In 2006, Handy researcher Elliott Hurwitt found a name W. C. Handy cut from his 1941 autobiography: Prince McCoy, the "long-legged chocolate boy" leading a three-piece band at a Cleveland, Mississippi courthouse dance around 1903 -- the night silver dollars rained at the dancers' feet and Handy said his ear as a composer was born. A bandmate tied that tune to "Memphis Blues," though Hurwitt calls the chain "murky and unverifiable." McCoy, born in Louisiana in 1882 and raised in Greenville, actually led seven- and eight-piece Delta orchestras "of Delta-wide fame" by 1909, then moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, toured with a medicine show through the 1930s, and worked as a janitor at a medical school, playing violin on his porch and at hospital Christmas parties. He died there in 1968, unrecorded and unphotographed until a 1951 snapshot surfaced -- "basically," Hurwitt said, "a phantom at this point."