<P> Although Handy's partnership with Pace was dissolved, he continued to operate the publishing company as a family - owned business . He published works of other black composers as well as his own, which included more than 150 sacred compositions and folk song arrangements and about 60 blues compositions . In the 1920s, he founded the Handy Record Company in New York City . Bessie Smith's January 14, 1925, Columbia Records recording of "Saint Louis Blues" with Louis Armstrong is considered by many to be one of the finest recordings of the 1920s . So successful was Handy's "Saint Louis Blues" that in 1929, he and director (Dudley Murphy) collaborated on a RCA motion picture of the same name, which was to be shown before the main attraction . Handy suggested the blues singer Bessie Smith for the starring role, since she had gained widespread popularity with her recording of the song . The picture was filmed in June and was shown in movie houses throughout the United States from 1929 to 1932 . </P> <P> In 1926 Handy wrote and edited a work entitled Blues: An Anthology--Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs . It is probably the first work to attempt to record, analyze and describe the blues as an integral part of the South and the history of the United States . To celebrate the publication of the book and to honor Handy, Small's Paradise in Harlem hosted a party, "Handy Night", on Tuesday October 5, which contained the best of jazz and blues selections provided by the entertainers Adelaide Hall, Lottie Gee, Maude White and Chic Collins . </P> <P> The genre of the blues was a hallmark of American society and culture in the 1920s and 1930s . So great was its influence, and so much was it recognized as Handy's hallmark, that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his novel The Great Gatsby that "All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the' Beale Street Blues' while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust . At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor ." </P> <P> Following the publication of his autobiography, Handy published a book on African - American musicians, Unsung Americans Sung (1944). He wrote three other books: Blues: An Anthology: Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs, Book of Negro Spirituals and Negro Authors and Composers of the United States, </P>

The american composer whose reputation was growing in the middle of the 1930s was
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