W.C. Handy

Lore & Background

W.C. Handy was a multi-instrumentalist—guitar, banjo, piano, violin—and a self-taught composer who spent years traveling the Mississippi Delta and the cities along it. By the time he settled in St. Louis in the early 1910s, he had absorbed the call-and-response vocal traditions of Black churches, the bent notes of Delta guitar, and the structured forms of Tin Pan Alley. The result, 'St. Louis Blues,' published in 1912, married a specific city's name to a universal feeling of longing. It became one of the most recorded songs in American history, and it gave a small Midwestern city a cultural export that would outlive him by generations.

When the NHL granted St. Louis an expansion franchise in 1967, the choice of name was almost inevitable. The city already called itself a blues city; the song was its anthem. The team bore Handy's melody as its banner, and from that moment his name was spoken in every broadcast, printed on every ticket stub, and chanted in every arena. He never saw a hockey game, never held a stick, never knew what a power play was. And yet every faceoff drop, every goal celebration, every empty-netter in the third period carries the weight of a 1912 piano roll and a Mississippi-born man's ear for a minor seventh.

The connection is not merely nominal. St. Louis has always understood itself as a city of music—jazz, blues, gospel, rock. The Blues franchise tapped into that self-image in a way no other NHL team could. When fans sing the team's name, they are invoking a musical tradition as much as a sports brand. Handy's legacy in the stadium is not a statue or a plaque; it is the fact that the name itself is a piece of music, and every time it is spoken, the song is half-performed.

In Their Own Story

The arena is empty except for the sound of a single guitar, amplified through the PA system, the way it was on that one night in the summer of 1983 when a local band was allowed to play a pre-game set. The strings ring out over the ice, and the notes of 'St. Louis Blues' drift down from the upper deck, bouncing off the glass, settling into the padded seats. A groundskeeper mops a water mark near center ice and stops, tilts his head. He's been working this rink for eleven years. He's heard that song ten thousand times on the radio, in bars, in his own kitchen. But hearing it this way, in this space, with the ice catching the overhead lights and throwing them back in long white ribbons—it sounds different. It sounds like the city is talking to itself. He finishes his mop, leans it against the boards, and just listens. The song ends. The PA clicks off. The silence that follows is the loudest thing in the building.

Reader's Guide

You walk into the arena and the first thing you notice isn't the ice. It's the name. ST. LOUIS BLUES, painted in that specific font, and you feel the weight of it before you've even found your seat. Because that name is a song. You've heard it in a jukebox, in a bar on Delmar, in a church basement where someone's grandfather is still picking a twelve-string. The team didn't just pick a name; they picked a melody, and now it lives in a hockey rink.

The seats are worn in the way only decades of butts and elbows can wear them. The concourse smells like popcorn butter and cold beer and the faint metallic tang of the ice resurfacer. Kids press their faces to the glass during warmups, breath fogging the plexiglass, and behind them their parents are already arguing about line changes, already three seasons deep in a conversation that started in 1979. The chant builds from the lower bowl, a rolling wave of vowels that hits the rafters and comes back down. You don't need to know the words. You just add your voice.

This is what it means to be a Blues fan in St. Louis: you are part of a city that has always defined itself by what it makes, not just what it buys. The song was made here. The team was made here. The waiting—the long, aching, beautiful waiting for a championship that kept slipping away—was made here, in these seats, by these people, over these decades. And every time the arena fills, every time the name is shouted, W.C. Handy is in the room. Not as a ghost. As a frequency. The city is still playing his song, and the hockey is just the rhythm section.

Did You Know?

• W.C. Handy was largely self-taught on multiple instruments and never received formal musical training, yet his 1912 composition 'St. Louis Blues' became one of the most covered songs in American popular music history.
• The NHL expansion franchise awarded to St. Louis in 1967 took its name directly from Handy's song, making a 1912 blues composition the official identity of a 21st-century professional hockey team.
• Handy spent significant time in St. Louis in the early 1910s, where the city's musical scene and its position as a Mississippi River port influenced the composition that would bear its name.
• The song 'St. Louis Blues' was originally structured as a piano piece with vocal lyrics, and its minor-key opening is one of the most recognizable melodic phrases in all of American music.