Category Archives: trails

Civil Rights, long stretches of beach and a whole lot of writing

Finding more blues outside the Mississippi Delta

If ever there was a pretty Southern town, it has to be Natchez, Mississippi. So, we parked ourselves there for three days, worked in the library, walked the streets and stopped in for coffee often at the excellent Steampunk Coffee Roasters. Next door is the historic blues club the historic blues club named Smoot’s Grocery. Smoot’s has received a top-to-bottom renovation and is a beautiful space for parties, get-togethers or live music. Well worth checking out if you find yourself in Natchez.

Our schedule included a “break week” when we were taking some down time on the Mississippi Gulf Cost, catching up on blues-related reading, working on the book structure and starting some chapter work. All accomplished while we stayed at Gulf Islands National Seashore near the pretty town of Ocean Springs. While there we crossed paths with a get together of about two-dozen Roadtreks and we were quickly welcomed into the fold. Thanks y’all! Looking forward to the next time.

Back to work and starting the drive northward. Our first stop was in historic Meridian (the home of The Father of Country Music, Jimmy Rogers) where we had a fascinating hour interviewing Hartley Peavey, the founder of Peavey Electronics. As a teenager he started building amps at his parents place and he is now head of a worldwide corporation producing quality musical sound systems and instruments.

On to the small town of West Point, considered the home of Howlin’ Wolf. There’s a blues marker, a small but very good museum and a very cool downtown mural.

Just a bit further into the northeast corner of Mississippi – we stopped at Tupelo. Tupelo is the hometown of Elvis Presley. He was born there and lived in East Tupelo with his parents until he was 13 years old and they moved to Memphis. They’ve done a beautiful job at the Elvis Birthplace Museum, the self-guided driving tour, at Johnnie’s Drive-In (where they have preserved an Elvis booth where he’d hang out with friends and order an RC cola and burger) and at the Tupelo Hardware, the spot his mother bought him his first guitar. Probably the best $7.75 she ever spent!

More blues than one can reasonably pack into a week!

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Here’s one of the biggest things to know about the blues and the Mississippi Delta … in this part of the state, the blues are everywhere. Many people only associate Clarksdale with the blues but there are actually many other communities with at least as rich and deep a blues pedigree as the town where Highways 49 and 61 cross.

We camped overnight at The Blue Biscuit – an Indianola restaurant and blues bar right across the road from the B.B. King Museum. Thanks to Trish – the Blue Biscuit’s friendly and welcoming owner! Then, the next morning, we drove east to Greenwood, a town with a complicated blues and civil rights history. On the way we drove into the countryside near Blue Lake to look for the birthplace marker for B.B. King, stopped at Holly Ridge to pay our respects at the grave marker for Charley Patton and detoured slightly to find the marker in Moorhead for “Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog” (*look that one up for a real slice of blues authenticity!).

One of the highlights of our travels has been the half-day tour of Greenwood and the blues with the personable and very knowledgeable Sylvester Hoover who runs Delta Blues Legend Tours. Sylvester took us through Baptist Town, to all three claimed gravesites of Robert Johnson (including the one accepted as the actual site at Little Zion MB Church in the countryside) and Three Forks (the site where Robert Johnson was – supposedly – poisoned). We also crossed the Tallahatchie River, the site of the Bobbie Gentry song.

In a non-blues related side trip, Sylvester took us to Bryant’s Grocery in Money, MS, to the remains of the grocery store related to the Emmett Till story – the event they say helped spark the entire civil rights movement. It was sobering.

Overnight we camped at the quirky, unique Tallahatchie Flats – old sharecropper shacks on the outside, renovated on the inside.

The next day we attended the Sunday morning service at Little Zion MB Church and soaked up the emotional and powerful music of the gospel church choir. We’d been invited by Sylvester and his lovely wife Mary, who is one of the choir directors.

After Greenwood, we spent several days hopping to more blues sites — Bentonia (home to the Blue Front Cafe), Jackson (where we went to Hal and Mal’s to hear King Edward – Craig subbed in on bass with the pre-show band), Hazlehurst (Robert Johnson’s birthplace and home to the Mississippi Music Hall of Fame), across the Mississippi River to Ferriday, LA and the Delta Music Museum.

We settled for several days in beautiful Natchez, MS – at the height of the cotton era, this small town was home to half the millionaires in America. We’ll write more about Natchez in the next post, as there is lots to talk about there. We made new friends, drank some of the best coffee ever (Steampunk Coffee Roasters), went to a community literary talk, dined by the Mississippi River and walked the streets of this lovely town. More on all that next time.

Been busy crisscrossing the Delta

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We’ve been busy.

Digging deep into the noteworthy spots that tell the story of the Delta blues. We stood by the tracks in Tutwiler where W.C. Handy first heard the strains of that “new” strange form of music called the blues – the seminal event that took the blues from porch front and field songs to something that was written and marketed.
At the excellent Railroad Heritage Museum in the pretty town of Cleveland we learned how the railroad up and down the Mississippi spread the blues outward from the Delta.

At Dockery Farms we interviewed the director (a genuinely nice fellow), toured the property and really came to appreciate why this spot was where first generation bluesmen like Charley Patton birthed a new music form (the next day we took a bumpy dirt road to the rural cemetery at Holly Ridge where Patton is buried).
We toured the new Grammy Museum | Mississippi – the celebrity angle does not interest us much but there is a great display on the blues of the Delta and Mississippi musicians.
In Greenville, we walked the levee, spent time at the small, but fascinating, 1927 Flood Museum to bone up on what was one of the defining events that shaped America – the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. If you don’t know about it, read up – it’s an amazing, heartbreaking history and will be a big part of our book.
Finally, in Indianola it was B.B. King and all B.B. King – one of the best blues museums around, his gravesite onsite and a guided visit to Club Ebony, a local nightclub associated with B.B. that specialized in the blues of the Delta.

Clarksdale: At The Crossroads of the blues

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Almost three days exploring Clarksdale, the Mississippi town that is home to the legendary Crossroads, the spot where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil in return for mastering the guitar.

We’ve been in juke joints, standing in cotton fields, walked the streets of Clarksdale (a very historic town that has been hard hit by economic and social downturns) and eaten in local BBQ places. The local blues book store has invited us back to do a book signing in spring 2018!

We’ve spent time with a lot of very cool people – passionate and knowledgeable about Mississippi and the blues – listened to music and, of course, Craig got to take to the stage to play blues with Josh “Razorblade” Stewart (Living Blues magazine has profiled him). They call him “Razorblade” because he dresses sharp as a razor.

It’s been a whirlwind of interviews, juke joints, local museums and a slew of historic markers along the Mississippi Blues Trail.

Hopping states (in search of blues sites)

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Today we woke up in Clarksdale – the town in the Delta most associated with the blues.

Yesterday we hopped across three states – from Memphis, Tennessee south into Mississippi with a stop at the excellent Gateway to the Blues Museum in Tunica (thanks Webster for giving us the tour!). More stops at blues markers along the way – including the Abbay & Leatherman Plantation where Robert Johnson spent his childhood and barbecue at the Hollywood Cafe, immortalized in Marc Cohn’s song Walking in Memphis.
Then across the bridge over the Mississippi River into Helena, Arkansas, a small town that has seen hard times but in the 1930s and 1040s was a hotbed of blues music and culture. Robert Johnson lived and played there, as did Sonny Boy Williamson II and Howlin’ Wolf. In Helena (home of The King Biscuit Blues Festival – considered one of the world’s best) we toured the Delta Cultural Center, from which KFFA 1360 broadcasts a noontime blues show (“the longest running blues show in the world” – since 1941). Then, back over the Mississippi River and the short drive to Clarksdale, MS.

Black Hills, Bison & Custer

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We travelled further west along I-90 into the South Dakota Black Hills, an area best known for wildlife and Mt. Rushmore (did the obligatory stop; it’s striking, but it didn’t hold our attention for long). The Black Hills tend to get overshadowed by the “wow” factor of the dramatic Badlands but we found it just as beautiful and just as wild, in its own way.

We camped (at the lovely Stockdale South Campground) and explored the Black Hills’ Custer State Park, South Dakota’s first state park and a don’t-miss stop. If you go this way, head into the excellent Visitor Center for information and a breathtaking widescreen movie about the region (got lots of background that helped us map out the next few days). Kevin Costner narrates, which doesn’t hurt things either!

Over the following days, we drove all the major scenic roads (which is, like, every single roadway): Iron Mountain Road with its pig-tail bridges (held up en route by a bison jam), Wildlife Loop Road, the drive to Wind Cave National Park and the nail-biting, hand-wringing, seat-clutching twists and turns of the narrow Needles Highway to the north. The latter involved three low and narrow tunnels cut into the rock that had us pulling out a tape measure first. Not kidding.

The Lakota called this land the “hills of black,” hence the name. There is a beautiful, pleasing roll to the land; the hills are covered with dark green ponderosa pine, the air is sweet with its fragrance and around every turn you’re likely to see deer, prairie dogs, elk, prairie dogs, pronghorn antelope, bison and maybe even . . . prairie dogs.

Custer State Park protects the American prairie bison. In the early 1800s, there were an estimated 30 to 60 million of the massive creatures. By the 1890s they’d been hunted down to near extinction – fewer than 1,000. Now, protected, there are 400 bison born at the park every year. The numbers are climbing and the main herd struts down the roadways like they own the place. Rigby was very interested.

Further to the south, Wind Cave National Park is “one of the biggest pieces of Swiss cheese you’ll see.” The park protects the underground cave environment known as one of the few places in the world where there are large rock formations of boxwork. To the Lakota, Wind Cave is a sacred spot – the place marking the emergence of their people into the world above.

People kept telling us not to miss the Needles Highway. This would be immediately followed by clucking about how low and narrow the rock tunnels are. This was followed by the tape measure. In the end, we decided “nothing ventured, nothing gained” and it turned out that we made it through with no problems.

It is a spectacular drive. Twists and turns, lots of lookouts and drop-offs. Beautiful views of the Black Hills and towering granite spires that give the roadway its name. We stopped and did a hike along the Cathedral Spires Trail. Most of the way in the weather started to turn (that happens incredibly quickly here) and we cut it short and went back to the van. Getting caught in the mountains in fog and rain . . . not such a good thing.