|
|
| polksalad69 |
Searching for the blues in its birthplace
Chicago Sun Times
April 4, 2004
BY JEFF JOHNSON STAFF REPORTER
GREENWOOD, Miss. -- I'd come to the Mississippi Delta to discover the real blues, to immerse myself in the ambience and traditions of the music. I even had a guide, novelist Ace Atkins, creator of "blues detective" Nick Travers.
The former investigative reporter for the Tampa Tribune lives near this blues cradle these days, all the better to roam the backroads where Robert Johnson, the king of the Delta bluesmen, spent his last days in August 1938.
Atkins, like countless other blues lovers, is a sucker for the myths surrounding the life and sudden death at age 27 of Johnson, who sang of "Hellhounds on My Trail" and spoke often of making a Faustian bargain. And as we drive through the Mississippi night, we speculate whether Johnson and other bluesmen who claimed possession really believed they had trucked with the devil or were merely creating a show-biz persona. The Marilyn Mansons of their day, perhaps?
The signposts of a style: mapping out the blues
If you're thinking of riding the blues highway, Steve Cheseborough, author of Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of the Delta Blues, says the Mississippi Delta is a compact area, so you can see everything if you stay for week. He offers this list of half a dozen can't-miss sights:
1. Memphis Minnie's grave in Walls, Miss., a short drive from Memphis. "There are many blues graves here, but this is my favorite. It's really in the middle of fields in an extremely rural setting. The headstone was provided by blues fans, so it's outsized and stands out in this little church cemetery." The Delta blueswoman was born in Algiers, La., and moved to Walls before relocating to Memphis, then Chicago. "She gets short-shrift among female blues singers and was also one of the great guitarists."
2. Helena, Ark.: "This is a real important thing. That town was wide open, as they call it. The 'King Biscuit Time' radio show is still on the air with the original announcer, Sonny Payne, broadcasting live from the Delta Cultural Center. And one of world's great festivals, the King Biscuit Festival, is held here every October. The musician most identified with Helena is Sonny Boy Williamson [II], who was musical host of 'King Biscuit Time.' This is the center of the music constellation." Robert Jr. Lockwood, Robert Johnson, Robert Nighthawk and Roosevelt Sykes all lived in Helena.
3. Clarksdale, Miss.: "This self-proclaimed blues capital of the world got on the tourism bandwagon early. You have Delta Blues Museum, a couple of clubs, the Sunflower River Blues Festival and Cat Head, a blues record and bookstore and folk art store. It's impoverished and crime-ridden, but that's true of the whole Delta. And casinos have changed the local economy. I really like Clarksdale and would recommend it. And the Shack-Up Inn and Hopson Plantation are just outside Clarksdale."
4. Tutweiler, Miss., where W.C. Handy first heard the blues in 1903 and where Sonny Boy Williamson II is buried. "It's not far from Clarksdale, and the site of arguably the birth of the blues." A mural on the Tutweiler train depot recognizes the history of the site. "These depots themselves are very connected to blues history. A lot of people played at the train stations." The mural also provides a map leading to Williamson's grave outside Tutweiler. People often leave harmonicas on this, one of the most frequently visited graves of blues legends.
5. Greenwood, Miss., "which is very important in that everything connected to Robert Johnson's death is here. He lived in Greenwood for his last weeks, playing on Johnson Street, and played his final gig at Three Forks, at the intersection of Hwys. 49 and 82, just inside Greenwood. The Greenwood Blues Heritage Museum, which is owned by Steve LaVere, is small, but he has big plans for a restaurant and performance area."
6. Poor Monkey in Merigold, Miss.: "A cool juke joint, and Thursday night is the night to go. They don't have live music, but it's the archetypal juke joint. It's a cobbled-together, wooden joint on the edge of a cottonfield. The owner changes clothes every half hour into a louder suit than he had on last time. You can arrange to have live music if you have a busload of people."
Jeff Johnson
There are no less than three headstones within a half-hour's drive of this historic town, all purportedly marking the burial site of the author of "Sweet Home Chicago," "Walkin' Blues," "Love in Vain Blues," "Come on in My Kitchen" and many other blues classics. But Atkins says that he and Gayle Dean Wardlow, author of Chasin' That Devil's Music, have pinpointed a site about four miles outside of town as Johnson's final resting place. Their research includes an interview with an elderly woman named Rosie Eskridge, whose husband supposedly dug the grave. And it's near Three Forks, the juke joint where legend has it that Johnson was poisoned by the proprietor, jealous that the itinerant bluesman had taken up with his wife. Wardlow disputes the theory that Johnson died of poisoning. He has unearthed a death certificate signed by a plantation overseer listing "syphilis" as cause of death.
We stop outside the cabin where Miss Rosie, who's in her late 80s, has lived a lifetime, but no one responds to our horn blast. Most of the roads, even those marked as county highways, are two-lane dirt paths. Atkins has just related a harrowing experience involving a Greenwood police officer, and I note with some trepidation that a blue Greenwood police cruiser is following us. The car disappears, and we proceed to the Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church graveyard on Money Road.
It's nearly midnight on a moonless, overcast night when we reach the Johnson site at the end of a long day of blues tracking. A storm is rolling in, and I pick up the scent of the minerals from the rich, pancake-flat farmland. We easily pick out the Johnson headstone in the dark, but any hopes of communing with his spirit are dashed when the patrol car glides silently into the parking lot and gives us the once-over.
That's the way it goes for a blues hunter in the Delta, where past and present collide in so many ways.
"The Delta blues will be dead when these last players [in their 70s and 80s] are gone," says Atkins, whose new novel, Dirty South, is the first in the Nick Travers series to abandon the central blues theme in favor of a rap-related mystery.
Hip-hop: the new blues
The ghosts of Mississippi bluesmen beckoned Atkins to Oxford, where he teaches journalism at Ole Miss. But the present state of the music holds little allure for the author, who says, "I set out to do a modern story and didn't find the modern blues scene that interesting. Hip-hop is the new blues."
Up in Clarksdale, town fathers regard the blues as a tourist attraction. They have erected two giant blue guitars to mark the intersection of Johnson's famous crossroads, U.S. 49 and U.S. 61. The train station has been refurbished as the Delta Blues Museum. Just follow John Lee Hooker Lane, named for the town's favorite blues son, until it dead-ends. Inside you'll find the cabin where Muddy Waters lived on the Stovall Plantation. And across the parking lot stands Ground Zero, the retro juke joint featured in Robert Mugge's 2003 documentary "Last of the Mississippi Jukes." The club is co-owned by actor Morgan Freeman, who lives nearby and wanted a place to hang out and hear blues, as well as contributing to the preservation of "American classical music."
Even the land developers have gotten into the act. Just outside Clarksdale, there's a sign in a cottonfield that reads "Blues Alley Subdivision."
Birth of Great Migration
A few miles outside of Clarksdale are the Hopson Plantation and Shack-Up Inn, where a six-pack of sharecroppers' shacks have been relocated for use as motel rooms. Proprietor James Butler, the husband of an heiress to the 4,000-acre plantation, does his best to duplicate the sharecropper's living conditions at Hopson, the plantation where the mechanical cotton harvester was introduced in the 1940s. While the invention freed field hands from lives of backbreaking labor, it also led to the end of the blues era by starting the Great Migration.
Air-conditioning, modern kitchen facilities and indoor plumbing are among the creature comforts, but Butler also gives a nod to the superstition of the original inhabitants. Broken mirrors on the front porch and hunks of newspaper glued to the walls are designed to distract invading spirits. And these may be among the last hospitality rooms in America not equipped with a TV, but guests are welcome to punch up the latest Gov't Mule or Tab Benoit offerings on a satellite system that plays music.
At the Hopson commissary, a watering hole for the locals, the main topic of debate is a highly unpopular effort to replace Colonel Reb, the Ole Miss mascot, with some "race neutral" image. This may be a college-educated group, but they sound corn-pone country when one of them tells a story about a squirrel's backyard death by electrocution.
You can't roll into this blues holy land on any given night and expect to find a wealth of live music. Perhaps the last real juke joint north of Jackson was the late Junior Kimbrough's club in Holly Springs, which was struck by lightning in 2000 and burned down.
There aren't really enough supporters of the music here to keep bluesmen working full time, so many take outside jobs and perform on weekends. Big Jack Johnson, for one, would drive an oil truck when not playing with the Jelly Roll Kings or his own band, the appropriately named Oilers.
And while the North Mississippi hill country blues of Mississippi Fred McDowell, R.L. Burnside, Kimbrough and T-Model Ford have found an audience with blues and grunge fans as played by their descendants, as well as the North Mississippi All-Stars, Kenny Burns, Richard Johnston and other younger artists, those players can command far bigger paydays touring nationally and in Europe than gigging before the home folk.
The culture, but not the music
Hard-core blues lovers still draw inspiration from the Delta. Steve Cheseborough, a 1920s and '30s revivalist musician as well as the author of Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of the Delta Blues, attended the Sunflower River Blues Festival in Clarksdale about a decade ago and was so inspired that he moved to Mississippi.
"If you're into the blues, as I've been all my life, you're aware of the strong connections to Mississippi, but I thought it was too late," Cheseborough explains. "I wished I'd come here 50 years earlier. But I'm constantly surprised by how much of the culture is still here. You won't find Memphis Minnie or Robert Johnson playing on any corner, and there are no juke joints going at all hours. But the distinctive culture is what got to me -- the roads, the land itself, the buildings, the cottonfields, the way the people talk, the food, the physical and cultural experiences of life here."
Joni Mayberry, who works at the Delta Blues Museum, moved to Clarksdale from Kansas City, accepting a pay cut from $38,000 to $12,000. "It's a choice I made," she says. "Here I'm surrounded by people who love it as much as I do and want to help. That's such a good feeling."
Monday: Whither the Year of Blues?
Day 1
http://www.suntimes.com/special_sec...blues/day1.html
Day 2
http://www.suntimes.com/special_sec...blues/day2.html
[Edited by polksalad69] |
|
|
| PolkSalad |
bump |
|
CHAT
ROOM aka THE FUN HOUSE] [
RESTROOMS]