W.C. Handy Encounters the Blues

W.C. Handy heard a man sing about "Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog," and the line pointed to a real place. Moorhead is where the Southern rail line crossed the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley line, which many called the Yellow Dog. Handy popularized the phrase in "Yellow Dog Blues" in 1914. Charley Patton sang it in "Green River Blues" in 1929, and Kokomo Arnold used it in 1937. The old Yazoo and Mississippi line has since been moved eastward and folded into the Illinois Central.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emmett Till Interpretive Center and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse — 4.7 mi
  The 1955 courthouse in Sumner where Emmett Till's killers were acquitted, restored to that year, and the interpretive center across the street that opened after the county's 2007 apology.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 8.8 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.
• Delta Blues Museum — 15 mi
  The state's oldest music museum, in a restored 1918 freight depot in Clarksdale, with Muddy Waters's rebuilt cabin and instruments from Delta players.
• Mound Bayou — 19 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.

More markers nearby

• Tallahatchie County — 5.4 mi
• John Lee Hooker — 6.3 mi
• Hopson Plantation Established 1852 — 12 mi
• Crossroads of 49 & 61 — 15 mi