Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
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February/March 2005 | Volume 56, Issue 1
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 2005 | Volume 56, Issue 1
CELEBRATE THE BLUES AT STARBUCKS! proclaimed the sign at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. I was catching a plane to Memphis, then driving south to Greenville, Mississippi, for the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival, the second oldest of its kind in the country. I was going to explore the Delta, the wedge-shaped region in the north of the state between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. If I’d had a laptop with a wireless portal, I could have just stayed at the airport Starbucks, sipping a five-dollar cappuccino and singing along with Precious Bryant: “I’m broke and I ain’t got a dime.”
The blues, arguably the first truly American music, evolved from a Southern front-porch pastime into a global phenomenon. But for lovers of authentic blues, the Delta is still mecca. No one really knows when or where people started singing the blues, but it grew up in the Delta, where slaves sang work songs that were its ancestors. The Delta is still cotton country, with fields dotted with white bolls stretching over land enriched by repeated flooding. After the Civil War, sharecroppers kept singing their frustration, accompanying themselves on pianos, guitars, washboards, or whatever was at hand. In the early 1900s W. C. Handy, a black band-leader waiting for a train in the Delta town of Tutwiler, heard a man in rags slide a razor along the neck of a guitar, crooning he was “goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog.” Handy described it as “the weirdest music I ever heard.”
After witnessing its popularity at dances, he realized it could also be incredibly lucrative. In 1912 he published “The Memphis Blues,” the first song published with the word blues in the title, and the music spread. In the decades that followed, blues musicians jumped trains north, hoping to make it big, and white producers traveled south, looking for big acts.
Following their paths south from Memphis, you can stop at the still functional Abbay and Leatherman Plantation in Robinsonville, where the guitar legend Robert Johnson spent his early years getting laughed at by Son House, Charley Patton, and Willis Brown. Johnson married young and left the plantation; when he returned in the 1930s, he amazed Brown and House with his greatly improved skills. “When he finished, all our mouths were standing open,” remembered House. “I said, ‘Well ain’t that fast! He’s gone now!’”
From this transformation a legend was born: Johnson had sold his soul to the devil. He recorded only 29 songs, but his influence has been as long-lasting as it is far-flung. His meager stock of recordings was cherished by the likes of Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and the White Stripes. In “Me and the Devil Blues,” Johnson sings, “Early this mornin’, when you knocked upon my door /I said, Hello, Satan, I believe it’s time to go.” You can visit crossroads all over the Delta, each supposedly