Around 1903 at the Tutwiler railway station, bandleader W. C. Handy heard a solitary man playing slide guitar with a knife and singing “Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog,” an experience that profoundly shaped his music. Handy later adapted the song as “Yellow Dog Blues” and became known as the “Father of the Blues” after basing many of his popular orchestrations on sounds he heard in the Delta. Tutwiler came to be celebrated as the birthplace of the blues in honor of this encounter, which involved one of the earliest documented blues songs. Handy, who led an orchestra in Clarksdale from 1903 to 1905 and played dances for both white and African American audiences across the Delta and beyond, began incorporating blues into his repertoire only after hearing the Tutwiler guitarist and a string band in Cleveland, Mississippi. Although Handy never gave a specific date for the Tutwiler event, the U.S. Senate accepted 1903 when it declared 2003 the centennial Year of the Blues. In his 1941 autobiography, Handy recalled the guitarist’s ragged appearance, his use of a knife on the strings in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists using steel bars, and the unforgettable effect of both the playing and the repeated lyric. The song referred to the crossing of the Southern and Yazoo & Mississippi Valley railroads in Moorhead, forty-two miles south, and the Y&MV, sometimes called the Yazoo Delta or Y.D., was nicknamed the Dog or Yellow Dog. After moving to Memphis in 1905, Handy adapted the blues into compositions that helped spark America’s first blues craze, including “Memphis Blues,” “Yellow Dog Blues,” “Beale Street Blues,” and “St. Louis Blues,” and by 1919 he was already being hailed as the “Daddy of the Blues.” Tutwiler is also linked to Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2, who is buried two miles northwest beside the old Whitfield M. B. Church site; a world-renowned singer, harmonicist, and songwriter, he played a pioneering role in broadcasting the blues on the Helena, Arkansas, radio show King Biscuit Time, wrote songs including “Eyesight to the Blind,” “Help Me,” and “Don’t Start Me Talkin’,” extended his influence from the Delta and Chicago to England through tours in the 1960s that helped inspire the British blues movement, and died May 25, 1965. Other former Tutwiler performers included banjo and fiddle player Tom Dumas and pianist-guitarist Lee Kizart, both documented there by folklorist Bill Ferris in 1968 and featured in his 2009 book Give My Poor Heart Ease.