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Ella Fitzgerald - My Heart And I Decided

Still, that statue didn’t quite jibe with me. The Father of the Blues depicted in the statue looked calm and grandfatherly. He wore a suit and tie and held his horn poised to play. In every photograph of Handy I had ever seen, he was always dressed impeccably. How could this man be the father of the rough, untamed music that I knew to be the blues? He looked nothing like the cafe, juke joint people my family described, and I suspected they used to be.

In fact, Handy was a formally trained musician who traveled all over the world. And though he wasn’t looking for the blues, the blues found him all the same. The story goes that he fell asleep waiting for a train and woke to find a man playing the weirdest music he’d ever heard on the guitar. This chance encounter with the blue sparked a passion in Handy that became his life’s work. But, at first at least, he didn’t create blues, be merely absorbed the raw, primitive sounds and wrote them down. Perhaps this tale planted a seed of storytelling in me, because what I learned from this was the one who writes it down get the power. That if you tell or write down stories, you can get a statue erected in your honor, even in Memphis, even if you are black. Children will be made to remember your name, if just for one month a year.


Ella Fitzgerald - My Heart And I Decided
  • First release in: January 1943
  • Written by: Walter Donaldson
  • Recorded in: July 1942

"By the 1990s, Ella had recorded over 200 albums. In 1991, she gave her final concert at New York’s renowned Carnegie Hall. It was the 26th time she performed there."

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