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So do I, and been wondering for a while. Maybe Dick Waterman knows.

The 1965 liner notes were by Dick "Jinxblues" Waterman, a text I used to know by heart in its French version at the time (and the only Bobby he alluded to was Dylan )
The CD reissue - which I blamed from the start for providing different equalization for what used to be the respective A and B sides of the original Columbia LP, an album I bought back later on - includes notes by Larry Cohn, and the excerpt you are referring to reads like this :
"He used to watch my hands, like I did with Willie Wilson, when I played. When we were playing and took a break he'd pick up my guitar and try to play it. He made some pretty awful sounds. I used to tell him to stop before the people got mad and run us all off."

I have a slight problem with calling that "mentoring", but the parallel is very interesting for reasons you won't like.

"I always sung. I was brought up singing church music and most of my familiy were songsters. Most of them played instruments and they even had a family band. Before Willie, I never heard anyone play with a bottleneck, and the sound really got to me."

To me it echoes the reports of LeDell Johnson collected by Evans, that blues were totally unknown in the Crystal Springs area before Tommy brought them back from - some say the Delta, I would rather say Jackson. That makes 1928, and it is amazing that a nearly 30 year old farm hand like Son House, born and raised in the Delta, had never heard any slide playing whereas it had been all over the place since the annexion of Hawaii three decades earlier.
Jitterbugs? African heritage? Hundreds of vagrant blue players traveling through the Delta since the 1890's? Blues rooted in the music of slavery times? I'd love to still believe to the tale, but it no longer works for me.
And the way I imagine things happened is more fascinating - and positive, regarding the musicians we actually know, who did not simply inherit and copy an ancestral style, but created something no-one ever previously heard - than the legend.

Yes, but I think there could not have been any place in the rural South less "isolated" that the Delta. The growth of its population, and of its economical wealth after the land had been cleared and the levees erected around 1890, the considerable opportunity it represented until the turn of century when the majority of land-owners were still African American families, the later decay of the situation and their spoliation, always made it a place where people came and went.
Many blues performer's families are known to have moved to the Delta in the late 1910's or a bit earlier, for the same reason which brought Handy there : money to be made.
The guy at Tutweiler was - obviously - a treveler, or else I wonder what he would have been doing at a railway station (which I personally never visit unless I need to catch a train). And thus, maybe not a local, which we'll never know for sure since Handy did not mingle too much with the people he considered as the originators of his sophisticated music.
Even 40 years after the word had become his trademark, Handy did not write that he, or the band near Clarksdale, were playing or singing anything like "blues". The much esteemed and learned composer was very talkative regarding the musical features of whatever he wrote himself, but quite vague or totally silent about those of his distant recollections, probably relying on others, like Abbe Niles, for the extrapolation. He only mentioned slide playing, instantly referring to Hawaiian music (but were they chords? single notes?), and one sung line which, like many others, later reappeared in folk and popular songs.

Handy's purpose was to illustrate "the beauty of primitive music", all of the examples he reports are interesting, but they mainly reveal what he, as a man of his time, considered as "primitive", and was not to access public recognition before a few decades. Including the "folk" versions of popular ragtime songs, or the solo performance of his own compositions.

His parents had moved to Louisiana, he came back to the Delta after they had separated and his mother had died. He was about twenty, and soon started preaching around Clarksdale.

Here is the way he reported his meeting with Willie Wilson :
"I didn't like no guitar when I first heard it. Oh Gee, I couldn't stand a guy playing a guitar. See, I's churchy then, you know. But he was playing so good with a bottleneck. I didn't want the people to see me watching. All them 'round him, you know, together, and it sounded so good to me that I eased up behind him and peeped over his shoulder, you know, it sounded so good. I didn't want them to know I was watching, see, 'cause I's so churchy. So I said "Well, I believe I'll try this thing."
(in Stefan Grossman's Delta Blues Guitar, page 37)

Once again, I do not fully trust Son House for telling the objective "truth", later in the interview he explains that neither Patton nor Willie Brown had previously seen a bottleneck either... and that Patton could never use it properly. The quote mainly means how he felt about it.

I am not sure the guitar got along too well with the church before the recording of solo artists had made it popular (remember the reaction of Handy's father, who ordered his son to sell it back at once, and buy something useful, like a dictionary).
Many of the so-called "guitar evangelists" were in fact secular performers. If I am not mistaken, the first ones who recorded were Jefferson as Deacon L.J. Bates, and Bo Weavil Jackson as Sam Butler in 1926. Blind Willie Johnson (and Washington Phillips, altough he played a different instrument) only performed religious material, but they were probably exceptions; even Taggart happened to perform secular songs... and the formula remained marginal, probably not very appealing to most Christians. The overwhelming majority of purely religious performers did not use any instrument, if we can judge by the impressive number of unaccompanied songs mentioned in Blues and Gospel Records.

I suppose that percussions were more in the tradition of religious singing than melodic instruments, duets like William and Versey Smith keep something of a "collective" spirit. There were also nearly jazz accompaniments as with Rev. McGhee, but they have little to do with the image of the blind guitarist holding his begging bowl outside the church.
It is very interesting to notice that Blind Willie Johnson had actually two styles, an ancient one (I think, since there are not any similar recorded examples) which was mainly single-string flatpicking in unison with the melody, and what I think was a "modern" one, playing slide on top of an alternating basses pattern.
There are two different ways the impression I mentioned from statistics of the recorded pre-war output can be denied:
- Either you mean to apply the "top of the iceberg" theory, and imagine there were indeed far more "guitar evangelists" than the few who appeared on records - which is a possibility, but since the scheme also applies to blues singers, I suppose the proportion is reasonably illustrative.
- Or you mean that prejudice against such devilish intruments as the guitar was not the prerogative of the Church, and I do agree, rather thinking it was a matter of era.
I got interested in the Norfolk Jazz/Jubilee quartet only recently, coincidentally listening to the whole of their secular output yesterday - I mean, until my wife got mad and asked me if I did not, by any chance, have any urgently pending question about Son House which implied listening to something else
It is still very impressive to notice that these guys came up with more prolific sessions while recording their harmonized type of blues than Ma Rainey did two years later.
I do not mind considering that such or such blues "feature" did exist in the early 1910's, what I fear is the mere, retrospective extrapolations I also adhered to for over 40 years, which suggest that the same kind of full-featured, basically 12-bar, guitar accompanied, personal three-line song including blue notes, which can be heard from commercial pre-war recordings, had been there since the late XIXth century, at the time there were no guitars, or since the birth of mankind.
"The blues have always been here", says the guy for whom "here" means the small part of the planet he happens to live in, and "always" the short and unfaithful collection of memories he includes in his own lifespan.
The "Gospel" examples are revealing of something, that music as a whole was a matter of trends, owing a lot to the Hawaiian craze as far as the introduction of slide guitar in both black and white traditions is concerned. And the tiny link everyone makes between the single example of two African kids sliding a bottle along one string and the blues (or Gospel) tradition is pure retrospective hallucination, regarding what we know of African American music.