The Enlightenment of W.C. Handy

W. C. Handy took what he heard in the Delta and put it in print. He debuted "St. Louis Blues" in 1914, opening with a tango introduction that shifted into a low-down blues, and in 1929 a short film of the song starred Bessie Smith, whom Handy had suggested. He went blind after a fall from a subway platform in 1943. When he died in 1958, more than 25,000 people filled Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and over 150,000 gathered in the streets nearby. The marker stands at South Court Street and North Pearman Avenue in Cleveland.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dockery Farms — 6.3 mi
  The plantation on the Sunflower River where Charley Patton lived and played from about 1900, now a working farm, a National Register district and a Mississippi Blues Trail stop.
• Mound Bayou — 9.4 mi
  The Bolivar County town founded in 1887 by men who had been enslaved at Davis Bend, built to be Black-owned, home of Taborian Hospital and a museum on Roosevelt Street.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 11 mi
  The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 16 mi
  The state penitentiary on Sunflower County cotton land, built in 1900 as a prison plantation, where Freedom Riders were held in 1961; a working prison with no visits and a Blues Trail marker at its gate.

More markers nearby

• Adath Israel Temple — steps away
• Cleveland — 0.3 mi
• Margaret Wade — 0.3 mi
• Chrisman Street — 0.3 mi