Tutwiler — Where Handy Heard the Blues

W.C. Handy was waiting for an overdue train to Memphis at the Tutwiler station in 1903 when he heard an itinerant bluesman playing slide guitar with a knife and singing about "goin' where the Southern cross the Dog" — the junction of the Southern Railway and Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad farther south. The Y&MV was locally called the Yellow Dog. Handy called it "the weirdest music I had ever heard." Legend says the guitarist was a local field hand named Henry Sloan. The song became Handy's published "Yellow Dog Blues."

Handy had heard something akin to the blues as early as 1892, but Tutwiler was the encounter he remembered, the one he wrote down. He and his family lived in the town for six years. The original train station does not survive. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker stands where it stood, erected November 25, 2009 with funding from Robert Plant, who attended the dedication and spoke about how Sonny Boy Williamson II had changed his life. "The first record my mom bought me was by Sonny Boy," Plant said. "I played it until there were no more grooves on the record." Sonny Boy's grave lies just at the edge of town, maintained by the Catholic nuns who have operated community services in Tutwiler since 1993.

The marker is the reason to come: to stand where the music was heard and transcribed, in a town that also raised John Lee Hooker and Frank Stokes. The train yard that once made Tutwiler a crossroads moved to Clarksdale in 1929, and the town has been declining since. But what happened on that platform — a lean, loose-jointed man pressing a knife to guitar strings, repeating a line three times — became the document of a sound that had been traveling the Delta without a name.