|
|
The crowd at the Red Top Lounge in Clarksdale,
Mississippi, is sparse on a rainy Saturday night in April. I walk
in with a few friends, all of us visiting from New York and humbly
prepared to be the only whites in the place. There is a voyeuristic
pleasure to this possibility, the thrill of going someplace we don't
necessarily belong, far from home. At the door we are greeted by a
man in a vintage suit and felt hat, who asks how we're doing and tells
us to make ourselves comfortable. We aren't comfortable, of course,
but we like that. Inside, some heads turn with mild interest, a few
lingering unabashedly before turning away. We soon notice two young
white men already sitting at a table in the middle of the room, their
hands folded, their expressions revealing that they had been humbly
prepared to be the only whites in the place.
The room is dim, lit by a Budweiser lamp above a pool table in the
back and strings of Christmas lights drooping behind the bar. Real
juke joints don't have stages so the musicians play near the murky
front window, on level with the crowd. Four members of the local Wesley
Jefferson Band wander up from the bar and the singer speaks into the
microphone, "Now, we want everyone to be comfortable now. Let's all
have a good time. All right!" And with that, the band starts into
a fast, electric blues groove. The four women at the table in front
of us dance a little in their seats and close their eyes and laugh.
We are in our first juke joint, and we're immediately in love, although
when I tap my feet and bounce my legs, I find myself wondering if
I'm doing too much, or not enough. Then I'm thinking that I should
stop thinking. I get up and put quarters in the pool table, drink
a can of beer fast, play against a regular, lose, and it is about
the time he shakes my hand and tells me I played a good game that
I start to relax. The large man who has been playing bass comes over
in his t-shirt and white baseball cap and asks if any of us visitors
play an instrument. My friend plays guitar, and before long he is
called up front to sit in.
He's good. "Damn, that boy can play!" a women shouts.
"See?" the singer tells the bar. "The blues is the blues. If you got
the blues, you just know how to play it, whether you're Chinese�We
had a guy in here from Hong Kong one time came up and played. We got
no idea what they listen to over there. But he come down to Mississippi
and play the blues." The crowd mutters amused agreement.
I go to buy another beer while the band takes a break, and I find
myself standing at the bar next to Wesley Jefferson himself. He is
tall and thin, dressed in a dark button-up shirt. He is visibly exhausted,
or drunk. I ask him how often he plays here. He says once a week,
that its a very laid-back show for them, like a practice. I ask where
they play real gigs. "The casinos are good. You get sixteen hundred
dollars for an hour at the casinos." He motions around the room. "You
don't get nothing in your hometown. It's when you go out there that
you get paid." He has been to Chicago, and a few other big cities.
"But I won't never leave my hometown. I'm from here. And we get together
and just have fun, drink. But you never get nothing in your hometown."
I look over to see my friend talking shop with the guitarist, and
I decide that this whole thing is not as awkward or as foreign as
I had expected. And I feel a little disappointed.
Keith Dockery McLean, who is eighty-seven,
has lived at Dockery Farms, near Cleveland, Mississippi, since she
married Joe Rice Dockery in 1938. Their plantation on the Sunflower
River was started some fifty years before by Joe's father, Will Dockery,
and was the frequent home of Charley Patton, the father of Delta blues.
Many a researcher and blues enthusiast has come to Dockery hoping
to learn something, or wanting to pay homage, or trying to gain by
osmosis some intangible communion with Patton and his blues.
"We never listened to blues," Mrs. McLean tells me. She told the same
thing to Robert Palmer when he interviewed her for his book Deep Blues,
and she tells the same to anyone who asks. "We were never a plantation
family who invited the singers in for parties. I know one family down
the road, they always did. And when the lady died recently, an all-black
choir dressed in white sang at her funeral, which was lovely. I mean,
it's beautiful."
They lived differently at Dockery, that's all. The plantation was
regarded for its fair treatment of black sharecroppers, but that didn't
mean the cultures mixed freely. Like a corporate boss today who might
be understandably unaware if his intern is the best nineteen-year-old
techno deejay in town, the Dockerys had no idea they were landlords
to a cultural revolutionary. Mrs. McLean studied piano, and in those
early days at Dockery they listened to a lot of jazz, pop standards,
and ragtime. She can still remember the day George Gershwin died.
But she doesn't remember even hearing of the blues, until the legendary
ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax came by one day in the early '40s, several
years after Patton's death in 1934. "He called Joe and told him he
wanted to come by here. And he came and said, 'You know, this is the
home of the blues.' And Joe said, 'Well, we don't know anything about
it.'
"Later on, us having all of a sudden become famous for the blues,
people just began to swarm in here and look at that sign down here."
DOCKERY FARMS is painted on the side of an elevated seed barn clearly
visible from the road. When Mississippi public television made a documentary
about the blues in the 1980s, they used the sign as a logo for the
beginning of the film. "And B.B. King stood in front of that sign,"
McLean remembers, "and he just said, 'You might say it all started
right here. At Dockerys plantation.'"
The sign, which notes the dates of birth and death for Will and Joe
Rice Dockery, is one of the only well-maintained relics at the plantation.
The cotton gin, with its rusted machinery inside, still stands nearby,
but the sharecropper shacks and the small schoolhouses and churches
that used to line Dockery road have been leveled, many as recently
as the mid-1980s. McLean grows soybeans these days as much as cotton,
and what used to be the work of hundreds is now handled by a half
dozen farmers, who use lasers and computers on their John Deere tractors.
Across the highway a little ways down a dirt road, at the site of
a black church that burned down six Easters ago, the tall, charred
stump of a tree stands over an old Negro cemetery. The graves closest
to the empty church lot are kept clean. But the plots drift out farther
than the Dockerys had originally allotted, the grave sites whimsically
and sporadically placed, so the grass is left to grow there. I have
seen in a book the names of Charley Patton's wives, so I walk around
here looking, but I don't find any of them, or anyone named Patton.
But some of these people must have known him, and I want badly to
think I am paying respects to people who danced and drank to his music.
Back at the house, things feel very much alive. The red brick ruins
of the long since burned-down commissary--where Patton used to play
for dancing crowds�look lush beneath layers of vine. Beside them are
tennis courts and a freshwater swimming pool. I sit with Mrs. McLean,
drinking hot tea on her patio in the afternoon. A hummingbird buzzes
around the flower patch. I'm amazed that she's lived in this paradise
for so long, I tell her. She laughs. "Sixty years, isn't that crazy?"
Even with age in her face, Mrs. McLean has a youthful glee that comes
through in her giggle and her crystal-blue eyes. "But I've always
traveled. I always say Dockery is a great place to live, but I don't
have to stay here all the time. It's really a wonderful place to have
your roots." Over on the lawn a bird feeder is overcome by blackbirds.
I tell her that walking through the plantation fields near the old
cemetery, I had seen a lot of red-winged blackbirds. "Well, these
here are just plain old country blackbirds," she says thoughtfully,
"The red-winged ones seem to stay out in the fields. Must be something
out there they feed on that we don't know about."
Cathy Cox, who has been Mrs. McLean's visiting housekeeper
for four years, is listening to headphones and washing glasses in
the kitchen when I walk in. A forty-five-year-old black woman with
a wide-eyed, sympathetic air, she asks what brings me all the way
down from New York City. I'm wandering the Delta for a week, I tell
her, looking for the blues.
"Yeah, you come to the right place," she says. "I grew up with the
blues. But I don't listen to it no more. I mostly listen to gospel
music now. But now, if you looking for blues, you should talk to my
sister Galean. That's all she listen to. She's a singer."
Galean, two years older than Cathy, is married to Jerry Fair, a cousin,
twice removed, of B. B. King's. We call Galean, who invites me out
to her house in the nearby town of Shaw. Cathy will take me. She knows
how to get there but doesn't know how to explain it to me. "But its
not too far," Cathy says. "It's nice, too. They're building a big
ol' house out in the country. Matter of fact, I don't know why they're
building it so big. It's almost as big as this one," she says. "And
that don't make no sense."
The house sits at the end of a gravel driveway off a remote dirt road,
and is, especially compared with the neighboring homes, large. But
it's unfinished. The yard is muddy from the recent rain, so we walk
on the boards outlining where a walkway is going to be. A friend who
drives a cement truck is supposed to bring by leftovers when he can,
Jerry explains. The Fairs are building the house themselves, slowly,
out of the cheapest good materials they can find. They spent the winter
in a small, heated part of the house with their nineteen-year-old
daughter, Noonie, while work to finish on the rest. Progress is slow.
The floors are unfinished; the kitchen cabinets have no doors yet;
many of the walls are unpainted or, upstairs, missing. The whole place
smells like a hardware store, like bare wood and plaster, but you
can see the beautiful house it's going to become.
In the living room is a row of mismatched chairs, a large guitar amp,
some microphone stands, and a couple of guitar cases. Jerry and Galean
practice here on Wednesday nights with their band, the Kings of Rhythm,
which plays every Sunday night in Indianola at Club Ebony, where B.B.
King has performed every June since 1980 during his annual homecoming.
Jerry is forty-five years old, stocky, and dark-skinned, with a mustache,
goatee, and a scar over his right eye. He speaks with a hazy ease
that doesn't quite hide the fact that there is a lot on his mind.
"The Club Ebony is like a shrine in Indianola," he tells me, sitting
in his kitchen. "And the whole town knows B.B." Jerry's grandmother
was first cousins with King, who is ten years her junior. King's parents
died when he was a boy, and he moved into her house as one of her
children. They grew very close. "When I was a little boy, six years
old or so, I remember B. B. came to visit. We were all in bare feet
like Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, playing in the mud or something, and
B.B. pulls up. A black man riding in a pink 1962 El Dorado. Pink cufflinks.
Pink suit. Everything pink. And Mama introduced us, 'This is B. B.
King, your cousin.'"
The very next year that Jerry started learning to play the guitar.
"Knowing that we had someone in the family that had made it, that
was a real influence. Then when I got fourteen and fifteen, playing
music made you popular with the girls, so that kept me going some
more. But see, Mama would tell us that B.B. was going to hell." Jerry's
parents, who raised eleven children in a two-room house in Indianola,
were devout members of the Church of God in Christ. And since Jerry's
great uncle Archie Fair was a sanctified Pentecostal minister who
played the guitar, Jerry cut his musical teeth in church, playing
gospel, just as B.B. had done.
"B.B. became inspired by Uncle Archie and the fact that Bukka had
recorded a blues album," Jerry says. Booker T. "Bukka" White, one
of the first country blues artists to be recorded, is also a relative.
"Uncle Archie gave B.B. his first guitar. And somehow or another everybody
in the family since back years ago. Grandpa Jones was a fiddler, a
guitar player, a piano player, was given the gift. And so it just came
along on both sides. My father is eighty-three years old and still
plays guitar. Could have been a hell of a blues guitar player had
he chosen to play the blues. But he played church music." Jerry has
always played both.
Jerry Fair is a long way from a pink El Dorado,
but he is not the dusty Delta blues musician one might want him to
be. For one, he almost always plays an electric guitar. And when Jerry
says "the blues," he means the rhythm and blues he grew up listening
to, not the old country blues or the electric Chicago blues his parents
told him were evil. "To tell you the truth, I was a grown man when
I heard Muddy Waters the first time. I was a grandfather. You know,
I'd probably heard it like in cafes or someplace, walking along the
street. I'd heard the blues vaguely, playing on the radio. But I wouldn't
know Howlin' Wolf from Steppenwolf. I'd be more familiar with Steppenwolf
'cause that was the only thing we'd get on the radio station when
I was at school." When he first sat down and really listened to the
blues, in 1994, he was thirty-eight years old.
Cathy, sitting with Jerry and me, laughs. "You late. I was six or
seven when I first heard Muddy Waters."
"But Mama and them didn't play no blues at the house, and they didn't
let us go to no parties and stuff," Jerry explains. "When I got to
college, we were doing the 'Wild Thing.' Listening to rock. Trapeze
and Steely Dan. Steve Miller. We played Al Green, stuff that was contemporary
at the time. We didn't play blues."
"We was raised up with the blues," Cathy says. "That's all we heard.
My mother listened to it. My daddy. You know those little juke joints?
We had to work in those, and when we got out of school and did our
homework, we had to go to work. That made it so we'd seen drunk women
and men, growing up as kids."
"But once you hear it, the blues catches on," Jerry adds. Galean walks
in, with an acoustic guitar for Jerry and one for herself, and tunes
up. Galean is forty-seven but looks thirty-seven at most. She is beautiful,
her skin a rich medium brown and her dark hair pulled back into a
small bun. There is a serenity in her face and voice, in the calm
movement of her eyes. The Fairs sing a gospel song for me, then "Every
Day I Have the Blues," a song B. B. made popular. Jerry met Galean
in sixth grade in 1967. They married in November of 1985, and Jerry
taught Galean how to play guitar the next year because she got tired
of him leaving her to go play. Having grown up playing the clarinet
and saxophone, she was a fast learner.
"We're pretty much a team now," Galean says.
"Galean is one of a kind," Jerry says. "She went onstage and sang
with Little Dave and Big Love and pleased the crowd. Then she got
up there with this all-white band, a bunch of white fellas from Kentucky
and Nashville and those places. Got up there with a country-western
band, and got a standing ovation, more applause than both bands had
gotten."
Galean smiles a warm, pacific smile at me and shrugs impishly. She
starts up a Bonnie Raitt song, "Come to Me." Her voice is free and
full of fire. Jerry sings some backup, harmony loose and clean. I
would pay for this. But if I hadn't come into their kitchen, would
I ever have heard this music?
I ask if they play any Charley Patton. "I heard some Charley Patton
stuff, but I don't know any of it," Jerry says. "I heard it once or
twice on an old tape; it was kind of scratched up. But I'd like to
hear some more Charley Patton." I bring in my book of CDs from the
car, and I play some Patton. But just a few songs. Looking through
the book, Jerry and Galean grow eager: "Play some of that Howlin'
Wolf." "Play some Muddy Waters." "Play some more Charley Patton."
Galean plays along on a B-flat harmonica that a Greenville blues legend
named Willie Foster gave her. They ask if I have a tape I can spare,
and I do. So we sit there for a long time in their half-finished house,
on bare wood floors, listening to my CDs in our own impromptu juke
joint, making a mixed tape so they can listen to some old blues after
I leave.
The next day Jerry and Galean take me into
Indianola, a twenty-minute drive away, to show me some old juke joints.
At a stop sign a man is passing out flyers that show a sample ballot
with two state flags. This is the day when Mississippi votes on whether
to adopt a new state flag to replace the current one's Confederate
emblem. I take a flyer.
"Why do they want to change the flag?" Galean asks me. She didn't know about the vote. I explain that the old flag, aside from its racist
connotations, is considered, more practically speaking, bad for the
state economy: companies hesitate to locate themselves in a state that
flies a Confederate flag. She frowns. "They're not going change the
flag."
We walk into the Club Ebony, where Mary Shepard, the owner, sits at
a table counting receipts. Shepard is fifty-eight and has been running
the club for twenty-seven years. She tells me about her first show,
in 1975, when she called Little Milton and asked him to play. Little
Milton asked for a thousand dollars and told her she could keep whatever
they made on top of that. She was nervous because she thought they
wouldn't make it. But they did. "Oooh, I was tickled to death 'cause
I had made $231." Mary Shepard's club has done well.
We go around the block to Church Street, which used to be the main
street of the black business district. It begins, literally, just
across the tracks from the historically white downtown area. Jerry
remembers as a kid having to eat out of the back doors of restaurants
in the white neighborhood on the rare occasions he went there. The
black neighborhood in those days was, of necessity, self-sufficient,
so businesses thrived and bustled. "These buildings that you see,
vacant buildings, vacant lots, used to house juke joints. Up and down
the street," he says, motioning along Church. "And if we walk along
the street, somewhere here they painted a copy of B.B.'s guitar, Lucille."
The sidewalk tribute is actually on the other (white) side of the
tracks. "The first black pharmacist in the state operated right here.
And the first black bank, Penny Savings Bank. There's my ex-brother-in-law
there. He own this lot and the one across the street where he's mowing."
Louis Lockhard gets off his mower and says hello. His furniture store,
along the tracks, used to be the Blue Chip Lounge. "We played there
back in the early '80s," Jerry tells me. "Every weekend. And Club
Chicago." Jerry s now-deceased brother Birkett ran Club Chicago.
Another man walks up, wearing a black shower cap and chewing on a
half-smoked cigar: Gene Gastone, the proprietor of the Key Hole Inn,
which has been open since '71. The three men start pointing to where
all the old cafes were, telling me "all those places there used to
be juke joints," and those stores, and that empty lot, and back there,
"all them houses used to run juke joints on the weekend."
"There was a store right there," Louis says, "and you come out of
that store and step out, it was packed full right there thirty, forty
years ago. It was packed, the whole street."
"Even when I was a boy back in the mid-'60s, in the late '60s, on
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday they had so many people in the city,
man," Jerry says, looking off down the street. "You could come down
here with a shoe box during the day and make money." Lockhard says
the city was making a killing just off the parking meters, which are
now removed. "Man, it was money," Jerry says. "People were here. It
was thick, crowded."
Gastone opens the door to the Key Hole Inn so I can look inside. Everything
is particle board and tinsel and beer posters except the brick bar.
He bought the little place next door and knocked out the wall, allowing
for a pool table. I flip the pages of the Key Hole's jukebox: Keith
Sweat. Coolio. no old blues. Nothing older than Motown.
Back outside
in the bright sun, Gastone points out the building where Lockhard
is putting a Laundromat.
"All of us stick together," he says. "We trying to make it more lively.
It may come back, make it back alive."
Mary Shepard's Godson Clarence, who is forty-four,
offers to take me over to a few places in Greenville and maybe introduce
me to a musician or two. (Jerry pulls me aside before we leave and
suggests I might give Clarence twenty bucks for his trouble, and I
do.) Clarence used to work in Greenville as a bartender at a riverboat
casino. When the casinos first opened a few years ago, Clarence says,
they hurt business for the area blues clubs. Why pay ten or twelve
dollars to see Bobby Rush or Little Milton at a nightclub if you can
see them at the boat and drink for free? "But you know, people kind
of got back off it, because most of the people, they know they can
go to the casino and play and gamble, true enough, and see stars,"
he says, "but you have to think about some people want their own privacy.
So they'll wait until they come to the Club Ebony next week and see
them then. Especially if you--excuse the expression, I know the tape
is running--got yourself a pussy. Know what I'm saying?"
I put on a Howlin' Wolf CD in the car, which surprises Clarence. "Damn,"
he says. "You listening to that hard-times blues. You like that old
blues?" I say I do, and does he mean the hard times are over? Not
exactly. Clarence has lived away from Mississippi--he went to college
for a few years in Marion, Ohio--and he knows things here are a little
backward. In Indianola, he explains, he still doesn't speak to white
women in town unless they speak to him first, and "then I talk to
them politely. But in Marion, it's all good. I can talk to any woman
I want to talk to, 'cause they game, and I'm game." In Ohio they even
had blacks and whites living together, he says. "But the state of
Mississippi, oh no. They don't play that shit here. You got that in
Indianola nowadays, but it just started." I ask him if any whites
ever come to Club Ebony. Not really, he says. "The only time you going
to see white people at Club Ebony is when the B. B. King show come
in June. Some might be just riding, coming from like where you are
from, New York or somewhere, Australia, down here, you know, sightseeing."
Clarence takes me to the home of Willie Foster,
an eighty-year-old bluesman who played harmonica for Muddy Waters
in the 1950s. Foster, who has lost both of his legs and is mostly
blind, answers the door with a small, yapping dog under his wheelchair.
Foster is beaming, glad to see me, whoever I am. I sit on his sofa,
and the little dog jumps at my legs until Foster swats it away with
a cane. He hands me his business card, which reads, HARMONICA PARADER
WITH SOUL. LEGENDARY OF MUDDY WATERS. PARTIES, DANCES, WEDDINGS, SPECIAL
OCCASIONS. CALL ANYTIME DAY OR NIGHT. HAVE BAND. WILL TRAVEL. He has
a price, he says, but if you can't pay it, well, that's fine too,
as long as you pay him whatever you can. "I'll play with anybody.
I'll play for nothing. But I don't want somebody to say, 'Here's two
dollars,' and they think they're paying me." He says a few things
then to suggest that there might be something in this interview deal
for him: "You're not writing this article for free, are you?" I ask
if he means he wants me to pay him. "Well, I'm mostly teasing at you.
Because you get grants to do these things. They give you a grant to
go out and search for blues, the black culture. We're history, am
I right?"
I say I'm not on a grant, and you're not history. You still play.
(In a month, on May 20, after playing a private party, Willie Foster
will die in a hotel room in Jackson, Tennessee.)
"But we are the history of the blues," he says. "We're history. And
you're really searching up on history. See, I hardly play at my own
cultural place, black folk place. We denounce ourselves, and we're
ashamed of ourselves. I can go out to a club, there'll be a hundred
people in there, mixed or whatnot. And they'll call me up because
I blow a harmonica. And this is the blues. That's what blues is. It
all originated back with the whooping and hollering across the fields.
That's where blues comes from. But I could go in a club where a lot
of black people, everybody jumping and dancing and, 'Let's call Willie
Foster up!' 'Yeah!' And I get up there. And they say, 'Aw, that's
an old man. I don't want to hear no old blues.' That's the first thing
they say, 'old blues.' But they're playing the blues now, but it's
just more fancy.
"When poor Muddy died, he come out of the blues. He didn't mind singing
about the blues, telling it like it is. Lightnin' Hopkins will tell
it like it is."
I tell him I prefer that kind of blues, the country blues. "Well,
there you go. That's who's interested in it now," he says. "But blues
is not a song. It's an expression of your past life. The life that
you have lived. Blues is a feeling. You get sad about something. The
only thing you going to have the blues about is your girlfriend gone
or you done got broke. But we had the blues about everything. We stomp
our foot, we got the blues. We had to go barefooted. Stick a nail
in your foot, step on cocklebur, you got the blues as long as it's
hurting. You walking on the hot sand. You ever been to the beach?
Wasn't no beach out there in no cotton field, but you'd be walking,
and that ground is hot. Ground is real hot. You walk, you're going
to hurry up and try to get to some shade where the ground won't burn
your feet. It wasn't too much shade out there. That'll give you the
blues. I've worked sick. I've worked hungry. Then when I got big enough,
I know, I got worried so. ... You worry. Blues is a burden. Somebody
die in your family, you got a burden. You worry. Just worry. Your
woman gone, you got a burden. If you love her, and she done walked
off and left you, nothing out there shoot you like that if you love
her. You got a headache, you got the blues. That's the beginning of
the blues. Black people coming home, put an ooze to it. They say,
'What's wrong with you? You got your head down today.' Well, I got
a terrible headache. 'Yeah, I know how blue you feel.' Yeah, I'm feeling
real blue."
This is definitely not the first time I have encountered this thought:
that I couldn't really have the blues, but there are old black people
who get the blues every time they stub a toe.
"The blues, I express it. 'Cause I lived it. That's the life I lived,
what I express. And you express your past life. If you lived it, you
know it. If you don't live it, you really don't know it. You hear
it from someone else. It's like a fire."
Foster tells me about his recent travels to New Zealand, where people
of all races treat one another with love, "just like we say Heaven
is," he says. "I tell some people now, we don't have nothing. God's
given you breath to breathe. That same air that I breathe, you breathe
it also. We all got red blood. And we all got to breathe this invisible
thing, the air. But we try to separate: 'I'm better than them.' But
you ain't no better. If God snatch that little breath from you and
snatch it from them, both of you gone. But I lived the blues. I went
to work when I was seven years old. I bought my first harmonica when
I was seven years old. And I lived the life I love, and I love the
life I've lived."
Clarence gets a warm welcome at the Casa Blanca
in Greenville, where a handful of people at the bar are talking to
John McPhen, the tall, deep-voiced proprietor. No live music there
anymore, McPhen tells me, but they spin dance r&b on the weekends.
He's been there for eleven years, and before that he ran another place
for thirteen, and he'll do it as long as he can, or as long as they'll
let him. "The boats are taking over and sliding the little black man
out. I run this place clean. But I give it five years, there won't
be a small black club left in this town. Not one worth going to. Not
a legal place."
McPhen has a rather sinister theory that the city, trying to push
people onto the casino boats, will shut down all the black clubs.
His is one of two clean places left, he says. The majority of black
clubs are heavy into crack cocaine, and the police know they can shut
those places down anytime they want. "When they get me, it'll be a
plant," he says. "And when you throw us out, you got the whole town.
That's it."
"If you can't beat 'em,join 'em," a friend at the bar jokes.
"No," he says, shaking his head, his eyes wide open. "I got the working
crowd, and I plan to keep it." The men have been waiting on Clarence
that night, it turns out. He's an essential component of the Casa
Blanca pool team, which is shooting against the VFW that night. The
VFW hall is a point of interest, Clarence assures me, because blues
acts used to play there all the time. But no, not anymore.
What's there now, in the back of the fluorescent-lit banquet hall
where a stage would be, are closed-up voting machines from the flag
referendum earlier that day. I ask John, the owner, if he's heard
how the vote turned out. He shrugs and shakes his head. No one I meet
seems to care. I think I care the most, the only person who isn't
from Mississippi, the only one who isn't black.
In the front bar room, a deejay is setting up to play dance music.
There will be fifty or so people here later, they say, dancing all
night. The back hall, where the regulars play pool, is vast and dark
except for one corner, where the women sit at tables talking and watching
the men shoot, sometimes playing the jukebox, which is full of obscure
'60s r&b, with the occasional '90s hit ("Whoop! There It Is") mixed
in for the hell of it.
The tournament ends (with VFW victorious), and Clarence suggests we
check out the casino to see if anyone is playing. But first we drive
past an old club, Perry's Flowering Fountain on Nelson Street. Nelson
Street was once to Greenville what Church Street was once to Indianola.
Now it's all crack, Clarence says. There's a police outpost there
now, brightly lit, but the area is still considered unsafe. Perry's
was the last real blues holdout for the longest time, but old Perry
died last year. His family started a Flowering Fountain Renovation
fund to keep the old place alive somehow, but nothing has come of
it yet. The door to Perry's is chained. NO TRESPASSING.
We drive up the hill of the river's levee and down the other side
to where the three casinos sit. It's midnight on a Tuesday, but the
parking lot is half full. A band had played (no one can remember their
name) but they were gone. Clarence shows me the penny slot machines,
a sign, he says, that they want your every last cent. The place is
bright and soulless, which is no surprise. But what is interesting
is the cozy multiracial patronage. Blacks and whites, side by side,
playing video poker. "You see," Clarence says, "the only color that
matters here is green."
I stop by the Cleveland/Bolivar County, Mississippi,
Chamber of Commerce office, looking for Cheryl Line, the director
of tourism, who I'm told knows a lot about the local blues history.
She's out, showing some sites to a group of people interested in developing
a self-guided blues trail for tourists, her colleague explains, but
I should come back tomorrow maybe. "I wish I could help you," she
says, "but blues is not my field."
She gives me a brochure, which lists annual festivals (where you can
actually hear live music) and seventeen sites in a thirty-mile radius
that "should be of particular interest for tourists with a love of
Southern culture." Many of them are just towns where certain things
happened a long time ago. Benoit: "Birthplace of blues-men Willie
Harris, 'Peck' Curtis. . . ." Rosedale: "Both Muddy Waters and Robert
Johnson sang about Rosedale. . . . Check out Bruce Street, where Robert
Johnson used to play." A restaurant called Airport Grocery is listed
as having occasional live music. I call. There is a Willie Foster
performance coming up, but nothing now. The courthouse in Cleveland
is listed as the famous spot where W C. Handy let a local black trio
play at intermission of his orchestra's concert in 1905 (they played
a blues number and stole the show). A historical marker is posted
in the lawn there. Parchman prison is listed: "Celebrated and cursed
in many recorded blues songs by former residents. Son House, Sonny
Boy Williamson, and Bukka White." Then there's Tutweiler, where Handy
first heard the blues in the train depot in 1903. There is a painted
sign off the highway there that reads, TUTWEILER. WHERE 'BLUES' WAS
BORN, and turning off toward the depot, you see another sign: $97.50
FINE FOR LOUD NOISE. The depot, now severely dilapidated, blends right
in with the other forgotten buildings. Traveling the Delta, trying
to soak up the blues heritage, starts to feel a little like walking
through the old black cemetery at Dockery.
Wednesday night at Jerry and Galean Fair's
house, the Kings of Rhythm are practicing. Galean does not feel well
and is in the bedroom trying to rest. But I see she's written out
the words to Etta James's "At Last," which she had asked to hear repeatedly
during our listening session two nights before. The drummer is also
absent. Jerry, on rhythm guitar, is working with the lead guitarist
and the keyboard player on a Temptations song. They get that down
and start to improvise an instrumental number, with Jerry yelling
out chord progressions. It starts out as a kind of Latin funk groove
then goes into a blues riff. Then Jerry leads them into a little jazz
improvisation. Then back to the latin funk. Jerry is thrilled. "That's
a good mix right there, a little samba and some funk and blues," he
says to the other two. He asks if I liked it. I did. He turns to the
band, pointing at me. "See, we can sell that to his kind of people--excuse
the expression--and they're the ones with the deep pockets."
When the band leaves and the house is quiet, Jerry seems still excited,
but in a way that makes me think he's not excited often enough. The
band has its good times and bad, he explains. In June they're going
to play at B.B.'s homecoming concert as the backing band for opening
acts Rufus Thomas and Nathaniel Kimball. But they've had some group-dynamics
issues lately. Galean is ready to take on a bigger role, but there
are other strong personalities in the band. "Its been kind of difficult
to market the team concept," he says.
After some time living in Milwaukee, he and Galean moved back to Mississippi
in 1990. They played with a band of four brothers called the Midnight
Express. The Express already had a singer, though, so there wasn't
much room for Galean, and they eventually left the group. "But we're
good together," Jerry says. He's never been turned down after an audition
with a band. In the mid- and late '90s, he played with some very promising
talent (including a fairly long stint with Little Dave Thompson, a
popular Greenwood guitarist who has recorded with the Fat Possum label
in Oxford), but a match has never been perfect, or long lasting. No
one seems able to handle any success they earn, Jerry complains. There
are gambling problems, drug problems. Jerry himself had a freebase
cocaine habit, and a marijuana charge once landed him in prison, from
where he emerged, by all accounts, a new man. And if it's not an addiction
that stands in the way of healthy success, it's rampant egotism. "One
guy usually maybe sings a little better or he's more versatile, can
play a multitude of instruments, and starts to feel that he deserves
more publicity, more financial rewards, instead of looking at the
group concept. So it's kind of hard to work with the same guys consistently.
There are plenty of musicians, but finding a group, a team to work
with, is missing us. Everyone wants to be the star."
The local scene is so faint, it's not surprising that individuals
might want to put their names out front and try to get broader notice.
With bands fighting over scraps, everyone's share becomes more vital.
"The juke joints can only afford two hundred, two hundred-fifty at
the most, to a local band," Jerry explains. "And the more pieces you
have, the less money you bring in." So if Jerry and Galean play once
a week, they each make fifty bucks, or a hundred bucks a week, or
about four hundred a month, barely enough to live off of. "With a
three-piece band you can make a living. But if you go in there with
five or six pieces, you got to do it every day." They could play more
gigs. They're offered gigs in Greenville all the time. But those pay
even less, and by the time you pack everything up and drive to Greenville,
and unload, and pack back up and drive home, it doesn't seem worth
it. "I'll play for free, on the street, before I do that stuff. I'll
give it away." I mention that Willie Foster told me something similar,
and Jerry complains that Foster does gigs for $250, making it hard
for them to get more.
Jerry tells me he has an interview at the USG construction materials
factory in Greenville the next day, for a nine-dollar-an-hour, nine-to-five
job. He didn't want to take anything lower than four hundred a week,
he says, but three-fifty might be all right. Except that if he takes
a day job, he sacrifices the time and flexibility that he wants to
use for music. "I know that all those musicians had to pay dues,"
he says. "But I've worked hard for fifteen years. I'm too old to work
hard like that. I got to work smart." For the longest time, Jerry
says, he never thought of music as a viable career. And maybe it's
still not. But he wants to try. "It's not basketball or football.
You can get old and still play music, and get better." Jerry wants
to retire on music. But there is his half-finished house, their hundred
bucks a week.
"It's sad," he says. "'Cause what about the future? I'm trying to
think about the next hundred years, our grandkids. That's why I'm
building this house so big, so we can have a place to all come together.
I want my grandkids to have a place, and they can say, 'My grandfather
built his house.' And maybe they'll lay a flower on my grave, and
I'll be remembered. That's why I'm building this house so big."
I hear about a juke joint called Bourbon Mall
where a great guitarist named Eddie Cusic is known to play. He doesn't
play there anymore, they tell me on the phone, but they've got music
on Wednesday through Saturday. Amazing, I think, four nights of live
music. I drive out south of Leland, following the vague directions
I was given. The road curves, and civilization slowly disappears.
Right about the time I'm certain I've gone past it, that it can't
be this far out, I come to a lighted shack on the side of the road.
Cars are parked in a field across the street. It's a quintessential
juke joint setup, and my eyes get wide. I walk into a small convenience
store front and am directed through a door into a dark bar area, where
a man sits in a chair in the corner with just an acoustic guitar.
There are small tables with candles, and various examples of taxidermy
around the room. Perfect. Except there are a few things awry: the
place takes credit cards; filet mignon is on the menu; there is a
big-screen TV (turned off, mercifully) in the corner above the bar;
and everyone in the place is white. Including Guitar Charlie, a jolly
but sore-throated man of about forty with a buzz cut and sunglasses.
His tip jar is empty. He sings a Howlin' Wolf song, his imitation
helped along by his sore throat. The people are talking among themselves,
oblivious to the music. Sitting alone at the front of the long, wooden
bar, I'm the only one who claps after each song. No one speaks to
me, asks me where I'm from. Half the backs in the room are turned
toward Guitar Charlie and me. When starts to move away from Delta
blues, into Stevie Ray Vaughn territory, the crowd warms up a bit,
but there's still no applause. "Folsom Prison Blues" gets people stomping
along for one verse and singing along for a chorus. But then they
go back to their conversations. The steak is excellent. The fried
shrimp, a little mushy. There is no bourbon for sale in Bourbon. I
get my check as soon as I swallow the last bite, and I take my leave
to the tune of ZZ Top's "Tush": "I said Lord take me downtown/I'm
just looking for some touch."
WE�VE GOT THE BLUES AND A WHOLE LOT MORE! read
the signs welcoming you to Clarksdale. And where Highway 61 crosses
49, near the center of town, there is a monument with three large
blue guitars, their necks pointing out in each direction. This marks
the crossroads where, we are led to believe, a mediocre Robert Johnson
sold his soul to the Devil for the talent that would bring him fame,
fortune, and immortality.
Clarksdale is pushing a blues revival effort. At the center of it
is the Delta Blues Museum, which states as its mission to "assure
that the blues never die, and remains a vibrant part of the history
and future heritage of its Mississippi roots." The museum building,
an old train depot at what is now One Blues Alley, was renovated two
years ago and houses galleries, a gift shop, and a practice space
where Michael "Dr. Mike" James, a guitarist with the Wesley Jefferson
Band, is giving a Thursday afternoon music lesson to four children
as part of the museum's local Delta Blues Education Program. There
is a boy on drums, another boy on bass, his twin brother on guitar,
and a longhaired white girl playing lead guitar. Dr. Mike paces the
room, counting off, singing out their parts to them one by one. Dr.
Mike has been teaching for fifteen years and took over this program
in 1998 from his former teacher, Johnnie "Mr.Johnnie" Billington,
who continues to teach students of his own in the nearby town of Lambert.
These classes are meant to get kids interested in playing the blues,
to teach them not only how to play but how to dress and act like musicians,
and how to make a living at it. There are several bands around Clarksdale
made up entirely of young graduates from the program.
The students play through the Temptations' "Just My Imagination."
Then they work on a new song that Dr. Mike is teaching them: Prince's
"Purple Rain."
I ask the man at the register in the gift shop of the Delta Blues
Museum if he knows of any live blues in town that night, and he does
not. It's mostly just three clubs, on the weekends. But that will
soon change, he tells me. They'll have music in town at least four
nights a week�Morgan Freeman, who lives nearby, is opening a juke
joint, Ground Zero, across the street in the old Delta Grocery building.
I walk over to Ground Zero, up the big concrete stoop past a barbeque
grill shaped like a pig's head. One of the managers, Joe Williams,
who played drums with the Wesley Jefferson band at Red's on Saturday
night, recognizes me. "You were with that guitar player," he says.
"Yeah, he was good. I liked his style." Joe's brother, Terry, is going
to lead Ground Zero's house band, Big T and Family. They'll play three
or four nights a week, but they'll keep a full array of instruments
there, ready to go, should capable and interested players happen to
show up on a Monday or Tuesday.
I notice, on a wall nearby, a photo, clipped from the newspaper, of
a billboard showing a white and black handshake. WORKING TOGETHER,
the billboard reads, WE CAN ALL BUILD A BETTER DELTA. "We want this
to be a place where whites and blacks can come and be together," Joe
tells me. He moved to Clarksdale when he was nine and remembers hanging
out around juke joints. He was too young to go inside, but he and
his friends used to get dressed up and dance outside for quarters.
"Not as many people come out as they did ten years ago. So we're trying
to recreate that happening time, when you come and relax on the weekend
and you don't worry about anything."
Ground Zero will serve Southern food seven days a week, all day '
and evening. They will have a shuffleboard table and bottle cap checkers.
On a table near the door are the checkerboards, fresh from the box,
with the checkers still in their plastic bags. The place feels like
what it is: a charming replica, bigger and cleaner than what it's
supposed to evoke. The ceiling is left unfinished, with some of the
wooden boards visible. The tables and chairs don't match, the floor
is bare. "Morgan wanted the place to be as tacky as possible," Joe
tells me.
Tony Czech, the director of the Delta Blues Museum, a white guy with
a mullet haircut, comes over and introduces himself. The museum is
not formally involved in the Ground Zero project, but Czech is thrilled
by its presence. "There's a lot of new interest in blues," he says,
"by a lot of people like me. The blues came to me from the Yardbirds
and Eric Clapton and John Mayall, and then you work your way backwards."
He tells me about the busloads of Norwegian tourists they get at the
museum. Now if only the Museum could just get more people to make
the drive from Memphis, or Tunica, where the casino boats attract
sixteen million people every year. I ask if anyone is worried that
a place like this might hurt the few traditional black joints left
in town, but Joe and Tony are not worried. More traffic through town
is good for everyone, they say.
A lot of people in town have those concerns, though, Czech admits.
They don't see the possibilities. "The people in Orlando don't necessarily
go to Disney World all the time, but they're glad it's in their backyard."
A tourism page on the museum's Web site says, "It is Clarksdale�s
intention to capitalize on its unique position as the Birthplace of
the Blues� by providing authentic, 'must-see' entertainment products
and services." But Czech puts it more concisely: "It's not cotton
anymore. Blues is the cash crop now.�
Czech suggests I check out a place fifteen
minutes out of town where they have occasional blues performances
(he saw James "Super Chickan" Johnson, a solo guitarist who also plays
with the Wesley Jefferson band, do a private party there the night
before). The place is the old Hopson Plantation. James Butler, who
married into the Hopson family, manages the site, which they have
developed into a "bed and beer" compound. There is a barn-sized commissary
building with a bar, a stage, and twenty or so tables for dining.
The room is decorated with photos, old license plates, farm equipment,
old album covers. There is an entire wall from an old barber shop,
complete with chairs, restored in one corner. It feels like a cross
between a museum and a T.G.I. Friday's.
The lodging part of the compound is a row of four sharecropper shacks
which were salvaged from nearby plantations and renovated with working
bathrooms, kitchenettes, and televisions. When there is a performance
in the commissary, the televisions show a closed-circuit view of the
stage area so people can watch from their rooms.
James Butler, who works by day as Director of Public Works for the
city of Clarksdale, knows his history, and cares about the blues.
He wishes he could have more live music, but when they do have it,
the five-dollar-a-head charge at the door doesn't come close to paying
the band. They have to make it up at the bar, and even then they only
break even, usually; $750 for the band, $400 at the door. It just
doesn't make sense. He's going to try to start putting on shows every
second Saturday. He figures if he can get people trained on a certain
schedule, he might succeed. And besides, he's sick of telling people
who come through the door that they have live blues but not today.
People like to plan.
Thursday night is the night to be at Po� Monkey's
in Merigold. Everyone knows this. Over the course of the week, when
I tell people I am looking for juke joints, most tell me to go to
Po' Monkey's on Thursday night. Even the brochure from the Cleveland
Chamber of Commerce recommends it.
Po' Monkey himself is William Seaberry, who lives at the sharecropper
shack and has run a juke joint in it for thirty years, gradually adding
rooms as popularity demanded. His place is right in a cotton field,
covered in Christmas lights, near a shady glen of trees. This Thursday
night he cruises the room in an American flag shirt� blue-and-white
starred shoulders with red-and-white striped pockets. I'm with a young
friend of Keith Dockery McLean's, Rob Brown, who teaches at Delta
State University and did his doctoral thesis on the return migration
of blacks to the Delta. There are few empty seats, but we are beckoned
to sit by a man called Puddin', who asks me to guess his age. I guess
fifty. He is seventy-one, an old regular and a retired professional
gambler. We play a little no-stakes three-card monte, and I lose.
We get drinks. Whenever Seaberry passes us, he asks if we're all right,
and I know he's asking because we're strange faces, white faces. "Relax
now," he says. "Enjoy yourself." This, if anything, causes a little
tension�like the excessive reassurance you get at a dentist s office.
But I'm not tense. The crowd is in full swing, having a great time.
The music is loud, the deejay is louder, talkative. He's giving shout-outs
to the people from Shelby and Mound Bayou.
From out of the crowd in the back emerge three middle-aged white people.
Rob introduces one to me as Luther Brown (no relation), who is the
head of the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State.
He's escorting Judy Randall, a consultant from North Carolina who
has been hired by the state of Mississippi to catalog the authentic
blues locations that might be of worth to tourism. It's too loud to
talk, so I wave at Randall, who smiles and nods and holds her purse
close to her body as she takes one more look around before leaving.
The dancing a few feet away ranges from mellow and skilled to mildly
obscene, and progresses toward the latter as the music evolves from
a bluesy groove to hip-hop and harder later in the evening.
Old photos of Monkey�s adorn the walls: portraits of family, snapshots
in the bar from decades ago, some pin-ups of women mixed in. Monday
night Seaberry has live dancing girls�less music oriented, I'm told.
I wander over to get another beer from the kitchen area, and beside
the open door is a poster of a blues musician named Stacey Merino,
who has autographed it: "To Po' Monkey. Keep your head up. We will
get there some day."
Cheryl Line has been to Po� Monkeys and has
talked at length to Seaberry about possibilities. "There are an awful
lot of people who come here and want something that's authentic. They
like places like Po' Monkeys," she tells me in her office the next
afternoon. "I don't think William Seaberry understands what he's got
out there. If he really took Thursday night and just played blues,
live blues. . .well, it would probably be too much for him." Line,
as the Director of Tourism for the city of Cleveland and Bolivar County,
is trying to foster a comfortable atmosphere where people can experience
the local culture. "They're coming anyway," she says. "What we'd like
to do is to give them something we think they can really sink their
teeth into."
It's hard, she realizes, when people travel down here with romantic
notions. They find the Delta as it is, and it's depressing. "What
we'd like to do is figure out something we could actually give them,
and not just have them wandering around to depressed and itty-bitty
towns where there's nothing left," she explains. "I thought of talking
to Po' Monkey and asking him if he would play some of the right kind
of music, or that kind of music. I don't know that he will. He's doing
his thing. "Looking around at what we're known for and what's important,
the music ought to be celebrated. I think we've been fools not to
recognize that," she says. And now she worries that it's too late.
"You're losing the numbers of people that have really heard field
songs and have heard those old chants. And most of the younger generation
doesn't know about blues, really."
The simple fact, she says, is that there's not much incentive. Blues
musicians don't make a lot of money�partly, she suspects, because
of bad organization. There is a lack of reliability with venues that
discourages people from patronizing. So Line says the consultant Judy
Randall is sticking to certain criteria as she charts out a guide
for tourists to the Mississippi Delta. "You have to be able to find
it," Line asserts. "You got to have a sign that says it's there. You
can't be standing there on the street guessing. You've got to have
at least hours that are reliable. If Judy could put together a package
that is realistic�start off small�and we can give people that experience
they�ve come looking for, then I think out of that will grow lots
of different things. And those streets may get full again. And you've
got plenty of out-of-work folks. There's no telling what you could
have going in those towns if something caught on." She and Luther
Brown have even talked about applying for a grant "to subsidize some
of these guys that are good who could run a safe place that would
be authentic. I don't know what we'll come up with, but we're looking
at some things like that."
But isn't there a small problem with manufactured authenticity? I
ask. And isn't the unreliability of a hidden hole-in-the-wall part
of the charm that would bring people down? She doesn't want to bring
busloads of people through any of those places, she says. "It makes
me nervous when [juke joints] get too much attention. Because I would
like to see as much authenticity maintained as possible. But I don't
know how to do that." A broad focus on the whole Delta history, she
believes, would help�an approach where tourists could be "standing
in a cotton field with a sack behind them, or taking a levee tour
and talking about before the river was channeled and how the levee
was built and what labor was used. See a film on mule farming and
take it all the way through, and just explain what happened. And we
would have to do a Civil Rights tour, too. So it's quite a story.
And then you have your blues. And it'll have a little bigger meaning
if you know the story. But there are a lot of people that don't want
to tell the story, that don't want you to know about the story."
By and large, people in the Delta are friendly, she says, even if
they don't know how to help. "And if you're adventurous, you're having
an experience." I've been pretty adventurous, I tell her, but I haven't
seen what I thought I would see, certainly not in the way of live
music. "We may not have the authentic juke joints, or as many as we
had," she answers, "but we still have a story to tell, and the flavor
that is still here. And there are festivals, of course, where a tourist
can get his fill of live blues. You might have to come the twenty-eighth
of this month to get the right feel for it in the right venue rather
than have it at anytime you come. You can look at a schedule across
the year that we could put together and have when the festivals are,
and you will be able to see when you could have a good experience
of the blues. Because you get your vacation when you can get it."
Line wants the towns to work together, to collectively develop something
that will make sense of it all, "to tell the story and be able to
direct people in the areas that they might be interested in and try
to see that those are developed as a realistic kind of thing, and
not a pie in the sky. You know, now you're just out there wandering,
looking for a grave site. Well, there's got to be more." *
©
Matt Dellinger. All Rights Reserved.
|
