Tag Archives: Mississippi Delta

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.

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.

 

Heading back to the Mississippi Delta (and escaping the Canadian snow!)

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Big news at our end. The past year was a bit of a roller coaster for most people – for us it included buying a new(er) Roadtrek that we are in love with as well as working on book ideas.

Our first big road trip was the one that delved deep into the roots of American music. Our goal is to write a travel guidebook about exploring the roots of a unique style of American-born music, the blues (publication date: 2018).

So, we are back on the road for a month this winter, tidying up the bits and pieces of research for the book. Our travels will take us through Memphis, zig-zagging all across Mississippi, into Louisiana and ending at Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

MS Blues collage

While we’re gone, we’ll be blogging from the road – just for the fun of it – because there are some very cool stops we’ll be making, including . . .

  • The birthplace of Robert Johnson and the church where he sang in the choir.
  • Interviews with David Hood (one of the original Swampers in Muscle Shoals), Clarksdale author and blues enthusiast Roger Stolle, blues players including Jimmy “Duck” Holmes and King Edward, Rick Hall (founder of Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals) and Jerry Phillips (son of the late Sam Phillips, the man who discovered Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis).
  • If there’s a blues museum in Mississippi, we’re stopping in.
  • Touring the recently-opened 3614 Jackson Highway in Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. The last time we were there it was still boarded up and the revived studio space was just an idea.

    • So, we’re packing up the van, washing the dog, unfolding our maps (and plugging in the GPS) and soon we’ll be off. If you have any ideas for what sorts of things you’d like to learn about the blues please let us know!