Cover Story: Blues Cruise

Who is this guy, strutting around the joint, talking shit in a voice like a bass trombone, practically drowning out David Lee Durham’s blues band? The man is tall, balding, beefy, pot-bellied, glassy-eyed and white, and he acts like he owns the place. He doesn’t. Mary Shepard has been the proprietor of Club Ebony in Indianola, Miss., for 30 years. She’s a compact, serious woman who stands vigil over the small Sunday night crowd, mostly African-American, mostly middle-aged. Still, she gives this good ol’ boy a wide berth. Everyone does.

Turns out he’s Walter Pitts, owner of a 13,000-acre cotton farm nearby. He is, for all intents and purposes, the local plantation owner. He’s been here 10 minutes and I already dislike him.

And that’s a surprise, ‘cause I’ve liked most everyone during my first four days of a weeklong trip spent zigzagging around Mississippi to take the temperature of the blues in its most celebrated birthplace. I’m joined by Charles Farrell, brilliant pianist, intrepid road dog and avowed cynic. We’ve discovered that a press card, a pearl-white Cadillac and, at times, our white skin brings privilege amid the Mississippi blues scene.

I’m feeling good and boisterous, having thrown back several beers on the drive down and drained the flask of vodka I smuggled into Club Ebony. I’m now drinking some of bartender Jimmy’s homemade wine with a splash of gin on top.

I don’t give a fuck how many acres Walt owns; he’ll get no deference from me. I quiz him on his wealth. He seems a little irritated.

Then Walt puts down his own personal drinking cup — everyone else makes do with small plastic ones — and starts waddle-dancing with Carlene Johnson, a weathered black woman with big, bony hands who likes to drink and shake her body on the dancefloor. From the looks of their banter, she and Walt seem to know each other quite well.

When Walt takes a breath, I escort Carlene directly to the front of the bar, where we commence to getting funky, shimmying and shaking and using my sport jacket as a prop. We get smiles from the band and a smattering of cheers from the crowd.

Back at the table, Walt bellows, “Whut wuzzat?”

“That was me showing you how to dance,” I say.

“Hell, that ain’t shit,” Walt foghorns.

“Tell you what,” I say, my voice rising. “Let’s have a dance-off, right in this club right now! You go 15 seconds and I’ll go 15 seconds! Winner by applause!”

Walt looks up. “By applause?” he replies smugly. “Hell, I’ll win that.”

I smile. I get his meaning. The game is rigged. We’re both white, but what chance do I have against the local plantation owner?

David Lee Durham, the hardworking bandleader on stage, mows yards during the day and plays a lot like B. B. King — high praise in Indianola, where the legendary bluesman was born. Guys like Durham have spent a lifetime in the shadow of whites like Walters, whether it was working the land for a plantation owner — as many elder bluesmen have — or trying to hold their own against corrupt record companies, conniving managers and snaky promoters.

But then, that’s just part of the blues.

The U.S. Senate decreed Feb. 1, 2003, to Feb. 1, 2004, “The Year of the Blues.” In honor of that, we wanted to find out how the root of all roots music — the music that had a baby and they called it rock ‘n’ roll; the foundation of funk, soul and hip-hop — was faring. Is the blues, birthed by oppressed people as a tool of defiance and survival, still relevant to Mississippi life? Is the blues ailing? Is it holding its own? What’s on the horizon?

To find out, we put some heavy miles on the Caddy, hopscotching to towns that are the holy places of blues lore, hanging out in juke joints and roadhouses, on street corners and in musicians’ homes. We passed up museums and the graves of dead musicians. This was not a historical dig, but a sojourn to examine the blues as it exists today — and to get a sense of what the future might hold.

The blues in Mississippi is not just music. It’s a dicey cultural construct influenced by myriad agendas and subtly tinted by race politics.

There are the power brokers who see the blues as a basis for transforming Mississippi’s economy from agriculture to tourism. There are the academics and preservationists who write tomes, hold symposiums and want to improve signage at gravesites and other landmarks. There are the blues societies, run mostly by white folk who seem to revere the music but often lack a real feel for it. There are special people like Roger Stolle, who left a lucrative marketing job in St. Louis to open a store called Cat Head Delta Blues and Folk Art in Clarksdale; with his website and connections, he’s become an informal clearinghouse for blues music throughout the state. And there’s Fat Possum Records, an indie label founded in Oxford, Miss., a decade ago by a young white kid named Matthew Johnson, that’s trying to do right by the musicians but finding it increasingly draining.

In the middle of it all are the musicians, an odd juxtaposition of African-American elders, revered as the last of a dying breed, and white wannabes. The older black men seem to appreciate these white kids, in part because black youth have largely ignored, even disdained, the blues.

Collectively, Mississippi’s better blues artists hope to land occasional overseas tours, maybe cut and sell a few records, score regular local/regional gigs and get paid fairly.

But that’s tough without a sizeable local audience and with blues-hungry pilgrims not yet coming in droves. These musicians have heard how a thriving tourist economy built on the blues can spur a trickle-down effect. They just hope the trickle reaches them.

A prevailing theme emerged during our trek: What will happen when the current crop of elders — Paul Wine Jones, Big Jack Johnson, T-Model Ford, R.L. Burnside, Eddie Cusic, Tommy Hollis, Elmo Williams, Hezekiah Early and others — die off? The answers were contradictory. On one hand, we heard that the blues will never die (“it cain’t dah”). But when probed, musicians find the blues in a worrisome state. Virtually no one, not the elders or the experts, sees a viable crop of new talent emerging. (Fat Possum’s Johnson said on the phone before we left for Mississippi, “We scoured all the backwoods at one point but sort of gave up. If you find anyone, let me know.”)

Even so, most everyone agrees that the blues in Mississippi has perked up in the last five years. It’s less clear what the idiom will become over the next couple of decades. Will it turn into a moldy museum piece practiced by revivalists, or will it somehow find a thrust of new creative energy?

From what we saw, the latter seems unlikely, but one also gets the sense that the blues simply cannot become fossilized in one of its earliest hotbeds.

We spent most of our time in the Delta, a leaf-shaped region in the northwest part of the state, about 200 miles long and 85 miles wide, flat as a workbench and blessed with dark, alluvial soil. Cotton country. Also soybean and rice country. The Delta population is roughly half-black and half-white. It’s one of the poorest areas of the United States.

The Delta is where blues legends such as Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson and scores of others roamed from town to town, plantation to plantation, playing for tips and drink and fast women. It’s where Muddy Waters learned his art before going north to Chicago.

These days, the blues legacy in the Delta can be hard to detect. At the junction of state Highways 61 and 49, just outside of downtown Clarksdale, stands a sign marking The Crossroads. Blues myth says this is where Robert Johnson struck a deal with the devil and walked away with extraordinary musical prowess. The sign juts upward, across from a Church’s Chicken. Downtown sits the Delta Blues Museum, a modest affair with photos and memorabilia, but no interactive music; it draws about 1,500 visitors a month.

We decided to bivouac in Clarksdale. From there we shot out to other Delta towns including Rosedale, Greenville, Cleveland and Indianola, and east to the hill country of Oxford (home of the University of Mississippi), Water Valley and Holly Springs.

During the day, in crisp, sunny weather, the Delta is inviting, draped with large tracts of brilliant green, even in early March, and pocked with dilapidated stores and truly weird stuff — like a used car lot with perhaps a hundred junkers submerged in water. At night, the Delta takes on a more intimidating aura. Outside of towns, the roads turn black, headlights forging a narrow tunnel. Simple bends can leave you guessing which way to turn until the last second (one time we had to screech on the brakes). Road kill — possums, mostly, and some dogs — makes the scene even creepier.

Before reaching the Delta, we flew into New Orleans, picked up the rental car and drove three hours north to Jackson, Mississippi’s state capital. We ended up at the 930 Blues Cafe, a converted wooden house on a residential street. Upstairs, a tight band was cooking, loosening the crowd for bawdy chanteuse Jackie Bell. Later, I sat in the Deville with Ironing Board Sam, just after he’d finished an amiable solo set of blues and R&B standards on a borrowed electric piano. Sam played “Georgia,” and then played it again three songs later after someone tossed a buck into his tip jar, a scuffed-up beer pitcher.

He had a little green in his pocket from walking table to table and holding his pitcher out to patrons. But as our conversation progressed, I found that Ironing Board Sam was feeling awful bad. The scoop-jawed 65-year-old, dressed in a tattered suit and fedora, felt trapped.

He’d left his native South Carolina in his teens when his stepmother put him out, he said. Sam cobbled together a homemade keyboard out of two-by-fours, thumbtacks and telephone wire, which he set on an ironing board and covered with a cloth. It was quite the curiosity, and he made a little name for himself in Memphis in the ’60s and ’70s. Sam eventually wound up in New Orleans and, after splitting with his wife, moved to Jackson three years ago.

He said he works six days a week for $300, and a portion of that goes toward renting a nearby hovel from the club owner. He has no car. A local dealer offered to give him a clunker, but Sam suspects the 930’s owner nixed that — in order to keep him in servitude. “I’m somethin’ like a slave,” he said. “I can’t get enough money to leave. I live in a five-block area, down to the sto’ and ‘round here. That’s the real blues. That’s too much blues.”

As much as I sympathized with Sam’s plight, I couldn’t help but think that the tip money in his pocket would probably cover a cab ride to the bus station. Was he being exploited? Probably. Was he really trapped? Not likely.

Ironing Board Sam’s situation might be more melodramatic than most, but it’s reflective of the strained financial relationships between Mississippi bluesmen and their employers. Written contracts for local gigs are all but nonexistent, lawyers a rumor. Clarksdale singer/guitarist James Johnson, who goes by Super Chikan, complained to me that he was underpaid for a caravan tour representing Fat Possum Records. “We was out two weeks and I’m thinkin’ we gon’ make good money, ‘bout $3,000 apiece,” he says, sitting in his work shed. “When we got back, me and the two other guys split a thousand dollars.”

Back at Fat Possum, Matthew Johnson scoffs at the allegation. Eating lunch on the square in Oxford, he runs his hand wearily through his hair. He says he lays out every detail of tour compensation in a contract. How much everyone makes on any given night is even posted in the tour vans, yet his road personnel still gets queries about pay.

Maybe that’s because most old black bluesmen grew up with ambiguous financial arrangements. Many worked pieces of land as sharecroppers or as sharecropper’s sons. (Most said they’d picked cotton and handled mules.) According to this feudal system, plantation owners’ accounting is what determined sharecroppers’ portion of the cotton profits. But the local white gentry also could be called upon for special needs. This murky situation often carried over to blues careers. It’s widely held that Muddy Waters earned little or no royalties from Chess Records, but owner Leonard Chess made sure his star always tooled around in a new Cadillac.

“The economic relationship is very paternalistic,” said Stolle of Cathead. “It harks back to sharecropping days. It’s not like you give someone straight-up $500 to do something, a specific thing. It gets blurred.”

Stolle books Ground Zero, Clarksdale’s premier blues spot, which is partly owned by actor Morgan Freeman. “I get stuff like, ‘Roger, my car broke down,’ or ‘I got a rent problem.’ It gets complicated. We’re both guilty in a way.”

The blues most of us take in at festivals or clubs or on community radio derives from Chicago, which over the years merged heavily with rock and has put an increasing emphasis on guitar heroics, much of it played by studious white men. Thankfully, this is not the case with most Mississippi blues. The music we witnessed was generally low on pyrotechnics, fairly high in rural authenticity.

There are no recordings of the earliest blues, so its origins are open to supposition. Most experts agree that it emanates from African traditions brought over with slaves, which evolved into spirituals and field hollers and were then spliced with European classical, Tin Pan Alley pop, white country music and other forms. Some researchers claim that actual blues did not develop until the first generation of freeborn blacks exercised their mobility — around the 1890s. Blues, they say, was rebel music, performed from an individual’s point of view, rather than as a collective musical expression of slaves.

Delta bluesmen in the ’20s and ’30s played mostly solo or in duets, generally on acoustic guitars. There were some terrific axe men, but blues was primarily an art that involved singing, storytelling and rhythm. The years after World War I saw a steady migration of African-Americans from the South to urban centers like Chicago and Detroit. Blues came along for the ride, and in the ’40s — sparked by pioneers like Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson and Sunnyland Slim — electric guitars, pianos, drums, basses, harmonicas and horns fleshed out the Delta sound to cater to urban dance crowds. From there it was but a short hop to rock ‘n’ roll.

Today’s Mississippi blues is mostly electric but compact — sometimes featuring just a singer/guitarist and a drummer. The vocals are guttural and expressive, the playing largely free of contrivance. During our travels, we did not find the next Robert Johnson. We knew we wouldn’t. By and large, the musicians we encountered had reached a career level commensurate with their talent. They were solid, earnest and occasionally inspired.

The clubs we hit were dives — no ferns in sight — but not disgusting. Even better were the handful of private performances that we experienced in musicians’ homes — by Super Chikan, 53, in his Clarksdale shed (playing a “chikantar,” which he custom builds by putting a guitar neck on a five-gallon gas can); or by Little Freddie King, a native of McComb, Miss., picking a shiny National steel in his New Orleans apartment.

Near the end of our jaunt, we stopped in Natchez, a quaint casino town on the Mississippi River, south of the Delta. We arrived at the home of 71-year-old Elmo Williams in the early afternoon. He showed us into a dimly lit family room where his wife, Fanny, was watching a big-screen TV. His partner, drummer/ harmonica player Hezekiah Early, had not yet arrived.

“What kind of blues would you say you play?” I asked Williams.

“Rock ‘n’ roll,” his wife chirped playfully from across the room.

“Nah, it ain’t rock ‘n’ roll,” Elmo said in a slow, gravely drawl, then looking toward Fanny, “Wait a minute, let me talk.”

After a pleasant round of laughter, I told him the best way I would describe his rough-and-tumble CD with Early (Takes One to Know One) would be “wild blues.”

“Yeah, you’s could call ‘em wild blues,” he said with a hint of a prideful grin.

Early, trim and youthful at 70, showed up with his harmonica but no drums and explained how he’d come to play both instruments at once (he duct-tapes the harp to a mic stand to free his hands). When Muhammad Ali came to Natchez in the ’70s to film Freedom Road, he needed a harmonica player. Hezekiah landed the gig, worked 12 hours, made $100 cash and got some good advice. Ali urged him to learn to play both at once. So Hezekiah did just that.

The fellas felt like playing. Elmo pulled a Marshall amp into the living room and plugged in his black, hollow-body guitar. Hezekiah followed suit with his harmonica cord. Seated, they wandered into a shuffle groove that evolved into the standard “That’s All Right Blues.” Elmo showed off his uncanny vocal rendition of a harmonica and Hez joined him in an easygoing duet. The partners played a convivial, laid-back couple of songs that were quite removed from the wild style of their album. For the guys with the press card, the Cadillac and the pale pigmentation, though, it was a terrific way to spend an hour on a lovely Monday afternoon.

R .L. Burnside may well be the last of the great Mississippi bluesmen. Not that long ago, he made some pretty good money. Now he lives in poverty. We took the unintended scenic route to find his home, about 10 miles outside of Holly Springs, in an area marked by small, undulating hills.

His dingy trailer, catty-corner to another, sat in a gully with mud puddles, cars on blocks, old tires and other detritus strewn about. A half-dozen of his “13 or 14” grandkids, and about that many adults, milled in and around the home. Burnside, 77, sat on an old sofa within arm’s reach of a rotary telephone. He barely moved. His cloudy eyes looked straight ahead.

Talking slowly and dropping consonants, a faint smile etched on his face, Burnside told us about the heart attack he had a year ago, followed by open-heart surgery. He doesn’t gig anymore — one can see why — but he occasionally plays around the trailer. When I asked if he’d do us the honor, he politely declined, saying that someone had messed up his guitar.

In the early ’90s, a robust Burnside performed in the terrific film Deep Blues, which followed musicologist Robert Palmer as he made his way through Mississippi looking for obscure artists. Burnside was such a dynamic proponent of the hypnotic hill-country style — with his hellhound moan and slicing slide guitar — that Matthew Johnson recruited him to be the flagship artist on the new Fat Possum label.

Johnson shook his head when asked about Burnside’s current state of affairs. His Come on In (1998) album sold 100,000 units in the United States and about the same overseas, Johnson said — paltry by major label standards but extraordinary for a low-budget country blues effort. His seven other CDs for the label, including one with New York faux bluesman Jon Spencer, did well, too. Burnside also placed songs on The Sopranos soundtrack and a Nissan commercial. And, according to Johnson, Burnside got paid plenty of back-end royalties, and for the subsequent Fat Possum tours, even for interviews. (Elmo Williams, who toured with Burnside, remembered him walking around with lots of cash in a backpack.)

But there sat Burnside on a Sunday afternoon, fiddling with an unopened box of MoonPies, his stained shirt covered with something that looked like sawdust. “I put a little money away,” Burnside croaked, “but medical bills done ate that up.”

That’s hardly all that ate his money up, Johnson claims. While reluctant to get into Burnside’s financial specifics, he explained that a retinue of relatives, acquaintances and hangers-on hounded his top artist, bleeding him for cash. Sometimes they took the money behind his back, but Burnside was also quick with a handout.

“Even if we’d cheated R.L., he’d still have a lot more,” Johnson said ruefully.

And yet here’s the funny thing: Although his fire has dimmed, Burnside did not look miserable. Even at the height of his success, he never chose to move into a fancy place in town. He stayed a country boy, moving from clapboard houses to trailers, a few of which burned down.

“He’s had more fun than we’ll ever have,” Johnson said.

As our visit progressed, Burnside expanded beyond cryptic answers. “I learned behind Mississippi Fred McDowell,” he explained. “I growed up doin’ farm work, in the hill country. My granddaddy would go down to McDowell’s house, get some whiskey, buy it by the gallon. Fred be playin’. I’d play some. It got to where he’d come by and get me every Saturday night. Ask my granddaddy if he could take me out with him, to play some for him. He’d get drunk on the way there, too drunk to play. And I’d have to play.”

With that, R.L. broke into a big, cackling laugh.

He told us how his first cousin Anna Mae was Muddy Waters’ longtime live-in girlfriend (the subject of the song “Anna Mae”). “I stayed in Chicago for about three years in the ’50s. I’d go to Muddy’s house two, three nights a week. He’d play at the Zanzibar, and I go up there and watch him, sometimes play a little. It was some good playin’ to me. I picked up a lot from him. I liked Chicago, but I come back here and I got married and I ain’t been back since.”

I wanted to know if this man, who comes from a deeply embedded culture of exploitation, felt that Fat Possum had treated him unfairly. “They doin’ a lot to help the blues musicians,” Burnside said. If he felt he’d been shorted at all, “it wasn’t enough to complain about.”

Finally, I asked, had playing the blues made for a good life? He paused. “Hmm, yeah, but some hard times along widdit.”

All through our odyssey, we’d kept an eye out for something that might hint at the future of the blues. We didn’t find it in Mississippi, although we obviously left a lot of ground uncovered. There were the three young white kids jamming “How Many More Years” on a sidewalk in Clarksdale. Well-meaning though they were, this was not the future. We walked away from our visit with the trio realizing that young blues musicians absolutely must come up with fresh narratives that reflect their own experiences. Kids playing “Sweet Home Chicago,” no matter how competently, only look backward.

There was the ragtag bundle of white longhairs crowding the stage for a Friday night benefit at the Walnut Street Blues Bar Bait Shop in Greenville. They are definitely not the future. On that same stage was Edie Brent, a 38-year-old keyboardist/singer who played the pretty white girl partnered with old black bluesman Boogaloo Ames until he died last year. She is not the future.

On our last afternoon, in New Orleans, we hooked up with Chris Thomas King, who is consciously trying to move the blues forward by fusing it with hip-hop. Although he says his music comes organically, his latest album is titled Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues.

We met King at his loft office in a boho enclave in uptown New Orleans. He wore baggy Sean John jeans and a white skullcap with a Nike logo, accentuating his heavy-lidded eyes. We spoke for a half-hour before I realized he had played George Clooney’s black sidekick Tommy Johnson in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? King runs several companies on his own, including 21st Century Blues Records — not by choice, but because he could never reach an accord with Sony or Warner Bros.

The multifaceted artist worked in his father’s juke joint in Baton Rouge, where he learned the blues basics. He also was surrounded by hip-hop. Throughout our conversation, King evoked an air of quiet defiance. He’s run into plenty of resistance trying to be a blues innovator.

“Bands that make it in rock ‘n’ roll — Nirvana, Metallica, Linkin Park — they don’t sound anything like Jerry Lee Lewis or Buddy Holly to me,” he said. “Nobody comes to a Linkin Park show and gets mad that they didn’t hear ‘Peggy Sue.’ People come to a Chris Thomas King concert and they start screaming out ‘Play some Muddy Waters!’ It’s like, ‘Who is Muddy Waters and what’s he have to do with a Chris Thomas King concert?’”

King says he encounters a lot of problems with promoters when he shows up to perform with a DJ as his only sideman. He’s clearly suffering backlash from an infrastructure that’s tethered to tradition. And yet, quite expediently, he works within that tradition. Last year, he played Blind Willie Johnson in Wim Wenders’ The Soul of a Man, part of Martin Scorcese’s series of blues films on PBS. As a companion piece, King recorded and released an album titled The Roots, where he re-enacted songs by Robert Johnson, Son House and Leadbelly dating as far back as the early 20th century.

Sadly, perhaps, The Roots is a far more satisfying listen than Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues, which, though not without its moments, suffers from sluggish production and the artist’s marginal rapping skills. Thus far, Chris Thomas King doesn’t appear to have the raw goods to be the future of the blues, but at least he’s got the right idea.

So what needs to be done to ensure the music survives, and perhaps thrives, down the line? It’ll take bold moves. Artists need to free the music from the shackles of purism, graft it to other styles, take risks, fail, not worry about living up to legacies. (Blues history will no doubt be well preserved.)

Maybe the next wave of blues visionaries is already out there, toiling away in bedrooms with PCs and turntables and Stratocasters and who-knows-what.

God willing.

snider@weeklyplanet.com