Published: September 25, 2007 06:17 pm         

Manson prosecutor to speak at ISU Oct. 2

TERRE HAUTE — Former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi will speak at 7 p.m. Tuesday in Indiana State University’s Tilson Auditorium as part of the 2007-2008 University Speakers Series. A book signing and reception is planned immediately after his talk in Heritage Lounge.

Bugliosi was the prosecutor who convicted Charles Manson in the Tate/LaBianca murders. He told the story of that case in the bestselling true crime book in publishing history, “Helter Skelter,” which was turned into a successful television movie.

Handy complied, blending the Delta Blues with strains of ragtime, and weaving in some of the popular orchestration and harmony techniques he had perfected in his musical travels. The song “Mr. Crump” not only helped his candidate win the election, it became popular in its own right, especially after Handy renamed it, “Memphis Blues.”

Unfortunately, Handy was swindled out of publication rights, making almost nothing on a song that would heavily influence what we now call “The Blues.”

Undeterred, in 1914 he wrote, produced and published “St. Louis Blues” and, later, “Beale Street Blues,” after the famous street in Memphis. Both songs would become tremendously popular and influential, especially “St. Louis Blues,” whose open, free-expression style made its publication one of the two landmark events in the birth of that other uniquely American musical idiom — jazz.

The second landmark event — or so the story goes among many jazz purists — occurred on Nov. 14, 1917, when government officials shut down Storyville, a district in New Orleans that had been created by city ordinance to incorporate (and isolate) the city’s prostitution into one section of town. In the Storyville brothels many future jazz greats, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong among them, had for years honed their skills, but when Storyville was closed, they were forced to find work elsewhere. Many migrated north to Chicago and New York where, in popular big city nightclubs and modern recording studios, they ushered in the Jazz Age by introducing it to the rest of America and the world.

It has been said that jazz and the blues are America’s only two worthwhile contributions to the 20th Century. W.C. Handy had a hand in both.