W. C. Handy

Assembled from 15 blocks · 1 evidence · 12 related

1. Story
2. An American cornetist, bandleader and publisher whose importance to this Journey is documentary rather than creative: he is the first literate musician known to have written down what he heard rural Black Southern musicians playing, and then to have published it. Handy led an orchestra in Clarksdale, Mississippi from 1903 to 1905 and travelled the Delta; his account of waiting at Tutwiler station around 1903 and hearing a ragged man press a knife against guitar strings while singing "Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog" is the most frequently cited early description of blues performance in existence. He recorded it in his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues, nearly four decades later, and noted that the knife technique resembled what Hawaiian guitarists did with a steel bar — an aside that is itself a small piece of circulation history. His published blues from 1912 onward turned an oral practice into sheet music that could be bought, and thereby into something that could travel without a traveller.
3. Knowledge
4. W. C. Handy
5. W. C. Handy hears a guitarist at Tutwiler station
6. Connections
7. W. C. Handy hears a guitarist at Tutwiler station
8. W. C. Handy hears a guitarist at Tutwiler station
9. W. C. Handy
10. W. C. Handy
11. Blues
12. The Mississippi Delta
13. Guitar
14. Evidence
15. Handy, waiting at Tutwiler station circa 1903, heard a man play slide guitar with a knife and sing "Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog"; he led an orchestra in Clarksdale from 1903 to 1905 and recounted the encounter in his 1941 autobiography Father of the Blues. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary attributed to the Blues Trail marker text; the marker page was not opened, and the quoted autobiography passage is reproduced at second hand.