Rock Star, Rock Planet

 

I discovered Eric Clapton, Rock Star, earlier this year. 

He’d been around, of course.  I just wasn’t paying attention.  In the early years, as he moved from the increasingly commercialized  Yardbirds into John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, I was being introduced to Lead Belly.  While I learned to play the 12-string, Cream  (Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and Clapton) came and went in just two years, disbanding a few months before Woodstock.  After Cream, Clapton formed a new group, Derek and the Dominos.  Layla, the title track on their album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs was released in December of 1970. First told by the Persian poet Nizami, the story of Layla and Majnun became one of rock’s definitive love songs, its famously contrasting movements composed separately by Clapton and Jim Gordon.

Clapton’s contribution to Layla was inspired by his then-unrequited love for Pattie Boyd, wife of friend and fellow musician George Harrison.  Though unaware of the details behind its composition, Layla  haunted my life for years. I loved the song, but couldn’t have told you the artist’s name.  It was enough to hear the music, drifting unbidden through the air of two decades and three continents, poignant and breathtaking as an unexpected tear.

Blues Traveling

Cheating.  Grudges.  Abandonment.  Shootings.  Woman trouble.  Man trouble.  Too much whiskey.  Not enough whiskey.  Flophouses and fixin’-to-die.   The blues has it all.

It’s a musical world rife with ”I’m-down-here-in-the-ditch-and-I-can’t-get-out“ resignation, if that’s what you want or need, but there’s more to the blues than down-and-out. Forced to  describe the blues in a single word, I wouldn’t choose sad or depressing any more than I’d choose anguish, tribulation, or despair. When I think of the blues, I feel like traveling.   The music overflows with highways and journeys, crossroads and railroads, picking up and leaving, heading home or wandering off to Chicago, Memphis, or Anywhere-But-Here.   

Robert Johnson went down to the crossroad.  Tab Benoit’s night train is rollin’.  R.L. Burnside did some rollin’ of his own, and a little tumblin’ for good measure.  R.L.’s grandson Cedric and his buddy Malcolm bought a lemon of a car and ended up having to hitchhike home. Cedell Davis says he’s gotta be moving on and suggests we might want to be heaving ourselves out of our chairs to start packing.  Sitting around’s not going to get us anywhere.

Unfortunately, no one who packed their bags and headed to Clarksdale, Mississippi for this year’s Juke Joint Festival arrived by stepping off a southbound train. Amtrak’s City of New Orleans speeds straight from Memphis to Greenwood, bypassing Clarksdale and its historic depot.  They couldn’t come by Greyhound, either, because that historic  terminal has closed and functions now as a museum and meeting place.  For travelers intent on experiencing the blues, hitting the road is the answer, just as it’s been for decades of bluesmen.  Some Festival-goers arrived at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49  in “bluesy” cars - Chevys, Fords and broken-down trucks -  while others tucked their distinctly non-bluesy Volvos, BMWs and SUVs into the far fringes of the town’s parking lots, perhaps hoping to appear a little more “down home” once separated from their vehicles.

The variety of people emerging from those cars was astonishing. There were J-Crewed families with infants and toddlers, Japanese tourists from Hong Kong and elderly couples  from the Dakotas sporting Western-style shirts with pearl snaps.  There were men in bib overalls and women in spike heels, teen-agers carrying skateboards and Goths with pierced everythings.   

The professionals were there, of course.  Photographers and videographers struggled with bags as big as guitar cases and lenses bigger than the CDs they snapped up.  There were notebook-jotting journalists and laptop-toting bloggers.   And always there were the musicians, sidemen and session players mixed in with nameless, not-on-the-program exemplars of persistence  hoping to get a hearing and a break as they hooked up to battered amps in doorways around the festival’s periphery.

The bluesmen  – and women – who’d been scheduled for the venues had done some traveling of a different sort to get to Clarksdale.   When Lightnin’ Malcolm and Cedric Burnside were joined by T-Model Ford and Cedell Davis on Saturday afternoon, the electricity running through the crowd was palpable.  Most of the people who’d drifted into the alley next to Rust Restaurant had come to hear Burnside and Malcolm, and had no idea two blues legends would be sitting in.  As friends helped Cedell, a victim of polio, get settled in his wheelchair and T-Model worked the crowd, shaking hands and grinning, the alley began to transform itself into a  house party.  Some family and friends were getting together to make a little music.  In the process, the gathered crowd would catch a glimpse of shared roots and shared lives impossible to grasp at a concert.

Cedric Burnside, grandson of blues great R.L. Burnside and son of drummer Calvin Jackson, has played for years with a variety of musicians including Junior Kimbrough, Kenny Brown, the North Mississippi Allstars, Bobby Rush and Widespread Panic.  After teaming with Steve “Lightnin’” Malcolm, another young Mississippi native who lived for a time with Cedell Davis, the  pair began writing and composing with flair and self-awareness.  “I don’t just sing about the blues, but I live it, too“, they begin, and then add, with a straight-faced irony no doubt lost on many of the Blues tourists, “Some people say they read about the blues, been readin’ about it for a while. Well, I don’t have to read about the blues, ’cause I been livin’ it since I was a child.” 

Cedell Davis, a native of Helena, Arkansas, was one who started livin’ the blues as a child.  Contracting polio at age nine while living near Tunica, Mississippi with his brother, he was forced by his disability to give up harmonica and re-learn his guitar skills.  He grew creative, telling an interviewer, 

“I was right- handed, but I couldn’t use my right hand, so I had to turn the guitar around; I play left-handed now. But I still needed something to slide with, and my mother had these knives, a set of silverware, and I kinda swiped one of ‘em.” 

It was the perfect solution for someone unable to put a slide on a finger and use it in the conventional way.  He wasn’t the first to use a knife, but he was in good company.  In a famous passage from his autobiography, W.C. Handy remembers his experience in the Tutwiler, Mississippi train station:

A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags, his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularised by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song too, struck me instantly. “Goin’ to where the Southern cross the dog.”  The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.

 ”Weird” is right. A metal knife handle on metal strings produces a sound some delicately call  “alternative tuning” while others describe it as a first cousin to fingernails and chalkboard. While it’s true an initial encounter with Cedell and his guitar can be  uncomfortable, there’s nothing uncomfortable about meeting the man himself.  Rolling through the gathered crowd in his wheelchair he had a word and a handshake for everyone in his path, and took obvious delight in sharing the spotlight with the other surprise of the afternoon, T-Model Ford.

 

T-Model, a man with as much hard living and bad luck behind him as you could have and still be alive, is a bit of a wonder himself.  He began playing guitar when he was 58 years old, on the night his fifth wife left him.  Every report I’ve read indicates he’s still unable to read or write, since the 88 year-old white woman who was teaching him was raped and murdered.  Born James Lewis Carter Ford in Forrest, Mississippi, perhaps in 1924, he had a pacemaker implanted in 2008 and anticipates another twenty years of bluesing it up.  One can only hope the next twenty are less dangerous.  Writing about Fat Possum Records and their artists  in the London Guardian, Richard Grant lays out the highlights:

T-Model’s life reads like a horror story. At the age of eight, his father beat him so badly between the legs with a piece of firewood that he lost a testicle. His ankles are scarred from the chain gang. His neck is scarred where one of his wives slashed his throat. He has been shot, stabbed, pinned under a fallen tree with a broken ribcage, beaten unconscious with a metal chair. He watched his first wife go off with his own father, watched another die after she drank poison to try and induce a miscarriage. The only woman he ever really loved poisoned him at the breakfast table; he woke up in hospital that afternoon and never saw her again.

Unbelievably, T-Model doesn’t seem willing to apply words like anguish, tribulation, or despair to his own life. As he says himself,

“I play the blues, but I don’t ever get the blues. After my sister died I prayed to God to please let me live like a tree. Tree don’t care if them other trees is dyin’. Tree don’t care about nothin’. When they raped and killed that white lady, I felt bad – she was a good old white lady – but I didn’t let it get me down. I don’t let nothin’ get me down.”  

As  Grant notes in his article, most people aren’t able to stay happy because they’ve decided to be happy, no matter what – but it seems to work for T-Model.

  

Certainly he seemed happy enough in Clarksdale.  Basking in the palpable affection that surrounded him, firm and straightforward in his singing, he obviously enjoyed playing with Cedric.  The set finished, T-Model rose, steadied himself on his cane and bantered a bit with the musicians around him.  Then, a model of graciousness, he went on to take his place in the crowd  while Cedell and Malcolm, the old and the young, the black and white, the root and the branch, began to edge through another song, just as they would have when they shared the same house .

 

Suddenly, in a  seemingly spontaneous and casual gesture, T-Model reached down, picked up and flipped his cane, and began to “play” in rhythm with Malcolm.  Watching him, it was as though he’d become the embodiment of the blues, the music the sustaining rhythm of his life.  “Look at that,” said the fellow from Chicago sitting next to me.  “Just look at that.”  At my other elbow, a photographer stopped in mid-focus to ask, “Can you believe that?”

What they saw I can’t say, but what I saw was T-Model Ford, the old reprobate, the “old tail-dragger” with the sweetest smile in the world, breathing in life and breathing out blues in a process as easy and natural as Cedell’s table knife slicing music into a plateful of chords.  He just couldn’t help himself, and everyone saw it.

When Lightnin’ saw what T-Model was up to, he caught Cedric’s eye, and the Two-man Wrecking Crew grinned at one another across the crowd. Seeing Lightnin’s amusement, Cedell looked over at T-Model, who gave a deep, elegant bow in return.  With only a pause, one song ended and another began as Cedell’s voice strengthened, the rhythms intensified and the chattering, admiring crowd began to grow quiet.

It was then, in a back alley hidden from the world, that travelers from Rotterdam, Rochester and Rolling Fork leaned forward in anticipation as they felt the Blues itself begin to travel.  Pitted against the low mumurings of a threatening storm, the music rolled and tumbled from one guitar to the next, from one singer to another. As the clouds heaped up and chords grew heavy in the  air, Cedell sang, and Lightnin’s guitar flashed and the music poured down, running like an unbanked river through hearts flattened and scoured by life. Channeled down the alleyway, it flooded out into the streets, spreading and leveling as it flowed.

Washed clean of inattention, the fellow from Chicago stopped talking, leaned back and closed his eyes. Surprised by an unexpected surge of joy, the photographer from Jackson lowered his light meter and set his camera aside. Smiling back at Cedell, T-Model winked, folded his hands over the crook of his cane and lightly tapped a foot over the fine, raspy grit of the alley. Off to the West, the rain rolled down and the River tumbled on through the Delta, the source and the life of the Blues.

 

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Huddie Ledbetter’s Pines

Until his suicide in 1994, I can’t say I’d  heard of Kurt Cobain. I knew there was a musical movement afoot in the Pacific Northwest called “grunge“, represented by groups with names like Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots and Alice in Chains, but I’d missed the ascendance of Nivana, and certainly didn’t know Cobain was their frontman. 

After his suicide,  it was impossible to avoid Kurt Cobain.  Even the un-grungiest were forced to learn about Courtney Love, her marriage to Cobain, the birth of their daughter and legal struggles over her custody, not to mention Cobain’s unrelenting drug addiction, rampant unhappiness and, according to some fans, impending musical sainthood.

I learned all this casually, as though hearing weather reports from New Delhi. The information surely was important to much of the population, but it seemed irrelevant to my life.  Even at the height of the hysteria over the rocker’s death, I still hadn’t heard his music, apart from the obligatory clip on the evening news.  Of course I was prejudiced.  I was 48 years old and deep into the fourth year of building my own business, with no adolescents to parent. I simply wasn’t interested enough to pursue the work of someone responsible for a song with incomprehensible lyrics called “Smells Like Teen Spirit“, a young man who’d been formally introduced to the woman who would be his wife at a Butthole Surfers concert.  

Despite public memorials held on the tenth and fifteenth anniversaries of his death, Kurt Cobain faded from my consciousness, until  recent research into the life of Blues legend Robert Johnson brought him back to mind.  Johnson was the first member of The 27s Club, a group of musicians noted for sharing one unfortunate experience: all died at the age of 27.   The list of musicians, including such notables as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Ronald McKernan of The Grateful Dead and Gary Thain of Uriah Heep, also includes Kurt Cobain.   

In their book  The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock & Roll, Erik Segalstad and Josh Hunter not only provide a terrific history of rock, they explore the inter-relationships and influences that link many of the “27s” together.  The influence of Bluesmen like Robert Johnson was criticial for musicians like Cobain, not only musically but personally.  According to Courtney Love (who may or may not be a trustworthy witness, depending on your point of view), Cobain once said he wanted to die as Robert Johnson did; according to his sister, quoted in the biography Heavier Than Heaven, he sometimes expressed a desire to “join” the 27 Club.

Whether that desire influenced the timing of his suicide is impossible to say.  What is certain is that Cobain had been spiraling downward for some time, his drug addictions obvious and his suicidal tendencies suspected by those close to him.   When his body was discovered at his Lake Washington home on April 8, 1994, a nearby suicide note  said, “I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music, along with really writing…for too many years now”. 

The truth is I wouldn’t have known any of this about Kurt Cobain had it not been for another roots musician, Huddie Ledbetter.  I first discovered Ledbetter - commonly known as Lead Belly - in college.   A friend with too many guitars  passed his 12 string on to me along with a little advice: if I wanted to learn to play, I needed to listen to Lead Belly, the King of the Twelve-String Guitar.  Listen I did.  Ironically, I learned to play my first song, In the Pines exactly as generations of garage band rockers have learned ~ by imitation. I listened to a Lead Belly recording time and time again while I tried to “get it right”.   Eventually I did get it right, and in the process learned to appreciate not only the music but also the life of an impulsive, reckless and notoriously violent individual.  Singing his way through and possibly out of prison, taken under the wing of musicologist John Lomax, working with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Big Bill Broonzy, he became a staple on the folk circuit until his death in New York in 1949.

I was astonished when I discovered Lead Belly also was a favorite of Kurt Cobain.   The song I learned as In The Pines was sung by Cobain during Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged appearance on December 14, 1993.  Nirvana’s title for the song was Where Did You Sleep Last Night? and Wikipedia wrongly lists it as a composition of Lead Belly’s.  The song actually dates from c.1870-1880. It may have its origins in the Appalachians and is extant in a variety of forms.  Researching the song for a 1970 dissertation, Judith McCulloh found 160 different versions.   Sometimes it’s known as In the Pines,  and sometimes as Black Girl.  Some versions include references to railroading while others don’t.  Only the cold, moaning wind seems constant.   

The lyrics are variously poignant, bitter, reflective or accusatory, but Cobain’s MTV performance of the song is essentially distressing, particularly when seen against the horizon of his death.  New York Times music critic Eric Weisbard, writing about Cobain and the song in 1994, made clear his belief that Cobain’s was the definitive version. As he said, ”There is really no need for anyone to ever sing it again.”  Fortunately for lovers of music and history, a critic can’t so easily wrest a  much-beloved song from the people to whom it belongs, only to deliver it into the hands of his favorite interpreter.  In the Pines will be sung, again and again, by people oblivious to the opinions of critics but firmly embedded in musical traditions that probably will outlive the Times.

 

There’s no denying that Kurt Cobain’s is a sad, unsatisfying story.  Unhappy in life, he seems ungrounded  in death, his accomplishments, convictions and musical legacy scattering to the wind like his ashes.  Despite his own difficulties and an unfortunate tendency to land himself in prison for attempted or actual homicide, the end of Lead Belly’s story is rather different.  Stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s  Disease, Huddie Ledbetter died in New York City in 1949.   He was buried near the place of his birth, in Mooringsport, Louisiana, in the Shiloh Baptist Church cemetery.

When I discovered the location of Lead Belly’s grave, there was no question I’d stop for a visit while on my way to the Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi.  Cautioned by others to take explicit directions and plenty of printed maps, I still spent an hour or so wending my way through unmarked back roads until a utility worker who claimed never to have heard of Blanchard-Latex Road – or Lead Belly -  noticed we were nearly on top of some railroad tracks shown on one of my maps.  “Head up there,” he said.  ”Take a right, and go on down that road a piece. If’n you don’t find the church, you’ll still be back where you started and you can start over again.”

Starting over for about the fifth time that afternoon, I discovered I was on the right road.  Built of the same brick as the tidy little church it announced, the sign was easily visible from the highway, and the expansive parking lot suggested either an active congregation or a steady influx of pilgrims to Lead Belly’s grave.  Parking behind the church, I reached down to scratch the ears of the welcoming committee, a scroungy yellow and white cat pushing against my ankles, and then walked through the neat, wrought-iron fence into Huddie Ledbetter’s world.

 Moving along the path toward his grave, itself fenced off and obvious toward the middle of the cemetery, I was surrounded by Ledbetters: Edmon, Annie, Alice and John.  I didn’t see the graves of Wesley and Sallie, his parents, but they surely were there. The church itself, established in 1872, bears E.A. Ledbetter’s name, inscribed into the cornerstone.  Like so many who set out for adventure in life, Huddie Ledbetter learned Eliot’s truth: that home is where we start from, only to find as we journey on that “the world becomes stranger and the pattern more complicated”. In the end, he was one of the lucky ones. He was able to return home, to lie surrounded by his family in  restful simplicity.

His own grave, marked by a matching wrought-iron fence and a stone noting his accomplishments, is well-tended, dignified and discrete.  A second stone embedded into the ground proclaims him King of the 12 String Guitar, and the engraved guitar which decorates it is scattered with triangular guitar picks,  thrown over the fence by visitors as tokens of affection and respect.  I had no pick, but I had a voice. In the warm, comfortable silence, a squirrel stopped at the sound of it, and the little lamb melting away in front of his stone seemed to listen.

 

Like so many graveyards, this one was peaceful, comfortable and reassuring.  Walking among the stones I collected a few sweet gum balls, stumbled into a fire ant mound and took a few more photos, until the lengthening shadows reminded me of the passage of time.  Reluctant to leave, I had a last look at Huddie Ledbetter’s grave and gave a final pat to the sociable cat who still was curling around my ankles before turning toward the car.

Halfway there, I turned again to look back down the narrow asphalt road leading to the grave of a man whose life had been filled with turmoil and success.  As a performer, Lead Belly sang of cold, lonesome pines, the darkness of anguished isolation and the shiver of fear felt by those forced by circumstance to flee familiar lives.  But here, where the late afternoon sun warms his grave and the ageless, insistent wind shushes the clamor of life, Huddie Ledbetter is a man at rest ~  asleep in the  sheltering pines.

 

 

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Headin’ Down to the Crossroads

Generally speaking, the anticipation and pleasures of a vacation compensate for the hassles involved in preparing to leave.  It can be exhausting to make those lists and check them a hundred times to ensure the cat will be fed, the newspaper stopped, the plants watered and the mail picked up.  On the other hand, every chore ticked off the list means being one step closer to a truly light-hearted leaving, and no one regrets the effort.

Coming home is another matter.  Coming home means unpacking, sorting through mail, discovering bills you forgot to pay, doing piles of laundry and being informed that the Cat from Hell, who gets truly annoyed in your absence, has run off yet another kitty-sitter.   Even worse, coming home means it’s time  to deal again with that troublesome co-worker, the boredom of school or any of the  daily irritants that never are as exciting, enjoyable or intriguing as days spent away.

On the other hand, as I think about vacations from even a decade ago, things clearly have changed.  Back in the day, vacations were separate from daily life.  No matter how greatly we enjoyed the fishing, the drive through the mountains, the concerts or the galleries, when the time came to leave, we left – and left all those vacation pleasures behind.  Oh, we remembered them, of course.  School kids wrote “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essays while their parents showed photos to co-workers. Still, vacation moved very quickly into the past.  As the demands of ordinary life began to impinge on the present, “vacation” seemed no more alive and vibrant than the piles of souvenirs cluttered into a corner.

Today that’s changing.  This is the internet age, and more and more often we’re able to bring our vacations home – not in the form of postcards, rocks, souvenir mugs or refrigerator magnets tucked into a bag, but through modern connectivity - a web of pages, sites, emails and videos that allows us to continue absorbing and appreciating where we’ve been and what we’ve seen even after we return home.  It’s a Law of the Universe that there’s never enough time to see it all, learn it all, or enjoy it all, but thanks to the internet, it’s easy to keep enjoying, learning and participating as long as we wish.

When I drove away from Mississippi’s most famous crossroads just over a week ago, I’d come to regard it as Mississippi’s most famous metaphor, primarily because the highways involved - US 61 and US 49 - don’t actually cross but merge on the outskirts of town.  No one seems to mind the poetic license.  For one thing, so many historical events and mythical stories are centered on those two roads they’d deserve to be known as The Crossroads even if they ran parallel.

As the joined highways head north out of Clarksdale toward Memphis, the four-lane road is smooth and wide. Eventually, Highway 49 veers west across the Mississippi toward Helena, Arkansas.  Where it turns, the crossroads has a flashing light, and each of the lesser crossroads – Jones, Moon, Coahoma, Friar’s Point – has its own helpful sign. In 1937, when the Moon Lake Club was in its prime and today’s Blues legends were just performers on their way to another gig, it was a different story. The road was narrow, two-laned and dark.  The truck parked near the intersection of  US 61 and Friar’s Point Road would have been nearly invisible to Richard Morgan, driver of the speeding car that hit it from behind and carried Blues singer Bessie Smith to her death.

There have been innumerable stories told of what happened that night, with wild variation in details.  There were claims the ambulance chose to transport a white woman injured when another car hit Morgan’s after the initial accident.  Some insisted that Bessie Smith was taken to an all-white hospital but was refused admittance and died in the ambulance while it searched for a colored hospital.   (Edward Albee’s 1959 play The Death of Bessie Smith promoted this view.)  In fact, she died in Clarksdale’s Black hospital, and lay for years in an unmarked grave until, in 1970, Janis Joplin and Juanita Green, the child of a former employee of Bessie’s, raised funds and provided a proper tombstone. 

I knew nothing of this while in Clarksdale.  I’d become lost on Friar’s Point Road while trying to find Uncle Henry’s at Moon Lake and I’d seen The Riverside Hotel in town, but had no idea the hotel was the old hospital where Smith died.  Only later, as I was pulling up a map to see how I could have gone so far astray on the back roads of Coahoma County did I discover the stories of Bessie Smith and Frank Ratcliff’s hotel - yet another bit of Blues history I’d missed while in Clarksdale.  Fortunately, a more knowledgeable traveler had sought Frank out during his own trip down the Blues highway and recorded a tour of the historic hotel.

However distressing Bessie Smith’s crossroads tragedy, for sheer mystery and drama the story of  bluesman Robert Johnson cutting a  midnight deal with the devil at his own, unknown crossroad is the stuff of legend.   The story is simple enough. Obsessed with becoming a great blues musician but often shooed away by the likes of Son House because his playing was so – well, bad - he received mysterious orders to show up with his guitar at an isolated crossroad at midnight.   

As promised, the Devil appeared, tuned the guitar, played a few licks and then gave it back to Johnson, along with the technical mastery he’d been lacking and a few good songs to go with it:  my favorite Sweet Home Chicago, Come On in My Kitchen and, of course, Crossroad Blues.   His songs are classics and his influence pervasive.  During one of his Robert Johnson sessions Eric Clapton said, ”My take on Robert Johnson so far is that it needs two people to play what he plays, and sing along at the same time.”   Well, yes.

I don’t believe anyone knows for certain where the Devil and Robert Johnson held their midnight meeting.  I do know wherever Robert Johnson’s crossroad might be or whatever happened to him there, I’ve yet to tire of the song that captures the experience and gives it life. Crossroad Blues is deep, pure art, and as Michael Maurer Smith notes, ”All good art has more to give each time (we return) to it—ideally wiser and more experienced.” 

What is true for art can be true for vacations.   Astonished as I was by the absolute flatness of the Delta, it took some  time to remember the River hidden behind its levees and begin to appreciate how the Mississippi had shaped the land. Riding the highways, variously puzzled or bemused by things I saw, I stopped time and again to ask my touristy questions.  Sometimes I got an answer and sometime I didn’t, but by the time I left Mississippi I was seeing the landscape in an entirely new way. Now that I’m home, other mysteries have been resolved - why brick obelisques are strewn across the Louisiana delta, where the cotton has gone, why slide guitarists like open-D tuning. With more reading, listening and study, I’ll be able to plunge even more deeply into Delta life and culture when I go back – a wiser and more experienced traveler. 

Despite the counsels of cruise directors and casino marketing staffs, there’s no reason leisure time should be devoted solely to escape, indolence and unthinking ease.  Engagement and active, thoughtful participation in the world to which we’ve traveled is always appropriate.  No matter our destination or chosen activity, there always is a land, a people and a history waiting to be discovered. We may not meet death or be courted by the Devil when we head off in new directions, but every vacation is a little crossroads – a place to stand and ponder the questions life loves to pose:  shall I turn back?  or shall I go on?  Should I return home, tell a silly story or two, poke a bit of fun at the  “native customs” and then settle back into my comfortable routine? Or should I go forward, taking a turn this way or that as I journey into deeper understanding, more gracious appreciation and a willingness to be shaped by what I find over the horizon?  

The questions are not entirely rhetorical, and answers will come. In the meantime, one of the gifts of the Blues – malleable, open, receptive to improvisation and revision – is that songs expand to contain life.  Mississippi Writin’ Blues did just fine  for a start, but we’re not nearly at the end.  There’s always room for another verse or two, and I’ve found one to take me on to my own, next crossroad.

Gonna find me a crossroad,
Brand new place and time,
Gonna bet me the Devil
won’t pay me any mind,
Gonna stop movin’ backwards,
gonna’ ride that forward line…

 

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Mississippi Writin’ Blues

 

When circumstances converge to produce an unexpected or unusual result, some people call it ”intuitive planning”.   Others call it temporary insanity, or taking leave of one’s senses.  Roger Stolle, proprietor of Cat Head Delta Blues and Folk Art  in Clarksdale, Mississippi, has heard it all.  A St. Louis executive with a love for the Blues and high tolerance for risk, he  left a lucrative job in advertising to move to the Mississippi Delta and start promoting musicians with names like Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, Robert “Wolfman” Belfour and Bill “Howl-N-Madd” Perry.  “A year ago, I was meeting with the CEO of May Company and traveling to Hong Kong on business,” explained Roger, speaking of his changed life. “Last week, I booked a blues musician named T-Model Ford for our grand opening and set up a store display that included a chair made out of painted cow bones. You tell me which sounds more fun.”     

I’ve had my own experience with the kind of intuitive planning that turned Roger into a combination entrepreneur and impresario - I ended up varnishing boats for fun as well as profit, after all  - so when I spot the first signs of circumstantial convergence drifting over the horizon like high cirrus, I start looking for the storm.  Not so long ago, a casual browse through Words..Music..and Sometimes Baseball, an obviously eclectic blog,  sent me over to Cat Head for the first time.  Browsing their site, I discovered something called the Juke Joint Festival, a gathering of home-grown Delta blues musicians taking place just on the fringes of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.  I could sense an impulse running down the tracks toward me like the 3:09 out of Memphis when it still barreled straight for the heart of the Delta.  I found Clarksdale on the map.  I looked at the calendar.  I thought about my old twelve-string guitar and wondered, ”Whatever did happen to Howlin’ Wolf?”  There was no turning back.

 

The town of Clarksdale sits in the heart of the alluvial plain known as the Mississippi Delta, at the convergence of two highways traveled in spirit by Blues lovers around the world.  Running north from Baton Rouge, US 61 reaches to Vicksburg, and then on up to Rolling Fork, home of Muddy Waters.  It crosses US 49 in Clarksdale and continues on to Memphis.  From Clarksdale, US 49 extends south to Greenville, home of the Mississippi Blues and Heritage Festival and northwest to Helena, Arkansas, where “King Biscuit Time”, the radio show that helped popularize the blues, began broadcasting  in 1941. ”King Biscuit Time” is still on air, hosted by its longtime emcee, John W. (Sunshine Sonny) Payne and preserving an irreplaceable part of American culture.