“I had the blues so bad, they put my face in a permanent frown. Now I’m feeling so much better I could cakewalk into town.”
NOVEMBER 28, 2012—A visit to Clarksdale, MS, center of the region known as the Mississippi Delta, has been on my bucket list for a long time because for blues lovers, the Delta is like Mecca.
Clarksdale is an anomaly. Decades ago its downtown must have been bustling. Today, 70 percent of its shops stand empty. Its broad streets are nearly devoid of traffic, and parking is certainly not a problem.
This part of the state along the Mississippi River has always been something of a rural backwater. The flat, rich Delta soil is ideal for growing cotton, and before the advent of mechanized cotton farming in the 1940s, the large plantations that surround Clarksdale needed hundreds of field hands. The African Americans who worked these fields lived on the plantations and, outside of working hours, were left pretty much to themselves. It was in this environment that the music known as the Delta Blues was born.
People from all over the world come to this poor region to visit the land where Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, and many other legendary country bluesmen began their lives and learned to play the blues in such distinctive ways. Most later migrated north to Memphis, Chicago, Kansas City, and Detroit, where in the 1960s they finally began to get world-wide attention, which is why we know their music, why we and so many others make the pilgrimage to the Delta.
CLARKSDALE IS NOT NASHVILLE. There is no huge blues industry here. Things here, at least outside of festival season, have a casual, half-improvised quality.
Our first evening there ended in an unheated storefront space called the Bluesberry Café, run by a man who had once worked in recording studios with some of the famous names of the 1960s. Adorned with blues and rock posters, it had a $5-per person cover charge and served only the King of Beers, Budweiser. The modest drink and surroundings didn’t matter because my wife, Kay, and I were there to hear the music provided by Clarksdale native, guitarist and singer Daddy Rich, along with friends, all white, who would accompany him from time to time. An irony is that the blues, once a strictly African-American idiom, now finds its expression more and more by white musicians.
Everything about the evening’s sequence was intimate and informal. There were only a few of us in the audience, all regulars except Kay and me and a young man from England.
All the musicians were local and really, really good. One man, a character named Watermelon Slim, thin as a rail and dressed in shabby clothes, wandered around the room talking to others and us. From time to time he would pull a blues harp from his pocket and, without any preliminaries, begin to wail in company with the guitarists on stage, whom he knew well. He would blow his harp so powerfully and so well that the music would stop with applause for his virtuosity.
Kay and I closed the Bluesberry after 10:30 p.m., and Daddy Rich’s final number began with the lines, “It’s too damn late. Now, it’s time to say goodbye. The rooster’s drunk, and the hens are high.”