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Birthplace of the blues Music is simple, the history deep along the Mississippi Delta
There is not a strip of Americana more historically significant, yet less commercialized, than the Mississippi Delta. It was here, in the wedge of floodplain bordered by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers – with Vicksburg and Memphis as the southern and northern limits – that the blues was born. Many an American musician, from Elvis to Prince, George Gershwin to Michael Jackson, would be nowhere without it. A drive through the Delta is a venture into the beginnings of a music that today, in various forms, is known across the globe.
Unlike other historical sites, there is no "Blues land" theme park, no costumed actors to show what it was like – the real Delta is still there: the cotton fields, the splendid sunsets over the cliffs of the Mississippi, the roadside juke joints, the plantation houses – all surrounded by obvious hardship and a simple but haunting beauty.
The area still is one of the poorest in the nation, and if it sounds strange to visit a place that so many thousands have done their best to escape, it won't seem so after talking to the people, who are customarily friendly and will want to know where you're from and where you're going.
Mississippi is gradually realizing its blues heritage and is acknowledging it with historical markers and in tourist brochures. One of the best – some say the best – blues festivals takes place in Greenville the third Saturday every September.
Exploring the not-so-obvious is the way to seek out the blues. If you're lucky, you may experience what W.C. Handy did in 1903 as he waited in the Tutwiler, Miss., station for a train that was nine hours late: "… life suddenly took me by the shoulder and wakened me with a start," Handy wrote in his autobiography, "Father of the Blues," (De Capo, $13.95), describing a guitarist in the station playing "the weirdest music I had ever heard." One of the lines the singer repeated – "Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog" – intrigued Handy, who would later write "Yellow Dog Blues." Where the Southern crosses the Dog is the intersection in Moorhead, Miss., of the Southern and Yazoo Delta rail lines, the local name of which was Yellow Dog. A marker notes the spot.
It is characteristic of the Delta that so many of the historic sites gain meaning only after learning the history by talking to the townspeople.
The grave of harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson sits in a grown-over graveyard next to the abandoned shell of a church overlooking cotton fields. Yet it's obviously the object of many a pilgrimage: harmonicas and other tokens, left in tribute by blues devotees, decorate the tombstone. (The gravesite can be a little hard to find. Outside of Tutwiler, drive south on 49W from its onset for about eight-tenths of a mile. Turn right and drive about 1/2 mile. Turn left just before the blue house and go 11/2 miles. The church and graveyard are on the right on Prairie Place.)
Town still stands
On Highway 8 midway between Cleveland and Ruleville is Dockery Farms, identified as the most likely birthplace of the blues by Robert Palmer in his definitive book, "Deep Blues."
The plantation town still stands, but is much quieter than it was when founder Will Dockery was known as a man with a lot of jobs to fill and, at least in comparison to certain Delta landowners, didn't cheat black workers out of their pay.
Soon after the plantation's founding in 1895, black farm workers, including Bill Patton and his family, flocked there. Patton's son, Charley, would live in the Dockery area most of his life, but he avoided farm work and instead played the guitar and sang. He has credited Henry Sloan, another Dockery worker who, for all we know, may have invented the blues, as his teacher.
Created dynasties
Charley Patton died in 1934 but played and recorded enough to change American music. In "Deep Blues," (Viking Penguin, $9.95) Palmer wrote of Patton: "Along with Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley and a few others who created not just styles but dynasties, he is among the most important musicians 20th century America has produced." John Lee Hooker and Howlin' Wolf also lived for a time at Dockery.
In Clarksdale, possibly the most famous blues site of all, there is little left beyond imagination. In 1936 Robert Johnson recorded "Cross Road Blues," in which he sang about the terror of being alone at a country crossroads in the middle of the night – terror of the law and of the supernatural. The song became his most renowned, with cover versions by Eric Clapton, among others, and it even inspired the movie "Crossroads" several years ago.
The crossroads Johnson sang about – where Highway 61 meets Route 49 on the outskirts of Clarksdale – is now a commercial strip lined with gas stations, fast-food joints and small businesses.
Yet Clarksdale is an essential stop, because it's home to the Delta Blues Museum, which has a modest but worthwhile permanent exhibit called "All Shook Up: Mississippi Roots of American Music," that includes posters, photographs, paintings and artifacts.
Memorabilia still used
Records are available for listening, and sometimes there's a guitar made from a board off the shack Muddy Waters lived in. The guitar actually belongs to the rock group ZZ Top, who pick it up when they go on tour and who, because of their admiration for Muddy Waters, are instrumental in promoting and raising money for the museum. The museum is on the second floor of the public library, 114 Delta Ave. (1-601-624-4461).Drove plantation tractor
Part of Muddy Waters' shack is still standing. Born McKinley Morganfield in Rolling Fork (acknowledged by a plaque on Highway 61), the bluesman became locally known while living in a cabin outside of Clarksdale on Col. William Stovall's plantation, where he drove a tractor. On weekends his place served as a juke house, which was popular enough in 1941 for word to reach folklorist Alan Lomax, who was traveling the South making recordings for the Library of Congress.
Muddy Waters made his first records in the cabin, one room of which still stands. The Blues Museum intends to eventually remove the structure to where it can be preserved and sheltered from the weather. (To get to Muddy Waters' cabin, take what is alternately named Oakridge and Oakhurst Road out of Clarksdale. It turns into Stovall Road. The cabin is located about 8 miles from downtown on the left.)
Unknown local talent
Another stop in Clarksdale is the Stackhouse Record Mart (232 Sunflower), which specializes in the blues and has a bulletin board with notices about upcoming concerts and events. Overnighters will want to check out night spots featuring the blues. Most of the local talent will be unknown to all but blues scholars, so always ask at the museum or Stackhouse Records for advice on where to go.
In Greenville, home of the Playboy Club where owner Booba Barnes is often the featured player, the annual Mississippi Delta Blues is in an open field – "We want to keep it a little down and dirty, like the blues," says one festival organizer.
The festival draws musicians still in the Delta, the nonhousehold names who go back to farming or barbering or truck driving when their gig is over. Festival director Malcolm Walls expects 30,000 people this year. The summer flood disaster has not affected this part of the Mississippi.
Depending on who you talk to, the Delta either begins or ends in Memphis. But when it comes to country blues, Memphis was definitely the end. Here, it is generally said, the blues were electrified and made palatable to white people – Elvis Presley being the great example. But truly, Memphis and Chicago are where the Delta blues were citified and made more popular with all people, black and white.
Delta-born B.B. King discovered his voice and sound in Memphis, finding that the audience was bigger for an urban, electric soul music than for the cruder, acoustic country moaning. Modern blues can be heard every night on Beale Street, where clubs blast their sounds out into the street.
Festival in July
King has an eponymous club here, where he plays at least once a year – in between, local Memphis blues bands appear. The second weekend each July sees the Mid-South Music & Heritage Festival, a celebration of blues and barbecue.
In Memphis, make your way to the Center for Southern Folklore, 152 Beale St. (1-901-525-3655), where there are changing exhibits on the culture of the South. The Center also arranges short tours of Beale Street and longer excursions to Delta cotton and catfish farms.
Travelers with an initial curiosity can attach the Delta country to a vacation in New Orleans or Memphis, visiting the houses in Natchez, touring the Civil War battlefields at Vicksburg, driving the Natchez Trace, or doing an Elvis pilgrimage to Tupelo and Memphis.
But blues fans will find that a day or two in the Delta will only scratch the surface. The music is simple, but the history is deep.
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