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This article investigates W. C. Handy's collection of blues and jazz compositions Blues: An Anthology (1926) in light of Paul Whiteman's pre-eminent role in 1920s American popular music culture. It explores Whiteman's autobiographics, on the one hand, and the correspondence between Handy and the author of the anthology's foreword, Edward Abbe Niles, on the other, in order to demonstrate how Handy's self-determined voice asserted itself against both the discursive power of the Whiteman-led symphonic jazz movement and the appropriative impulse of primitivist jazz and blues historiography.