The Yellow Dog Cafe
These people seem to make a regular business of being located "where the Southern cross the Dog." They’re very aware of where they are, and they have memorabilia all over commemorating the intersection. On the other hand, we were the only visitors there when we came, late in the day on a Wednesday.
For a bigger, better picture, click on the picture above.
This guy found us, or we found him. He works at the Yellow Dog Cafe (restaurant, general store, gas station). He told Doug when he was a little baby his mother used to carry him in her cotton sack as she worked in the fields. He told Ken about growing up in Wisconsin. He also showed us, inside, some of the historical memorabilia, including the sheet music below.
W.C. Handy, in the proud spirit of the blues tradition, took the blues song he heard and turned it into his own song, copyrighting it and publishing it. The record does not show whether he let the man he first heard playing the blues share the royalties.
Note the railroad tracks along the bottom of the frame, and the yellow dog sleeping in the corner. Never heard the W.C. Handy tune before? Can't blame you--we'd never heard it either. Thanks to the magic of the World Wide Web, you can partake of both the words and music to this historic rag. (For further information, try a Web search at go2net.com. Clarksdale . . . Highway 61 . . . Greenville . . . Moorhead . . . Yellow Dog Cafe . . . Greenwood |
