A Handy Discovery

The thing you have to know about the blues is that, at least when we’re talking about the forebears, it’s about 1% music and 99% myth.

Don’t let that upset you. The music is unquestionably the foundation and worthy of appreciation in its own context. The problem is: There is so little of it recorded.

Alan Lomax (left) did his best--traveling around for the Library of Congress, collecting recordings from various early blues musicians in the 1930s and early 1940s for the Archive of American Folk Song. But he couldn’t get to everyone and, even if he could have, recording equipment wasn’t then what it is today. Nevertheless, his contribution is laudable--albeit incomplete--in it’s own right and remains the lusty acquisition of audiophiles everywhere.

But again, we run into a problem: The blues didn’t suddenly exist the moment Lomax whipped out his microphone. It’s origins lie much earlier and our friend Alan, who--though he did it fashionably--was late to the party.

This is where the blues began:

It began at a crossroads (no, still not THAT crossroads. We’ll get to that one, I promise.)

This crossroads exists in the music itself, “where the Southern cross the Dog”--that is to say, in Moorhead, Mississippi at a railroad junction where the north and south bound trains cross the east and westbound trains.

The year was 1903 and it was another humid Delta night in nowhere Mississippi and a weary traveler sat waiting for a train. The weary traveler was none other than W.C. Handy, but at this point in time, he was no more than another schmuck on layover, forced to wait out the night. Little did he know that what he would overhear that night in the Tutwiler station would soon change, not only his own life but, the course of musical history forever.

For it was there, in that train station, that W.C Handy “discovered the blues.”

A black man, lean and lonesome, whose name is lost to time, sat playing slide guitar with a knife. “Goin’ to where the Southern cross the Dog,” he lamented. The sound was likely harsh, mean, brilliant, and unforgettable. Handy recognized it instantly for what it was and would build his legend on it.

That is where the blues began.

The less romantic version--that the blues was born out of the blending of various folk traditions and first showed up in the south in the 1890s or early 1900s, the product of solo singers accompanied by their own stringed instruments--can be cited, but it can’t be exalted.

No, the explanation that a genre so steeped in legend needs and deserves is the Handy account in which a lone figure disappeared into a train car, destined both never to be known and yet never to be forgotten.