Editing W. C. Handy (section)

== Early life ==
[[File:WC-Handy-Birthplace-al.jpg|left|thumb|Handy's birthplace in [[Florence, Alabama]]]]
Handy was born on November 16, 1873, in [[Florence, Alabama]],<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.allmusic.com/artist/wc-handy-mn0000195430/biography | title=W.C. Handy Biography, Songs, & Albums | website=[[AllMusic]] }}</ref> the son of Elizabeth Brewer and Charles Barnard Handy. His father was the pastor of a small church in [[Guntersville, Alabama|Guntersville]], a town in northern Alabama's [[Marshall County, Alabama|Marshall County]]. Handy wrote in his 1941 autobiography ''Father of the Blues'' that he was born in a log cabin built by his grandfather William Wise Handy, who became an [[African Methodist Episcopal]] minister after the [[Emancipation Proclamation]]. The log cabin of Handy's birth has been preserved near downtown Florence.

Handy's father believed that musical instruments were tools of the devil.<ref name="chernow">{{cite book |last1=Chernow |first1=Fred |last2=Chernow |first2=Carol |title=Reading Exercises in Black History Vol. 1 |date=1979 |publisher=Continental Press |location=Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania |isbn=0-8454-2107-7 |page=32}}</ref> Without his parents' permission, Handy bought his first guitar, which he had seen in a local shop window and secretly saved for by picking berries and nuts and making lye soap. Upon seeing the guitar, his father asked him, "What possessed you to bring a sinful thing like that into our Christian home?" and ordered him to "take it back where it came from", but he also arranged for his son to take organ lessons.<ref name="Handy" /> The organ lessons did not last long, but Handy moved on to learn to play the [[cornet]]. He joined a local band as a teenager, but he kept this fact a secret from his parents. He purchased a cornet from a fellow band member and spent every free minute practicing it.<ref name="Handy" />

While growing up, he apprenticed in carpentry, shoemaking, and plastering. He was deeply religious. His musical style was influenced by the church music he sang and played in his youth and by the sounds of nature. He cited as inspiration the "whippoorwills, bats and hoot owls and their outlandish noises", Cypress Creek washing on the fringes of the woodland, and "the music of every songbird and all the symphonies of their unpremeditated art".<ref name="Gaillard2010">{{cite book|last1=Gaillard|first1=Frye |last2=Lindsay|first2=Jennifer |last3=DeNeefe |first3=Jane |title=Alabama's Civil Rights Trail: An Illustrated Guide to the Cradle of Freedom|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gKeZBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA311|access-date=November 20, 2018 |year=2010 |publisher=University of Alabama Press|isbn=978-0-8173-5581-4|pages=311–}}</ref>

He worked on a "shovel brigade" at the McNabb furnace, where he learned to use his shovel to make music with the other workers to pass the time. The workers would beat their shovels against hard surfaces in complex rhythms that Handy said were "better to us than the music of a martial drum corps."<ref name="Handy">{{cite book |last1=Handy |first1=William Christoper |title=Father of the Blues: An Autobiography |url=https://archive.org/details/fatherofbluesaut00wcha_0 |date=1941 |publisher=Macmillan |location=New York |isbn=978-0-306-80421-2 |page=[https://archive.org/details/fatherofbluesaut00wcha_0/page/140 140]}}</ref> Handy would later recall this improvisational spirit as being a formative experience for him, musically: "Southern Negroes sang about everything....They accompany themselves on anything from which they can extract a musical sound or rhythmical effect."<ref name="Handy" /> He reflected, "In this way, and from these materials, they set the mood for what we now call Blues."<ref name="William Christopher Handy page 74" />