to be mellow,” wrote Handy. “Where was it to be found? Certainly not in any existing files. I closed my eyes and tried to dream it.”

Handy considered instrumentals and lyrical snatches “half-moaned, half-spoken,” from his experience. He imagined Spanish tango rhythm, Italian crescendo, Hawaiian guitar and country picking—disparate entries coming melodious together, now in mind. He heard again a black pianist in Pee-Wee’s, plunking melody “haunting and thoroughly original.” Handy remembered delta Mississippi, waiting on a train, when the black guitarist wailed and pressed knife blade to strings. “I could hear what I wanted. It was a weird melody in much the same mood as the one that had been strummed on the guitar at Tutwiler.”

Handy composed a campaign instrumental, Mister Crump, writing on the cigar stand in Pee-Wee’s. He assembled players for a street band, aiming to sway black votes from Republican to Democrat. The ensemble was Handy on trumpet; brothers Paul and Ed Wyer on violin, and possibly Jim Turner; Archie Walls, bass violin; George Higgins, guitar; Bob Young, clarinet; James Osborne, saxophone; and George Williams, trombone.

“They put us in a two-horse wagon and hauled us to Main and Madison,” Young told the Commercial-Appeal decades later, for this account: The band played the song, with its eerie blues rhythm… and pretty soon, says ‘Uncle Bob,’ everybody on the street corner was dancing—they just couldn’t resist the urge that the odd melody seemed to give them. Young recalled: “Professor Handy, as leader, was bearing down on his trumpet so hard that he almost made it smoke.”

Handy designed music breaks for solos, and two players got creative: Young improvised a flurry on clarinet, and Paul Wyer finished memorably on violin. Wyer “went wild,” producing “something new and unheard-of,” reviewed Abbe Niles in the book edited by Handy, Blues: An Anthology. Wyer “deviated from his score and put in some licks on his own account; he licentiously patted his feet.” Niles noted that Handy “learned something from this; from then on his musicians had carte blanche in the breaks of his blues, of which they, and soon other Negro bands, made use with gusto. Such things cannot be hid under a bushel, and it was not long before whites were doing the same thing.”

“The effect was electrical wherever heard,” Handy wrote for New York Age. “When we played, no matter where, the people could not refrain from dancing. They danced in parks, halls, stores, on sidewalks, streetcars—anywhere. I shall never forget the night we played this for a colored dance as a tryout. We had played only a few measures when a shout went up that thrilled me.”

Recollections conflicted over whether words were initially part of the song. Handy and Young thought so, decades later, maintaining that “Mister Crump” was mentioned from outset. But evidence indicates the ditty remained an instrumental through end of 1909. Ed Crump later insisted his name wasn’t used until 1910, when Handy visited to ask permission, first time they met, for a song titled “Mister Crump Blues.”

Regardless, Mister Crump was a three-line blues number in 1911, for the mayor’s reelection. E.H. Crump had lost Beale precincts in his first mayoral drive, but he swept the city this time, trouncing J.J. Williams.  Eyesight, meanwhile, confirmed Crump “reform” meant nothing along the packed streets of Beale and Gayoso, DeSoto and Hernando, prime Afro districts.

Gambling and alcohol still reigned and dive owners paid poll tax on behalf of black voters, bundling thousands for Crump. Hammitt Ashford left Memphis for North Little Rock then Pine Bluff, Ark., still a bootlegger and pimp committing assaults, accused of pummeling two females with a baseball bat, among reports. Bill Latura remained on Memphis streets, having switched his allegiance to the Crump Machine, though changing in no other way.

The lyrics of Mister Crump were satirical, belying reality, purporting he banished hustlers and revelers, “easy   riders.” Phrasing was borrowed from the folk song Mama don’t ’low no pickin’ and singin’ round here. Memphis musicians and audiences contributed wry words, chanting merrily over instrumentals:

Mister Crump don’t ’low… no easy-riders round here.

Mister Crump don’t ’low… no easy-riders round here;

Well, I don’t care what Mister Crump don’t ’low.

We gonna barrel-house any-how.

Mister Crump don’t ’low, and ain’t gonna have it here.

Well, Mister Crum can go… and get his-self some air.

Handy self-published an instrumental version in 1912, renaming the song Memphis Blues, and distributed more than a thousand copies, many hand-written. Black vaudeville shows demanded Memphis Blues, including Salem Tutt Whitney’s Southern Smart Set, which employed the lyrics for singers like Mamie Smith and Goldie Chappelle. Unfortunately a store pianist bamboozled Handy, catching the musician strapped for cash. Theron C. Bennett bought song rights for $50, securing himself a small musical fortune and enduring notoriety as a con artist.

Composer W.C. Handy won adoration of the planet, applause everlasting, as a founder of American music.

“The ‘Memphis Blues’ is known all over this country and its composer is almost as well known,” observed the Nashville Tennessean in 1916. “Down in Memphis town Handy reigns almost supreme at most of the dances, his music being the one big boast that Memphians have.” G.W. Lee, on Beale Street, said his friend Will Handy “changed the entire tempo of American music.”

In 1930 Clifford McGuinness, Pittsburgh Courier, credited Handy for the “first real blues” published. “After the success of the ‘Memphis Blues,’ which ushered in the present era of jazz, both races recognized his genius and lent encouragement.” Elsewhere in the Negro press, poet Langston Hughes lauded Handy, 1954, writing for New York Age: “Given new vitality just before the First World War by the folk blues and the personal creations of W.C. Handy in blues form, Negro syncopation became the popular music of America.”

“Handy was the father of it all; he was the beginning,” said Papa John Gordy, Dixieland jazzman, following the composer’s death in 1958. “I never met him, never had the chance. I never had to. What he did has been in my blood all the time I’ve played.”

Merl Eppse of Nashville, expert in African-American history, had met Handy on occasion. “He captured something great and left it behind. We’re lucky, I think. I always liked him as a person.”

O.V. Wright, singer of R&B and gospel, cited Handy for the chart-busting “Memphis Sound” of Stax Records in 1968. “Some people call it ‘soul,’ but it’s only the old blues. I think it’s the old Handy sound passed down to a new generation.”

Judy Peiser, 1990, Center for Southern Folklore, said “eventually someone would have written the blues, because it was a music of the people. The reason Handy is so important is that he was a classically trained musician. Not only could he conceive and perform the music, but he could write it down.”

“Handy has become a controversial figure, his mythical title father of the blues much disputed,” author Preston Lauterbach stated in 2015. “But his true claim to fame was never to have invented blues music outright but to have crossed the music over from Beale Street to Main Street, from colored honky-tonks to mainstream America.”

Matt Chaney is compiling companion books on Southern music, tentatively titled River Shows, Jazz, Blues and Country Music and, the sequel, Rockabillies in the Missouri Delta. See the page Stories from River Music to Rock in the Northern Delta. For more information, including Chaney’s previous books, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.  Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

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Refused Jail. (1903, Aug. 27). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 7.

Round About Notes. (1890, Dec. 25). Memphis Appeal-Avalanche TN, p. 4.

Shall The Dives Elect The Next Mayor. (1909, Oct. 30). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 13.

Sheriff’s Men Raid Three County Dives. (1914, Sept. 21). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Shootist Flynn Captured. (1900, May 28). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Shot In The Shoulder. (1900, May 27). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 12.

Silver, L. (1966, May 13). Handy’s blues trumpet honor to Beale Street. Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 1.

Slight Errors Are Corrected. (1909, Aug. 14). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

So Many Good Things To Tell You. (1912, Oct. 13). [Advertisement.] Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 35.

Southern Smart Set’s Big Xmas. (1910, Dec. 29). New York Age NY, p. 6.

Strong And Progressive Firm. (1896, April 17). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

Sullivan, A.C. (1923, April 7). “Emperor Jones” blazes trail for all-colored stage plays. Sacramento Star CA, p. 2.

Talley, R. (1949, July 10). You know Handy’s blues made Memphis famous, but do you know where they were composed? Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 51.

Tennessee Is Third In Navigable Rivers. (1912, Jan. 13). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 16.

Terminates In A Mistrial. (1896, Dec. 29). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 3.

Testimony Nearly All Aimed At Hayes. (1917, Sept. 28). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, pp. 1, 9.

The City Election. (1911, Nov. 10). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 6.

The Combined Orchestras Of Memphis. (1909, June 27). [Advertisement.] Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 7.

The Memphis Sound, Pushed Through. (1969, May 25). Memphis Commercial Appeal, Sesquicentennial Supplement, TN, pp. 14, 86.

The White Light Steamer. (1909, May 23). [Advertisement.] Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 7.

Things Are Looking Up. (1908, Jan. 20). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 4.

To Build Elevated Track. (1916, Nov. 29). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 5.

To The Polls. (1909, Oct. 30). [Advertisement.] Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 13.

Turner & Handy’s Orchestra Church’s Park. (1909, April 18). [Advertisement.] Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 7.

Use Lawless Negroes. (1916, Jan. 12). Nashville Banner TN, p. 2.

Walsh People Are Uneasy. (1907, Oct. 24). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 4.

Who Can Vote The Crump Ticket And Have Any Hope For Reform? (1911, Nov. 8). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 11.

“Wild Bill” Latura, Bad man Of Memphis, Killed. (1916, Aug. 24). Chattanooga Times TN, p. 2.

“Wild Bill” Latura Freed. (1910, June 18). Arkansas Gazette, Little Rock AR, p. 3.

Wild Bill Latura Meets Swift Death. (1916, Aug. 23). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, pp. 1-2.

Wild Bill Latura’s Deadly Gun Again. (1912, March 24). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 1.

With Base Ball Bat. (1902, Aug. 9). Memphis Commercial Appeal TN, p. 3.