Where the Southern Cross the Dog

The story goes that W.C. Handy, later known as the Father of the Blues, was under contract in Clarksdale and traveling through the Mississippi Delta when he encountered a mysterious man at Tutwiler train station.

In his autobiography, Handy writes, “His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar… The effect was unforgettable.”

The man sang a single line, over and over—Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog.

It’s strange to think about how things begin, how legends begin. A man at a train station meets another man. One of them becomes the father of a genre, while the other, unrecorded, unnamed, becomes a footnote to the greater story. A legend, already faded, ephemeral.

The Southern Railroad once crossed the Yazoo Delta Railroad—colloquially called the Yellow Dog—in Moorhead, Mississippi. That crossing inspired the man’s strange refrain. Yet if Moorhead ever held any prominence, its legend has also long since faded. These days, Moorhead is a town of torn doors and sagging porches, its stores closed behind shuttered doors and its fields fallow, gone the way of many legends, remembered in songs that couldn’t save it.

And yet, there’s a certain beauty in faded legends. To stand in such a place and feel history, however faintly, is striking.

Handy would go on to write Yellow Dog Blues in 1914, spreading the sound of the Delta from Memphis across the nation. As for the man at the train station, some believe he was Henry Sloan, an early blues pioneer, still blowing in the wind.