Love Quote by William Christopher Handy

Handy frames musicianship not as a skill acquired but as a sudden reorientation of the self: “like falling in love” turns practice into possession, devotion into destiny. It’s a clever move for a working musician in a country that often treated Black artistry as entertainment first and labor second. By choosing romance as the metaphor, he claims interiority. This isn’t just technique or hustle; it’s an emotional event that reorganizes perception.

“All the world seemed bright and changed” does double duty. On one level, it’s the rush any player recognizes when an instrument stops being an object and starts answering back. On another, it’s a quiet statement about mobility and possibility. Handy came of age in the post-Reconstruction South, where Black ambition was routinely punished or fenced in. To say the world “changed” when he committed to an instrument is to describe art as a workaround to narrowed horizons: a private light that can’t be legislated away.

The subtext is also about legitimacy. Love is irrational, yes, but it’s also socially recognized as serious. Handy borrows that seriousness to dignify a calling that might otherwise be dismissed as pastime. And because love can be consuming, the line hints at the cost: once you’re “set” on the instrument, you’re no longer neutral. You’ve entered a relationship that demands time, sacrifice, and the willingness to be transformed. That’s the origin story of the blues entrepreneur as much as the blues romantic: the moment when sound becomes a life.