Yellow Dog Blues

 It’s not every song that has an historical marker devoted to it beside the highway. But then it’s not every song that has the privilege of being composed by the great W.C. Handy. It’s hard to imagine what the early days of jazz would have been like without the songs of William Christopher Handy. “Memphis Blues” and “Beale Street Blues,” “Careless Love” and, of course, the immortal “St. Louis Blues.” The Flood does a lot of those songs, and lately we’ve been drawn to one of Handy’s earliest compositions. In 1912 he wrote “Yellow Dog Blues,” which ends with the line “Your easy rider’s gone where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog.” Those are railroad references about the crossing of the Southern Railway and the local Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, known thereabouts as The Yellow Dog. And to this day, down in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the town of Moorhead, a bronze plate stands at the very spot memorialized in that classic blues line. So, here’s our take on the tune from last night’s session, with Doug and Veezy burning it up on the solos atop Danny Gillum’s rocking bass line.