Artist: Prince's Band
Author: William Christopher Handy
Label: Columbia
Year: 1916

As Joe Turner Blues - Introducing Yellow Dog Rag, following two other W.C. Handy songs they first recorded: St. Louis Blues and Hesitation Blues. Published by Pace & Handy in 1914. Answer song to I Wonder Where My Easy Rider's Gone by Shelton Brooks, popularized in vaudeville by Sophie Tucker in 1913 and on record by Mae West in '33 (in film She Done Him Wrong).

The Yellow Dog was the nickname of the Yazoo Delta railroad line, crossing the Southern line in Moorhead, MS. The Southern Illinois linked Chicago with the Gulf of Mexico right through the Mississippi Delta, while the Yazoo Delta (Yellow Dog) went from east to west between Yazoo City and Clarksdale. "He's gone to where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog" repeated over and over, was the lyric line Handy remembered when in 1903 a young black guitar player was waiting for the same train in the Tutwiler, MS railway station. Meanwhile the boy was handling his guitar strings in such an unusual but strikingly moving way with a knife, Handy had to write it down in his diary, not realizing he just notified the very first bottleneck effect and the very first AAB blues pattern on the side. Was it maybe Henry Sloan, mentor of Charley Patton at the Dockery Farm? Or was it Charley Patton himself, who was 12 in 1903? Patton lived on walking distance from both Tutwiler and Moorhead and sings about the Yellow Dog in his Green River Blues. (see also: Where The Southern Crosses The Dog, Make Me A Pallet On The Floor and Green River Blues)