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| Mother baby |
TRAVELERS ON THE Blues Highway know this, some more explicitly than others: From Natchez to Memphis, the length and breadth of the Mississippi Delta is littered with gravestones, each a holy site for blues enthusiasts, but a gravestone nonetheless — Mississippi John Hurt in Avalon, Elmore James in Ebenezer, Fred MacDowell in Como. And, somewhere near Greenwood, the final resting place of Robert Johnson.
The Blues Highway is at once both metaphor and road map, an itinerary from the Gulf of Mexico up to Chicago roughly along the route of Highway 61. It’s not just the “things to do” that caught my attention when I traveled the Blues Highway last fall, in the company of travel writer Tim Cahill; it’s also the things best left unnoticed on other journeys. The tattered old towns, the decrepit juke joints, the jails falling into ruin and the railroad tracks lying as fallow as a winter cotton field, and those cotton fields themselves, flat and spare and endless. Belzoni, Yazoo, Indianola, Itta Benna, Avalon, Tutwiler — this is the landscape of the music, and slipping into their disregarded past isn’t really that difficult.
KING OF THE DELTA BLUES
Clarksdale has long been one of Mississippi’s cultural hot-spots, given its strategic location in the cotton trade and proximity to Memphis, just over the border in Tennessee. It’s also less than an hour from Greenwood, where Robert Johnson is thought to have died, in August 1938. We got there just in time for lunch, and detoured down River Road to find smoke pouring from a trailer kitchen. “The King of BBQ” read the hand-painted sign — everybody’s the king of something in the South, it seems — and the smoked meat that fell off the bone was worthy of a funky kind of royalty.
“Y’all after the blues?” asked the BBQ King from the midst of his sooty lair. “You should go downtown, see that new blues shop that guy’s got.” We thanked him and paid for our ribs and slaw; maybe later, we thought. Right now we were, like the Blues Brothers, on a mission from God — following the fading traces of Robert Johnson’s brief life.
Robert Johnson, known as “the king of the delta blues,” lived in Greenwood for perhaps four months in 1938, following the second of his two recording sessions. Here Henry “Honeyboy” Edwards met him, playing “Terraplane Blues” on a street corner. Edwards recalls in his memoirs that Johnson had a room in Baptist Town — the black neighborhood of narrow streets, small lots, and wood frame houses just east of the old downtown, along the railroad tracks.
We drove slowly into the neighborhood, self-conscious about our new rented red SUV. Old greasy sedans leaned close into the curb, discolored by bondo and rust; a nearby water tower rose into the bleak skyline. It looked like neighborhoods near where I grew up, in Pasadena, Calif.; there are probably “Baptist Towns” disappearing all across America these days, their sprawling families uprooted and their old trees falling.
ROBERT, WHO?
We found the corner of Third and Fulton, where Johnson had supposedly lived, and died. There were four different houses to choose from, and after only a moment’s hesitation we chose the most photogenic — a simple blue one-story with a peaked roof and a tree’s branches flowing overhead.
As I was taking pictures and Tim was making notes, a man came out of a house nearby to do some work on his car. “Hey, do you know anything about Robert Johnson living around here?”
“Where’s he live?” he asked.
“He used to — he died in the ’30s.”
He laughed. “Well I didn’t know him. Let me ask my Pa. Hey Pa” — a gray head on a bent spine poked out from behind the screen door — “y’all heard of what his name, Robert Johnson?”
“He was a blues musician,” I said helpfully. “From the 1930s. Very famous now.”
The old head shook slowly, with overtones of reserve and caution. “Don’t remember a thing about it,” he said.
One afternoon in August of ’38, Johnson and Honeyboy played a juke joint at Three Forks, near the town of Quito about a country dozen miles away. Johnson was seeing a local girl — he was a young man who loved his women, and in most towns he played he had a favorite. But that afternoon someone put poison in Johnson’s drink — he was a young man who loved his drink, too — and before long he was too sick to play. He was taken back to Baptist Town, remained too ill to get out of bed, and died four days later.
RESTING IN THE BLUES
‘You may bury my body down by the highway side / So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.’
— ROBERT JOHNSON
blues musician
It seems for years no one cared very much, either about his murder or where he might have been buried. But as his fame slowly grew over the decades, people began to wonder where Robert Johnson’s final resting place was. There were two candidates that we knew about, one near Quito and one a bit farther down the road, near Morgan City. We asked for directions to Quito — it’s pronounced “quit-oh,” with the accent on the “quit,” and it’s down the road from Itta Benna, pronounced like it’s spelled — and made the turn over the Yazoo River to an open, spare neighborhood under the trees.
A graveyard occupied a bend in the river, near the rebuilt and whitewashed Payne Chapel. It was an isolated and simple cemetery, but I found the simple flat gravestone at once. “Robert Johnson. May 8, 1911 — Aug. 16, 1938. Resting in the Blues.” A guitar decorated one corner, a treble clef another. Someone had stuck a forked twig in the ground above the stone, whether as a tribute or an omen I don’t know.
A black man of about thirty came over to speak to us. “You looking for Johnson’s grave, right? Yeah, this is the one. That’s his girl friend’s place over there.” When we looked dubious, he continued. “Or something like that. Sister, maybe. Knew him, anyway. You know this ain’t his original gravestone?”
We nodded. This one was planted by a devoted Georgia blues band only about 10 years earlier. We had heard the story that his ex-girlfriend, or sister, had had Johnson’s body moved here after he died, some said so that he’d never be out of her sight again.
“You know some people don’t think he’s here, but I do. Seems like the right kind of place for him, you know?” He looked around at the quiet country cemetery by the river. There were other gravestones marked Johnson nearby. “Then Quito would have been all family. Everybody took care of every one else. I remember my aunt sayin’, ‘You might as well get whipped here ‘cause you’re gonna get whipped at home!’ Course they never hurt you, really. But every woman was our mother in those days.
“Now it’s different.” He stood up. “Drugs. Drugs came and ruined it, everyone’s into crack. All different now.” He walked away, to join some friends checking rabbit traps in the fields. Or so he said.
Down County Road 7 we almost drove past the T-intersection at Morgan City. A U-turn, brought us into the parking lot of Mount Zion Mission Baptist Church. Here there was no mistaking it, the squat four-foot obelisk at the base of the road bank. White marble. Inscribed with the titles of all his songs, a brief biography, and a quote from “Me and the Devil Blues” — You may bury my body down by the highway side / So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride. The monument had been erected in 1991, with support from Columbia Records. A few coins, dried flowers, and a mostly empty bottle of Heaven Hill Kentucky Whiskey had been left as offerings. Tim copied down the inscriptions, I took photographs, and in less than an hour we were on our way. I never saw a Greyhound.
STUMBLING ON A GOLD MINE
The doctor-of-record had scribbled on the back of the death certificate, ‘Cause of death: syphilis.’
It was late afternoon by the time we returned to Greenwood, feeling that by visiting two graves we had proved only there might be others. After all, it had been 65 years — a lifetime ago; if he were alive today he probably wouldn’t be. As we passed through town again, however, I suddenly remembered the “blues shop” the King of BBQ had told us about. We found it on Howard Street, an ostentatiously named Greenwood Blues Heritage Museum and Gallery.
At first it seemed as if we had stumbled on a gold mine, complete with gold records plus 30’s-era photography, blues books and CDs, and Robert “King of the Delta Blues” Johnson posters. It was hard to tell if it were tacky or a tribute, but there was no doubt that here was some sort of legacy of the Johnson story.
No wonder: the owner was Stephen C. LaVere, a lawyer who had become obsessed with the Johnson myth many years earlier and eventually re-copyrighted all his songs — the gold records were composer’s awards for songs by the Rolling Stones, Cream, Eric Clapton, and others — as well as the two known surviving photographs of Robert Johnson, LaVere held these in a trust he shared with Johnson’s surviving kin, including an illegitimate son born in 1931.
And there was this: a photograph of yet another grave site, in a display arguing that this, at last, was the real final resting place of Robert Johnson. The young girl in the museum had only been there a couple days, and she had to call her boss for details. But eventually she did direct us to “the real one,” as she said with the confidence of the neophyte. We raced outside to the red SUV just as the sunlight was disappearing from the street outside and made a beeline north up Fulton Street, over the bridge and out of town.
MSNBC |
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| steel driving hammer |
She's my Highway Child, who plays guitar on that Mick or Keith? |
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| FPM C10 |
quote:
steel driving hammer wrote:
She's my Highway Child, who plays guitar on that Mick or Keith?
Oddly enough, the guitar in that is played by Paul McCartney.
By the way: WHAT THE FUCK, MY BRO? I keep tryin' to stick up for you, and you keep proving your detractors right. Did you think your comment was apropos because it had the word "Highway" in it?
Anyway, the original article is really cool, and it's a trip I want to make someday. John Hammond Jr's "The Search For Robert Johnson" takes the same route.
[Edited by FPM C10] |
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| steel driving hammer |
Hey it's nice to see you finally learned how to post pictures!
{{{{CA-RACK}}}}}
That one's out of the ballpark Ronnie! |
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| scully |
Thanks for posting the article - I'm hoping to spend some time in the Mississippi Delta next year as a birthday present to myself. Been to Memphis and Muscle Shoals, but travelled between the two in the dark, so couldn't see much!
The Peter Guralnick book "Searching for Robert Johnson" is well worth reading for anyone who loves the blues. (All his books are IMHO). Sam Charter's book "Country Blues" is also good, but written much earlier, so is (oddly) less informed.
Thanks again. |
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