Freaking hell, it was cold in Clarksdale when I woke up on this day. And still grey as a tomb, though the sun ended up breaking through the clouds after I got on the road and headed along the very scenic way towards Tennessee and Nashville.
After the same breakfast as yesterday again at the Rest Haven, I steered the Shark up route 6 to route 55 with the plan to stop in Como on the way to Senatobia in order to find the gravesite of Mississippi Fred McDowell. Como's so small it didn't even have a stoplight, but it did have Blues Trail markers for both Fred and fife master Otha Turner. Fred's mentioned that he was buried north of town at Hammond Hill Missionary Baptist Church on Hammond Hill Road, but the young guy at the gas station where I asked didn't know where it was. Just for shits'n'giggles, I decided to head up route 51, which parallels the larger, four lane route 55 up to Senatobia. Went a little ways looking for Hammond Hill Road, but when I crossed into the next county it seemed that I was on the wrong side of the north end of Como. So I decided to turn around and head back to check out the other side of town. Picked a random side road in which to pull a u-turn and, lo and behold, there was a sign for Hammond Hill M.B. Church that wasn't visible from the direction I'd been headed.
That road ended at a T intersection, but there were no more signs specifying a direction to the church. Made another random decision and headed right (The first sign said "keep right", right?). About a mile down, tucked next to a crossroad between pine and sweetgum woods on one side and empty fields on the other, was Hammond Hill M.B., with the cemetery on the hill across the street. I always get a hell of a kick out of such serendipitous discoveries.
Hammond Hill cemetery had many of the same style of home-made headstones I'd seen yesterday at Charley Patton's gravesite, in addition to newer ones on which much more money has obviously been spent.
From Como, the Shark and I headed up to Senatobia, then juked east toward Holly Springs to see if I could find a record shop listed on the Mississippi Music Tourist Sites map-- Aikei Pro's (Pronounced "ecky", as in "ecky thump". Some of you will catch the White Stripes connection...) Stopped first to choke down the worst fried green tomato po'boy in the history of southern cooking (fried green tomatoes should be breaded, not battered), then asked at the lunch counter if they could direct me to the street where the shop was located. The woman who worked there didn't have any idea, and when she asked a local who'd come in to pick up carryout, we were told that the record store had closed. I went back out and drove around anyway, and within five minutes had found both the old town cemetery (of course, I have a built-in radar for these things) and Aikei Pro's. Wondered whether perhaps the woman at the lunch counter was correct, because when I peeked in the door it appeared that there were piles of records and magazines and Lord knows what other sorts of junk leaning up against each other just inside.
It was hard to tell if there were any signs of life inside, though. Started to head back to the car, where a down'n'out local started to pester me for a ride to somewhere, when the door of the shop opened and out squeezed a college-aged white girl and a grizzled little old black man. After she thanked him and wandered off, I squeezed as far in as I could get (which was about one foot), said hello to the grizzled guy and told him I'd heard this was the place to come for good records. He laughed and started talking, and it was an hour before I got myself back into the car. Mr. Caldwell talked to me about how there's no such thing as hill country blues-- That's something created by the white folk because they came along and wanted to be a part of things. All blues are delta blues, no matter whether the musician playing them came from Mississippi or Texas. He went on to describe his experience of coming to Mississippi from Kentucky after serving a handful of years in the army in Europe-- After being called a nigger for the first time in his life and being told to go back where he'd come from, he decided that, no sir, he was going to stay put. In his time in Holly Springs, he's since seen them desegregate the local schools and elect a black mayor. I can't help but think that he had at least a little to do with that. But he also told me that if we went back to the lunch counter that very afternoon and ordered coffee, that he wouldn't be served. I'd like to think that's not true, but we didn't put it to the test. In hindsight, perhaps I should have offered to buy him a cup. He's apparently also pretty famous amongst blues aficionados (he showed me a couple of magazine articles he's been interviewed for), as well as a good friend of Junior Kimbrough. The one thing I could actually see in the shop that I wanted to buy was a record of Junior's up on the wall, but Mr. Caldwell told me that album wasn't for sale for any price. I'm unable to embed the video from this link, but you have to go and watch it in order get a feel for the place and the man-- Portrait of a Record Dealer: Holly Springs, MS - Aikei Pro's. (If the video there doesn't work, go here. Or check the one below that I found when updating/editing this post on 3/13/2017)
Back on the way towards Tennessee, the empty roads I'd become used to began to fill up with more and more traffic. By the time I got to Nashville, it was well after dark, I was hungry, tired, and pissed off at being challenged on the highway by assholes in SUVs. Much as I was looking forward to the plans I had for N'ville, couldn't help but wish I was back down in the Delta at the Shack Up Inn, listening to that cold wind blow outside the windows.
It's a cold, grey day in Clarksdale. I've returned for a more extensive visit than last year's, back again at the Shack Up Inn, but with a different ride. Lucifer the Pony, a black Mustang, has been replaced by a silver Camaro that, with it's wide mouth-like grillwork and side "gills", reminds me of a shark.
The weather, though, is just as unsettled as last year. Woke up this morning to the sound of wind whipping around outside the windows of my Cadillac Shack. Broke the night's fast at the Rest Haven restaurant, smoking a cigar while waiting for two eggs sunny-side up with a pork chop, surrounded by good ol' boys who were all also puffing away while waiting for their meals. Smoking in restaurants is enough of a novelty these days, at least where I come from, but is even more exotic before breakfast. Reminded me of my crotchety grandfather who began each day with coffee and a cigarette, which was soon followed up with the first of many Budweisers. But back to Clarksdale-- The topics of conversation among the Rest Haven regulars that morning ranged from deer hunting to ant and roach control. A handful of Japanese tourists then wandered in and squeezed into the booth in front of mine to complete the scenario. William Least-Heat Moon wrote in Blue Highways that the more calendars on the wall in little country restaurants, the greater the guarantee of good food. Rest Haven has only one calendar, but I've now had the same breakfast there three times and the pork chop has been perfect every time. So much for Least-Heat Moon's rule.
Headed into downtown Clarksdale, such as it is, to re-visit the Delta Blues Museum, then stopped in Morgan Freeman's Ground Zero blues club for a post-breakfast Coke and peach cobbler. Perhaps it's ignorance or snobbery on my part, but I just don't think much of Freeman's place. His intentions are good, but it's like Bourbon Street is to New Orleans-- You get only a gloss of the real thing, a touristified version. I'm sure the music booked at Ground Zero is very good, but the atmosphere, with the encouraged graffiti of visitors on every bare bit of wall and ceiling and the studied dilapidation, is just too cheesy for me. And their peach cobbler leaves much to be desired.
While spooning up the gooey, soggy cobbler, I sat and contemplated the scribbles all over the bar and the wall behind it. What is with the need people have to write on walls, anyway? From graffiti to bathroom stalls to places like Ground Zero, where it's encouraged, to the shacks at the Shack Up Inn, where it's specifically not-- Is it some sort of cry for attention? Or perhaps, on a deeper level, a fear of mortality? So many people seem to have the need to be seen, recognized, remembered, even if it's only by anonymous strangers. They need to leave a bit of themselves for eternity, even though their graffiti'd scribbles represent nothing worth being remembered for. Though as I write this, it occurs to me that perhaps it's not all that different from babbling to the anonymous interwebs in some blog...
Braced by breakfast and the double shot of sugar from Coke and cobbler, I mapped a route around the Delta that headed east and then south on 49, east on 8, south on 7, then west on 82 to loop back towards the Mississippi River, north a ways along 1, and then back over to Clarksdale, then queued up the soundtrack for my wanderings-- John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Son House, and the White Stripes Live in Mississippi. The last is significant because it was their final show as a band and was, ironically in light of Jack's deep love of Delta blues, the first and only one they ever played in Mississippi, at a venue between Clarksdale and Memphis. John Lee's Boogie Chillun was the band's walk-on music to begin the show, and after a moody, brooding version of Death Letter, Jack very touchingly thanked Son House for letting him finally come home. He ended that last show by saying God bless you to both House and Robert Johnson, and so I felt it was fitting and necessary to include this album in the day's listening.
Stopped at a convenience store outside of Tutwiler for a package of dill pickle-flavored sunflower seeds and couldn't help but compare the real dilapidation of empty store fronts next door to the faux effects at Ground Zero. The faces of a handful of older gentlemen lounging outside matched the buildings, but the freshly mopped floor of the bathroom inside the convenience store was spotless and had just enough of a bleach aroma to smell clean as a sunny day.
I feel alien in places like this, with my fast rental car and my rock'n'roll attire, having slept comfortably the night before in a restored version of the sort of sharecropper's shacks that still line many of the roads down here. What am I documenting when I snap photos around here? I've felt the same thing driving through certain neighborhoods of Baltimore back home. Am I romanticizing a place and people I don't fully understand? My family was pretty poor when I was a kid and I'm far from well off now, so I have some idea of what it's like. But this seems to be a level of poverty I've never experienced anywhere near firsthand. Or is life around here really not as hard-scrabble as I imagine based on appearances? What's the reality? Without living it the way these people do, I'll likely never know, and that leaves me uncomfortable about pulling out the camera in these spots where I find a sort of desperate beauty and picturesqueness.
Heading down South 49W towards the site of the notorious Parchman Farm, you pass a sign that reads "Penitentiary area. Emergency stopping only next 2 miles." And yet there's a Blues Trail marker directly across the road from the prison, which is now the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Of course I pulled over to snap a photo of the sign, then turned my head to look across the street and found a handful of inmates, in their distinctive green and white striped pants, lounging near the gate and watching the crazy tourist who wasn't supposed to stop. One of the more notable inmates of Parchman was Son House, who spent two years there supposedly for killing a man in self-defense, though there is apparently some debate over the accuracy of that story.
Between stops, the Shark and I rolled past the ubiquitous, endless cotton fields of the Delta, which is not as monotonous as you might think. Fallow fields of empty dirt rows alternated with harvested fields bordered with huge rectangular bales of compressed cotton, along which the roads were scattered with loose, dusty white puffs. Occasionally you pass an unharvested field in full bloom and the white of the cotton against the brown of the plant stems creates a silvery shimmer that, on this day, mirrored the grey of the cloudy sky above.
Unfortunately, I got so caught up in the joy of moving fast on un-trafficked backroads that I missed the turn to the church where Mississippi John Hurt is buried outside of Avalon. Wanted to also find Robert Johnson's gravesite (the official one, according to the Mississippi Music Tourist Sites map I was using as a reference), but drove around Greenwood without finding the right road.
Looked for something to eat while in Greenwood, too, but there appeared to be nothing except the usual fast food and chain restaurants. Until I got to the edge of town and caught sight of a little shack with smoke pouring out of the side of the building and a bunch of cars out front. Turned out to be the Rib Shack, of which Johnny Edwards is head chief (according to his business card). I ordered a pulled pork sandwich with cole slaw and a side of baked beans. Would have sat right there in the car to eat it, but felt I was providing a bit too much entertainment for the locals. One gentleman asked if I was from around there. When I said no, he confirmed that he didn't think so, 'cause he didn't think he'd seen a Camaro around town. When my food was ready, I headed down the road and found an empty public park, where I sat and had a very windy picnic of gloriously succulent pork. If you ever find yourself in Greenwood, MS, be sure to look around for Johnny's shack.
One pilgrimage site I did manage to find was the gravesite of Charley Patton, in a sad excuse for a cemetery next to Hicks Cotton Gin outside of Holly Ridge. Just a scrubby field scattered with graves, many with nothing but a small, plain white cross, some unmarked at all, and a few collapsed to the point that you'd fall in if you weren't watching where you were walking. Most touching of all, for a reason I can't define, were the plain concrete slabs that had name and dates of birth and death scratched in by hand, like the way people scratch their names into freshly poured concrete on a sidewalk. There was something very caring about those headstones, despite the bleak simplicity of them.
Wandered about for a bit, but the place was so disorganized that I couldn't find what I'd come for right off. The wind began to push me back toward the car, but then a good ol' boy wandered over from the gin and asked if I was "looking for Charley". The way he asked-- not "was I looking for Charley Patton", but "looking for Charley"-- was so disarming I couldn't help but smile. He pointed me in the right direction and walked with me a bit, asking where I was from, then headed back over to work while I trudged the rest of the way through the dusty grass to the spot. Stood there looking at the headstone and accompanying empty bourbon bottle and tried to imagine the slight, ornery man with the growling voice and flamboyant playing style. Patton was one of the first precursors to today's modern rock stars, though few of those rock stars probably realize it. I couldn't help but wonder how Charley might've felt if he'd had any clue that people like me would make pilgrimages to his grave in the heart of the Delta, eighty years and more after his death.
Ended the day back at Ground Zero for some passable electrified blues. Decent stuff, but not as moving as Johnson's or House's acoustic blues or as mesmerizing as Hooker's groove or Patton's growl. And certainly not as gut-wrenching as any version of the blues from the White Stripes, but decent enough for an evening's diversion. Fell asleep worn out from hours of driving, listening again to the wind blowing around the edges of the windows of the shack.
Began the day in Mississippi by rolling up the legs of my jeans and walking barefoot through the wet grass from my Cadillac Shack (pictured below) to Lyle's Tinth Shack.
Our plan was to visit the Delta Blues Museum in downtown Clarksdale and eat tamales at Hick's, then head back up to Memphis to check into our hotel there and hopefully collect Lyle's wayfaring luggage. Accordingly, we piled into the Pony, which Lyle christened "Lucifer" after the pony in Bob Dylan's song as covered by The Dead Weather (we certainly had no plans to shoot our Pony).
I had a pony, her name was Lucifer
I had a pony, her name was Lucifer
She broke her leg and she needed shooting
I swear it hurt me more than it hurted her
Sometimes I wonder what's going on with Miss X
Sometimes I wonder what's going on with Miss X
She got such a sweet disposition
I never know what the poor girl's gonna do to me next
Everybody say you're usin' voodoo, your feet walk by themselves
Everybody say you're usin' voodoo, I seen your feet walk by themselves
Oh, baby, that god you're prayin' to
Is gonna give ya back what you're wishin' on someone else
Come over here pony, I wanna climb up one time on you
Come over here pony, I wanna climb up one time on you
Well, you're so nasty and you're so bad
But I love you, yes I do
Clarksdale's a fairly bleak place, with a history as rich as the local Delta soil but way too many empty store fronts to make it a truly going concern. Even Morgan Freeman's Ground Zero Blues Club has apparently failed to make it the successful destination that it could, and perhaps should, be. It's still a necessary visit for anyone looking to understand the blues. The Delta Blues Museum is basically one room in the old train depot, filled with photos, instruments, costumes, and information about the musicians that put this place on the map. The largest exhibit focuses on Muddy Waters and includes a portion of the shack where he was living when discovered by John and Alan Lomax.
We wandered from there to Cat Head, Inc, then over to the town cemetery which is unlike any other I've visited. I've seen a lot of cemeteries in my time, but never one quite so stark. It's obviously maintained, but only at a bare minimum. The crabgrass is mowed, but the dry mowings are left piled at the base of the headstones. And there are no other plantings aside from decades-old trees. Many family plots are completely bare dirt, not even graced with crabgrass. A favorite motif was apparently what I call the "bathtub" style of grave marker, in which the area above the casket is marked with a marble rim that would have been filled with flowering plants and greenery. The sight of so many of these markers in one place indicates that the Clarksdale cemetery must have been beautiful at one time, very different from the poor place it is now.
Lyle and I decided that we weren't yet getting a good feel for the blues, so we climbed into Lucifer and headed for Tutwiler, which is where W.C. Handy supposedly heard the first true blues but which is now more known for the nearby prison (and traditional quilts made by local women). This is no surprise. A bunch of small homes and an empty downtown in the middle of vast, flat cotton fields, Tutwiler appears even more rundown and decrepit than Clarksdale.
At the time, I think we were too busy looking and talking and taking photos to be able to sink into the moment and feel what was around us. Thinking back as I write this, though, it's clear that we were surrounded by the atmosphere that birthed the blues. It's easy now to imagine W.C. Handy in that lonesome train station all those years ago, waking up to the sound of that unidentified musician with his knife sliding on the frets of his guitar and his song of "goin' where the Southern meets the Dog".
Back up in Memphis, Lyle was finally reunited with her luggage. We cleaned up a bit and drove down to Beale Street, where we ate ribs and more tamales, then wandered down the block and listened to local street musicians including Big Jerry, from whom Lyle had to buy a cd before he broke her heart (go to that link and buy some of his music, he's good).
Afterward, I re-lived the experiences of my April trip by dragging Lyle past Minglewood Hall (where I first experienced The Dead Weather), C.K.'s 24-hour coffeehouse, and the cemetery behind the Piggly-Wiggly. Settling into bed in the Sleep Inn later on, I found myself missing the less homogeneous but much more comfortable Cadillac Shack out in the middle of those dark cotton fields in the Delta.
So I went back to Tennessee. The trip(s) in April/May were just too good, I'd been thinking about the place ever since, especially as I've kept in touch with some of the people I met there the first time around. And, because my infatuation with Jack White has not only continued, it's expanded to encompass the blues music that inspires him and that I first began exploring on my earlier trip. Memphis and the Delta area of Mississippi are the cradle of the blues and I wanted to go to the source, get a feeling for the place this music came from. I've been reading about the blues, but words-- dates and names and anecdotes and such-- can only convey so much. So I picked a week, talked it up to a compatriot (my buddy, Lyle, who got me into the Dead Weather performance at Third Man Records back in May), and planned an itinerary. To allow the most time possible to see and do, I decided to fly in this time and rent a car there-- A Ford Mustang, of course. What else would I drive on a road trip if finances allowed? Lyle and I put together a thoroughly blues-oriented expedition that would begin in Memphis, swing down for a side-trip to Clarksdale, Mississippi, back up to Memphis, then over to Nashville.
I got to Memphis with no problems, but Lyle was not so lucky. The first of her two flights ended up diverted by Hurricane Hermine, leaving her first stuck on the tarmac in Austin, Texas, then finally arriving in Houston and having to scramble for a connection to Memphis. As she was going through all of that, I had the task of wrangling our Pony. I almost came to blows with another woman when the rental company gave it to both of us as the same time. But I got it, a sleek black beauty with beige interior and a 6-cd changer on which I planned to rotate Jack, Son House, Blind Willie McTell, and Robert Johnson, with a little bit of Black Keys thrown in.
Once the Pony was saddled up, I headed in to Memphis to find a way to occupy the hours until I had to head back to the airport to pick up Lyle. I ended up on Beale Street, where I perused the aisles of A. Schwab's, once an honest-to-goodness five-and-dime, now a combination five$-and-dime$ and museum. The bins contained everything from open leg underwear (that's what the sign said, I swear it), to cowboy hats, Memphis souvenir mugs, and voodoo candles. They also had a pretty fantastic selection of blues cds, so I picked up a couple of compilations, adding Leadbelly, Blind Willie Johnson, Charley Patton and others to the week's musical assortment.
A few doors up from Schwab's was Tater Red's rock'n'roll clothing/etc. I walked in and immediately recognized the White Stripes' Effect and Cause coming over the sound system. I grinned big and picked out a kitschy little voodoo doll to hang from the rearview mirror of the Pony as a mascot. Landed next in Blues City Cafe for the first of what would be many sweet iced teas consumed over the course of the week.
It felt so good to be back in Memphis, even on touristified Beale Street, but I kept also getting twinges of guilt for enjoying myself while Lyle was stuck somewhere on an airplane. After a while, I headed back to the airport and her flight finally arrived, but sans luggage. She was promised that it would make it into town the following day and be delivered to the hotel we'd booked in Memphis for the next night, so we hit the road for Clarksdale. Our destination was the Shack Up Inn, a place I'd read about and been intrigued by in It Still Moves. Before getting there, though, we made a stop at the Blue & White Cafe, where Lyle had her first taste of fried catfish and I had a B.L.T. made with fried green tomatoes. And my second sweet tea of the day. Having been born & raised in Virginia, sweet tea is one element of Southern culture that I embrace with gusto.
Arriving in Clarksdale, we got turned around while hunting for the Shack Up Inn in the dark and instead ended up at the famed "crossroads". I use quotations because there is some debate as to whether the intersection of routes 49 & 61 is indeed the place where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for miraculous guitar-playing skill (Lyle insists it actually occurred in Rosedale, but we didn't have time to drive that far), and because the atmosphere of the place gives anything but an impression of dark magic. The spot is marked with a cheesy pair of crossed blue guitars and is surrounded by a Church's Fried Chicken, a donut shop, and a beer & wine store. Though perhaps that's fitting. The blues originated in African-American culture, which since the days of slavery has apparently been nothing if not resilient and adaptable. Blues is based in a feeling, one that can exist regardless of the setting or atmosphere in which it's experienced. And who knows, perhaps Robert Johnson wished that there had been a beer'n'such shop there while he waited alone in the night for the devil to appear.
We finally found the Shack Up and collected our keys from the lobby mailbox. We had no idea what to expect and arriving in the pitch dark left us clueless until we actually walked in the door of Lyle's Tinth Shack. The place is great. The shacks are beautifully restored, retaining a wonderfully rustic feel while being completely clean, cozy, and convenient. Lyle, stoic Brit that she is, settled in with a bottle of wine while I steered the Pony back around to my Cadillac Shack. The day came to a close on the front porch, where I sat in the dark smoking and listening to a soft rain fall on the metal roof of the nearby converted cotton gin.
All images and text herein (excepting song lyrics, quoted material, and otherwise attributed images) are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. Feel free to use my words or photos, but please link back to the post from which you pulled them. Like anyone else, I find it gratifying to be acknowledged for my work. Thank you.
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