(no subject)
Carried over from the failed chicagorevenant blog. I'll come back to New Orleans, but for now I want to jot down the details of my Mississippi Delta excursion. I say with certainty it was the highlight of my trip.
First... Elmore James... I left New Orleans on Monday, October 9. Fearing that I'd arrive too late to do anything in Clarksdale (it's a seven hour drive through a whole lotta nothing) I visited only one bluesman's grave on the way up. Elmore James' last resting place is in a black graveyard next to a little church well away from the highway in the southern Delta. His stone is pretty professional looking beside the numerous carved concrete slabs of his less well-known neighbors. I got my shots, left a guitar pick, and stole a sample of dirt from Mr. James' grave, which I intend to employ in an art project. While there, I paid my respects at lesser-known bluesman Lonnie Pitchford's grave and observed a splendiferous spray of flowers left over the graveyard's latest addition. While most of the cemeteries I visited looked abandoned, each one always had a new resident.
No one and I do mean NO ONE was around. It was a warm, bright, and sunny day, and while I was prepared for a dearth of car noise and such, being raised in the suburbs I always expect to hear insects and birds in the nearby woods at the very least. I heard nothing, my friends, aside from occasional black fly's buzzing. The stillness was unsettling. That's not dramatic license on my part. Letting my imagination run away with me, I wondered what it would be like around a more demonic bluesman's final bed.
The next day, at 8:30, after a puny "continental" breakfast of Cheerios, watery OJ, tepid coffee, and a bagel, I headed south on Highway 61. My first stop, the Dockery Plantation, where, more or less, the country blues were born.
It's a long drive from Clarksdale to Dockery. I had a beautiful day for the trip. I appreciated the lack of rain even more much later on when I had to find John Hurt's grave. Along Highway 61 you pass through various towns with names like Alligator and Shelby until you come to Cleveland, the main drag of which looked like most northern suburban business centers, if memory serves. Clarksdale had its own Wal-Mart too, even though it was juxtaposed with one of the poorest areas in the country. Along the way you get an eyeful of cotton fields and the infrequent barn or house in varying states of repair. Dockery itself is represented by a group of buildings which, I suspect, may be kept semi-shabby for appearance's sake.
In its day, as Steve Cheseborough's wonderful and indispensable book Blues Traveling points out, Dockery was a successful plantation, with its own post office and gas station. Both are closed today, but Dockery remains a working plantation, and it is advised to reserve photo ops to the extremely photogenic barn and offices out front. Some of the blues' leading lights worked, or at least hung out and played here: Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, and, I think, Son House. In summary, everything you thought Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, and Keith Richards came up with was probably invented here first.
It was here that I first noticed the ubiquity of cotton in the area. Not just in the fields. The stuff flies around loosely, rolling around around like mini-tumbleweeds and covering the sides of the road and parts of the scenery in light flurries. Dockery has a Chicago November's worth of cotton snowfall, I'd wager.
The other predominant feature of the scenery are the ramshackle buildings. Newer homes, barns, and such are to be found, of course; this isn't the Depression. But I saw more literal shacks everywhere I went, growing more shabby and poorly repaired the deeper I delved into the Delta. And yet, they rarely appeared as anything less than solid, even when tilting 45 degrees... But back to the trip. I took a few shots at Dockery's picturesque facade and drove on.
Leland was my next stop. Leland is a more identifiable town than most of the three-building villages that cover the Delta, having a town center marked by brick and mortar buildings rather than wood and nail shacks. Not just a center for blues history, Leland was also the boyhood home of the Winter Brothers and, of all people, Jim Henson. Henson has a small museum near the exit (it wasn't open) and a historical plaque on the bridge crossing over Deer Creek, which runs through town and by which the young muppeteer larked and gamboled.
The Highway 61 Museum-located in the old Mason's temple across the way from the Leland Police Department-wasn't open when I arrived, so I wandered a bit, finding yet another blues mural on the side of the building across the street. The paintings aren't bad. Not great, but not bad. At least you can identify the persons they're intended to portray. Leland is probably the only place you'll see twin albino bluesmen immortalized thusly.
When the museum opened, I was attended to by a sweet little old southern belle, a bit stooped and slow-paced, but pleasant and accommodating. She pointed out some of her favorite exhibits, particularly the folk art covering the walls and the individual blues exhibits under glass. The Leland Highway 61 Blues Museum is wonderfully curated by a man named Billy Johnson. Most of the small blues museums I came across were constructed with a lot more soul and love than most larger and better funded museum exhibits I've encountered. They certainly show a great amount of personal devotion and excitement over the subject.
Of special note is the James "Son" Thomas exhibit. Thomas wasn't just a great bluesman who learned at the feet of Sonny Boy Williamson and Elmore James, he created remarkably weird sculptures. He and his son and fellow bluesman/sculptor Pat have a grand display of sculptures, paintings, and instruments in one section of the museum (which is about the size of large living room). Also represented were Little Milton, the Winter brothers, Boogaloo Ames, Charley Patton, Jimmy Reed, and others, each having a condensed exhibits of their life's work. The accent is apparently on local acts, so I don't want to pretend I knew everyone represented there. But it did encourage me to find out more about them. As I discovered, the blues are still a very active musical form in the Delta. Even better, like Mr. Thomas, many contemporary Mississippi blues musician divide their time between producing music and outsider art-when they're not working their asses off at blue collar jobs that is. I find that utterly charming. As a happy side effect of this trip, I felt better about my own artworks.
I visited Mr. Thomas' grave just outside of town, in yet another evocatively large, remote, and sparse graveyard. Things weren't as quiet as they were at Elmore James' gravesite, the insects--which included dragonflies and mosquitoes as big as your head--clicking and buzzing in the background, with a slight wind whisking through the dried grass. Before he died in 1993, Thomas was promoted as one of the last of the Delta bluesmen, which seems to be a fairly interchangeable title. In the past dozen years I think I've heard of several last Delta bluesmen out there. Oh, by the way, here's one of Thomas' skulls:
Neat, huh? I would have bought one, if I could have found one, but the damn things are going for hundreds of dollars now.
Thomas' graveyard is remote, but not by much. I suppose living in Illinois I'm accustomed to driving past acres upon acres of farmland. Which makes Thomas' and other bluesmen's graves seem a lot closer than the several panicky, "I drove by the road several times! It was getting dark! Aggh!" accounts I read online made them sound like. As my friend Dave points out, country roads are very direct. They just seem scary because they're usually very, very long.
Thomas' particular boneyard is a bit bigger than the others, with the usual collection of century-, decade-, and week-old stones. Some headstones were handmade; two pieces of wood nailed into a cross. A few had concrete slabs with almost Celtic-like wave patterns. Thomas' was straight to the point: a tall stone provided by the Mount Zion Memorial Fund with a lyric from one of his songs.
As I said, the graveyard was less unnerving than Elmore James'. Maybe I was just getting used to the silence of Mississippi beside my usual Chicago ear diet. Out there it's just you, the earth, and the sky, which is quite big, wide, and blue. I paid my respects to Mr. Thomas and moved on.
My next stop was Holly Ridge, to find the great Charley Patton's grave. I'd been warned by Internet accounts that it was easy to bypass the dirt road that takes you there. I didn't have that problem, probably due to Mr. Cheseborough's lovely little tome (I swear he's not giving me a cut of the royalties). Holly Ridge is a collection of battered buildings and a cotton gin that roared and clanged the entire time I was there. I was supposed to look for a church, supposedly one that Mr. Patton used to sing at, but unless I was blind and/or hypnotized by the road, I didn't see it, and it occurred to me that it might have been torn down. Then again, maybe I'm an idiot, brain damage brought about by inhaling too much cotton dander, so I hope I haven't distributed heart attacks to all the blues fans out there.
Patton's stone, it is suggested, doesn't really mark Patton's grave. Poor Charley's bones ares probably being slowly mushed beneath the gin. It's still a nice tribute, provided by the somehow appropriate John Fogerty of Credence Clearwater Revival.
The field that Patton rests in is covered with dust; more so than the rest of the Mississippi countryside. My understanding is that cotton leeches the hell out of the dirt, leaving it loose and dead. The gin's output probably added to the dust, and I kicked up little clouds as I strode across the graveyard. Driving down Highways 61 and 82 you get a better sense of the hardness of the land. Parched is the word that kept coming back to me. it's no wonder all those bluesmen-those that worked the fields, that is-had those amazing craggly faces. Even in October a person can feel baked and desiccated down there.
Because of his gargling with glass vocals and archaic sound, I don't think Charley has received as much attention as the slicker Robert Johnson has. I recommend picking up this collection as a starter. Patton is accompanied here by two other lesser-known, latter-day bluesmen, Asie Payton and Willie James Foster, both of whom died in recent years. Don't know much about them, but I plan to look into their work.
Tomorrow: Robert Johnson's three graves, the friendly(?) hellhound, Mississippi John Hurt's terrifyingly distant grave, and more!
Bonus: Other graves from various graveyards.
And a picturesque shack:
First... Elmore James... I left New Orleans on Monday, October 9. Fearing that I'd arrive too late to do anything in Clarksdale (it's a seven hour drive through a whole lotta nothing) I visited only one bluesman's grave on the way up. Elmore James' last resting place is in a black graveyard next to a little church well away from the highway in the southern Delta. His stone is pretty professional looking beside the numerous carved concrete slabs of his less well-known neighbors. I got my shots, left a guitar pick, and stole a sample of dirt from Mr. James' grave, which I intend to employ in an art project. While there, I paid my respects at lesser-known bluesman Lonnie Pitchford's grave and observed a splendiferous spray of flowers left over the graveyard's latest addition. While most of the cemeteries I visited looked abandoned, each one always had a new resident.
No one and I do mean NO ONE was around. It was a warm, bright, and sunny day, and while I was prepared for a dearth of car noise and such, being raised in the suburbs I always expect to hear insects and birds in the nearby woods at the very least. I heard nothing, my friends, aside from occasional black fly's buzzing. The stillness was unsettling. That's not dramatic license on my part. Letting my imagination run away with me, I wondered what it would be like around a more demonic bluesman's final bed.
The next day, at 8:30, after a puny "continental" breakfast of Cheerios, watery OJ, tepid coffee, and a bagel, I headed south on Highway 61. My first stop, the Dockery Plantation, where, more or less, the country blues were born.
It's a long drive from Clarksdale to Dockery. I had a beautiful day for the trip. I appreciated the lack of rain even more much later on when I had to find John Hurt's grave. Along Highway 61 you pass through various towns with names like Alligator and Shelby until you come to Cleveland, the main drag of which looked like most northern suburban business centers, if memory serves. Clarksdale had its own Wal-Mart too, even though it was juxtaposed with one of the poorest areas in the country. Along the way you get an eyeful of cotton fields and the infrequent barn or house in varying states of repair. Dockery itself is represented by a group of buildings which, I suspect, may be kept semi-shabby for appearance's sake.
In its day, as Steve Cheseborough's wonderful and indispensable book Blues Traveling points out, Dockery was a successful plantation, with its own post office and gas station. Both are closed today, but Dockery remains a working plantation, and it is advised to reserve photo ops to the extremely photogenic barn and offices out front. Some of the blues' leading lights worked, or at least hung out and played here: Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, and, I think, Son House. In summary, everything you thought Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, and Keith Richards came up with was probably invented here first.
It was here that I first noticed the ubiquity of cotton in the area. Not just in the fields. The stuff flies around loosely, rolling around around like mini-tumbleweeds and covering the sides of the road and parts of the scenery in light flurries. Dockery has a Chicago November's worth of cotton snowfall, I'd wager.
The other predominant feature of the scenery are the ramshackle buildings. Newer homes, barns, and such are to be found, of course; this isn't the Depression. But I saw more literal shacks everywhere I went, growing more shabby and poorly repaired the deeper I delved into the Delta. And yet, they rarely appeared as anything less than solid, even when tilting 45 degrees... But back to the trip. I took a few shots at Dockery's picturesque facade and drove on.
Leland was my next stop. Leland is a more identifiable town than most of the three-building villages that cover the Delta, having a town center marked by brick and mortar buildings rather than wood and nail shacks. Not just a center for blues history, Leland was also the boyhood home of the Winter Brothers and, of all people, Jim Henson. Henson has a small museum near the exit (it wasn't open) and a historical plaque on the bridge crossing over Deer Creek, which runs through town and by which the young muppeteer larked and gamboled.
The Highway 61 Museum-located in the old Mason's temple across the way from the Leland Police Department-wasn't open when I arrived, so I wandered a bit, finding yet another blues mural on the side of the building across the street. The paintings aren't bad. Not great, but not bad. At least you can identify the persons they're intended to portray. Leland is probably the only place you'll see twin albino bluesmen immortalized thusly.
When the museum opened, I was attended to by a sweet little old southern belle, a bit stooped and slow-paced, but pleasant and accommodating. She pointed out some of her favorite exhibits, particularly the folk art covering the walls and the individual blues exhibits under glass. The Leland Highway 61 Blues Museum is wonderfully curated by a man named Billy Johnson. Most of the small blues museums I came across were constructed with a lot more soul and love than most larger and better funded museum exhibits I've encountered. They certainly show a great amount of personal devotion and excitement over the subject.
Of special note is the James "Son" Thomas exhibit. Thomas wasn't just a great bluesman who learned at the feet of Sonny Boy Williamson and Elmore James, he created remarkably weird sculptures. He and his son and fellow bluesman/sculptor Pat have a grand display of sculptures, paintings, and instruments in one section of the museum (which is about the size of large living room). Also represented were Little Milton, the Winter brothers, Boogaloo Ames, Charley Patton, Jimmy Reed, and others, each having a condensed exhibits of their life's work. The accent is apparently on local acts, so I don't want to pretend I knew everyone represented there. But it did encourage me to find out more about them. As I discovered, the blues are still a very active musical form in the Delta. Even better, like Mr. Thomas, many contemporary Mississippi blues musician divide their time between producing music and outsider art-when they're not working their asses off at blue collar jobs that is. I find that utterly charming. As a happy side effect of this trip, I felt better about my own artworks.
I visited Mr. Thomas' grave just outside of town, in yet another evocatively large, remote, and sparse graveyard. Things weren't as quiet as they were at Elmore James' gravesite, the insects--which included dragonflies and mosquitoes as big as your head--clicking and buzzing in the background, with a slight wind whisking through the dried grass. Before he died in 1993, Thomas was promoted as one of the last of the Delta bluesmen, which seems to be a fairly interchangeable title. In the past dozen years I think I've heard of several last Delta bluesmen out there. Oh, by the way, here's one of Thomas' skulls:
Neat, huh? I would have bought one, if I could have found one, but the damn things are going for hundreds of dollars now.
Thomas' graveyard is remote, but not by much. I suppose living in Illinois I'm accustomed to driving past acres upon acres of farmland. Which makes Thomas' and other bluesmen's graves seem a lot closer than the several panicky, "I drove by the road several times! It was getting dark! Aggh!" accounts I read online made them sound like. As my friend Dave points out, country roads are very direct. They just seem scary because they're usually very, very long.
Thomas' particular boneyard is a bit bigger than the others, with the usual collection of century-, decade-, and week-old stones. Some headstones were handmade; two pieces of wood nailed into a cross. A few had concrete slabs with almost Celtic-like wave patterns. Thomas' was straight to the point: a tall stone provided by the Mount Zion Memorial Fund with a lyric from one of his songs.
As I said, the graveyard was less unnerving than Elmore James'. Maybe I was just getting used to the silence of Mississippi beside my usual Chicago ear diet. Out there it's just you, the earth, and the sky, which is quite big, wide, and blue. I paid my respects to Mr. Thomas and moved on.
My next stop was Holly Ridge, to find the great Charley Patton's grave. I'd been warned by Internet accounts that it was easy to bypass the dirt road that takes you there. I didn't have that problem, probably due to Mr. Cheseborough's lovely little tome (I swear he's not giving me a cut of the royalties). Holly Ridge is a collection of battered buildings and a cotton gin that roared and clanged the entire time I was there. I was supposed to look for a church, supposedly one that Mr. Patton used to sing at, but unless I was blind and/or hypnotized by the road, I didn't see it, and it occurred to me that it might have been torn down. Then again, maybe I'm an idiot, brain damage brought about by inhaling too much cotton dander, so I hope I haven't distributed heart attacks to all the blues fans out there.
Patton's stone, it is suggested, doesn't really mark Patton's grave. Poor Charley's bones ares probably being slowly mushed beneath the gin. It's still a nice tribute, provided by the somehow appropriate John Fogerty of Credence Clearwater Revival.
The field that Patton rests in is covered with dust; more so than the rest of the Mississippi countryside. My understanding is that cotton leeches the hell out of the dirt, leaving it loose and dead. The gin's output probably added to the dust, and I kicked up little clouds as I strode across the graveyard. Driving down Highways 61 and 82 you get a better sense of the hardness of the land. Parched is the word that kept coming back to me. it's no wonder all those bluesmen-those that worked the fields, that is-had those amazing craggly faces. Even in October a person can feel baked and desiccated down there.
Because of his gargling with glass vocals and archaic sound, I don't think Charley has received as much attention as the slicker Robert Johnson has. I recommend picking up this collection as a starter. Patton is accompanied here by two other lesser-known, latter-day bluesmen, Asie Payton and Willie James Foster, both of whom died in recent years. Don't know much about them, but I plan to look into their work.
Tomorrow: Robert Johnson's three graves, the friendly(?) hellhound, Mississippi John Hurt's terrifyingly distant grave, and more!
Bonus: Other graves from various graveyards.
And a picturesque shack: