"EARLY ONE MORN, THE FIRST BLUES WAS BORN… I MEAN THE MEMPHIS BLUES… EV'RY ONE SINGING IT, ORCHESTRAS SWINGING IT… ALL PROCLAIMED IT BEST, THIS DADDY OF THE BLUES": FIRST EDITION OF UNSUNG AMERICANS SUNG, 1944, INSCRIBED BY "FATHER OF THE BLUES" W.C. HANDY

HANDY, W.C. Unsung Americans Sung. [New York]: American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, (1944). Quarto, original brown-and-white pictorial stiff paper boards, original dust jacket.

First edition of W.C. Handy's celebration of African-American music and history, boldly inscribed by him, "To D— S— Esq. with sincere appreciation, W.C. Handy 6-11-1945.”

Born in 1873 to former slaves, William Christopher Handy "paved the way" for the blues (New Grove 8:144). In 1903 "Handy was leading a band called the Colored Knights of Pythias… when one day he paid a visit to the little town of Tutwiler, Mississippi. 'A lean loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me… His face had on it the sadness of the ages,' Handy writes in his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues. 'As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar… the weirdest music I had ever heard'… when in 1909 Handy moved to Memphis, he took some of the music he had heard in Mississippi and rearranged it for his band… In his words, Memphis Blues introduced 'the blues form to the general public,' and the American public introduced it to the world" (BBC).

Unsung Americans Sung brings together nearly 40 songs and numerous literary works together in print for the first time. The collection features Handy's groundbreaking Memphis Blues, as well as numerous songs with music and arrangements by him, including the spiritual, We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder, When the Black Man Has a Nation of his Own (1925), Aframerican Hymn (1925), Finis (1940), Black Patti (1940), Opportunity (1934), and Vesuvius (1935). At the initial publication of Memphis Blues in 1912, "the song caught on immediately [and] before Handy knew how it was selling he had sold his rights for $100." He only regained full ownership of Memphis Blues in 1940, four years before this work's publication. Among the many musicians indebted to Handy was George Gershwin: "In a letter to Handy, George Gershwin thanked him for helping him to write Rhapsody in Blue," says Barbara Broach, director of the W.C. Handy museum in Florence, Alabama" (BBC). Included is a printing of Alain Locke's essay, Negro in American Culture. Throughout are tributes—in music, prose and poetry—to figures such as Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Crispus Attucks, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Harriet Tubman, and Phyllis Wheatley. Handy has included works with music or arrangements by James P. Johnson, Clarence M. Jones, Joe Jordan, Lillian Evanti, Charles L. Cooke, Jean Stor, Luckey Roberts, Sidney Frederick Johnson, Eubie Blake, Chris Smith, Margaret Bonds and Daphne Lindsay. This seminal collection also notably contains lyrics from works by Langston Hughes, Andy Razaf, Henry Troy, L.B. LaMarche, George L. Bullock, Omoo Aummen, Olive Lewis Handy, LaVerne Barner, James William Henderson, Walter Malone, Edwin Markham, J.M. Miller and J. Russel Robinson. First edition, first printing with ASCAP imprint on title page; no statement of edition or printings on copyright page; dust jacket with Handy Brothers imprint on front flap. With photographic frontispiece portrait of Handy, two full-page photographic illustrations, and eight full-page illustrations of African Americans from sketches by Beauford De Laney.

Book fine; slight edge-wear mainly to spine ends of the highly elusive, very good dust jacket,