The Tutwiler Station

W. C. Handy was leading an orchestra at Clarksdale when, by the account in his 1941 autobiography Father of the Blues, he fell asleep at the Tutwiler railway station waiting for a train delayed nine hours and woke to find a man playing a guitar beside him, pressing a knife against the strings the way Hawaiian players used a steel bar. He sang one line three times: going where the Southern cross the Dog. Handy asked what he meant. The line names the crossing at Moorhead, forty two miles south, of the Southern Railway and the old Yazoo Delta line, a company the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley had absorbed in 1897 and which everyone still called the Y. D., the Dog or the Yellow Dog. Handy called it the weirdest music he had ever heard, and copyrighted his own version in December 1914 as The Yellow Dog Rag, retitled Yellow Dog Blues in 1919. The story is usually told as the moment the blues was discovered, and it will not carry that. Handy told it more than once and not the same way twice: a version he published in 1916 puts it on a plantation with no railway line in it, and in 1925 he gave a different encounter, at a dance in Cleveland, as the one that changed him. He never dated Tutwiler at all. The 1903 attached to it comes from a United States Senate resolution of 2002 declaring the following year the centennial of the blues, and a bronze plaque at the site says 1895, so a visitor reads two dates within sight of each other. The depot is gone, leaving a slab and the rails. Robert Plant paid for the marker and turned up quietly for its dedication in 2009. Murals painted on the brick behind it in 1996 have faded almost through.