W.C. Handy

It was W.C. Handy, perhaps the most respected black orchestra leader in the country and the self-proclaimed father of the blues, who first popularized the blues. The distinguished son of an Alabama minister, he was traveling through rural Mississippi sometime in 1903 when a black man seated next to him took out his guitar and began to sing a blues song called "Goin' Where the Southern Cross the Dog." Handy was taken not only with the manner in which the man sang, but also the instrument he used. The man's played his guitar using a homemade slide, creating a wailing sound that is still the hallmark of Delta blues.

Writing in 1941 in his autobiography Father of the Blues, Handy referred to the manner that such turn of the century Mississippi singers used their homemade instruments: "From these [makeshift] materials, they set the mood for what we now call the blues."

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