W.C. Handy, Self-titled “Father of the Blues” traveled, heard the blues, realized he could make money from this, and created a publishing empire. The Memphis blues, a collection of sheet music written by Handy was a prime example. Perry Bradford was another early writer of the blues that took advantage of the money present in publishing the genre. When the Blues was an extremely popular genre money came mostly from publishing and writing as is demonstrated in W.C. Handy’s case. However, in the 1920’s race records became a common occurrence for record labels. Race records were records that were made by black people and marketed to a black audience. These “race records” had many effects on society including creating a sort of underground black audience that blues groups could play to. Around this time is when the commodification of blues really began to take off, whites used black women to market this seemingly rough genre. Soon the blues had a super star that would take the world by storm and profits to another level… Yeah you guessed it, Bessie Smith.