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In 1903 W. C. Handy, the African American leader of a dance orchestra,
got stuck one night waiting for a train in the hamlet of Tutwiler,
Mississippi. With hours to kill and nowhere else to go, Handy fell
asleep at the empty depot on a hard wooden bench. When he woke,
a ragged black man was sitting next to him, singing about “goin’
where the Southern cross the Dog” and sliding a knife against
the strings of a guitar. The musician repeated the line three times
and answered it with his guitar. Intrigued, Handy asked what the
line meant. It turned out that the tracks of the Yazoo & Mississippi
Valley Railroad, which locals called the Yellow Dog, crossed the
tracks of the Southern Railroad in the town of Moorehead, where
the musician was headed, and he’d put it into a song. It was,
Handy later said, “the weirdest music I had ever heard.”
That strange music was the blues, although few people knew it by
that name. At the turn of the century, the blues was still slowly
emerging from the deep South and its roots in various forms of African
American slave songs such as field hollers, work songs, spirituals,
and country string ballads. The blues was rural music that captured
the suffering and anguish of 300 years of slavery and tenant farming,
typically played by roaming solo musicians on an acoustic guitar
at weekend parties, picnics and juke joints. Their audience was
agricultural laborers who danced to the propulsive rhythms, moans
and slide guitar. In 1912 Handy helped raise the public profile
of the blues when he became one of the first people to transcribe
and publish sheet music for a blues song—“Memphis Blues.”
Eight years later, listeners snapped up more than a million copies
of “Crazy Blues” by Mamie Smith, the first black female
to record a blues vocal. The unexpected success of Smith’s
recording alerted record labels to the potential profit of “race
records,” and singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith began
to introduce the blues to an even wider audience through their recordings.
As the African Americans that created the blues began to move away
from the South, they changed the music to reflect their new circumstances.
Following both World Wars, thousands of African American farm workers
had migrated north to cities like Chicago and Detroit, and many
of them began to view traditional blues as an unwanted reminder
of their humble days toiling in the fields; they wanted to hear
music that reflected their new urban surroundings. In response,
transplanted blues artists such as Muddy Waters, who had lived and
worked on Stovall plantation, just outside Clarksdale, Mississippi,
before riding the rails to Chicago in 1943, swapped acoustic guitars
for electric ones and filled out their sound with drums, harmonica
and standup bass. This gave rise to electrified blues with a stirring
beat that drove people onto the dance floor and pointed the way
to rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll.
(This article is part of the official electronic press release
kit of The Blues)
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