Blues still buoys a Delta town

Black, white, native or non, they come to sing or to listen

By Rob Azevedo, Globe Correspondent, 12/1/2002

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		Printable version If you go... How to get there Upcoming round-trip fares between Boston and Memphis start at $198 on Northwest, Delta, American, US Airways, Continental, and United. From Memphis, drive two hours south on Highway 61 into Clarksdale. What to do The Delta Blues Museum and Blues Station 1 Blues Alley (662-627-6820) dbmuseum@clarksdale.com Museum open Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission: adults $6, children 6-12, $3, under 6, free. Ground Zero Blues Club 0 Blues Alley (662-621-9009) gzbluesclub@cableone.net Dinner Wednesday-Saturday, live music Friday, Saturday nights. Cover $10. Cat Head 252 Delta Ave. (662-624-5992) Folk art store. Where to stay Shack Up Inn 001 Commissary Circle Highway 61 662-624-8329 or 615-385-4345 Shacks cost $50-$75. Where to eat Madidi Restaurant 164 Delta Ave. (662-627-7770) French dishes, including rack of lamb and hybrid bass. Entrees $19-$29. The Ranchero 1907 State St. (662-624-9768) Heavenly ribs and other barbecue. Entrees $11-$17.

It was just past midnight, and the sound coming from inside The Blues Station juke joint was a mixture of brilliance and raw nerve.

Legendary Delta bluesman Johnnie Billington, 67, was setting off rockets with his red guitar. Beyond the stage, the drinking crowd of 30 listened closely to Billington's golden notes as they slid through the walls and out into the nearly empty streets.

"The blues ain't dead," roared Billington before leaving the club. "You just gotta look harder to find 'em."

A few days earlier, I had come to Clarksdale to live in Delta time. I wanted to see the barrel-hipped mamas swaying against liquor-stained walls, and meet the men playing for them, the ones on stage in three-piece suits, dreaming the fever away.

Slugging down Highway 61, into the heart of Coahoma County, a driver with a sharp eye would notice the cotton defoliating and a lonely station wagon dragging its rear down a long dirt road. But look even closer, and there appears a heritage seemingly forgotten, and a city knocking on death's front door. Once a town that bustled from King Cotton, Clarksdale (pop. 19,700), located 75 miles south from Memphis, now appears exhausted, almost bleeding.

A quick glance down Delta Avenue offers an ugly frame, one filled with boarded-up storefronts, broken faces, and dented walkways. Still, inside the ruins, a group of townspeople works to bring these sidewalks back to life. Interested not only in raising the social bar, these folks also hope to save their vivid past. I was met downtown at Cat Head, a delta blues and folk art store, by the unofficial grand marshal of Clarksdale, Kinchen "Bubba" O'Keefe, 45, a homebuilder with a wife and three girls.

"Just don't ever say we need to 'Save the town,"' O'Keefe said, his bifocals sunk low on his nose. "We got a jewel here we're just trying to polish."

The story goes (and it's an old one) that in 1930, a young guitar slinger named Robert Johnson met with the devil in Clarksdale, at the crossroads of damnation. There, Johnson traded his soul for the ability to play guitar, and thus a place in blues history.

When Johnson died in 1938, Clarksdale became a mecca for dark strength and midnight music, the songs of the blues. Musicians, playwrights, and poets also came here to facilitate creativity. They wrote about the women canning vegetables in the fields, the lawless vagrants, traveling salesmen, and beer spillers.

Walking across the street to where the old WROX radio station was located, O'Keefe remembered Clarksdale being home to Muddy Waters and Tennessee Williams, both native Mississippians. "Tennessee based a character in one of his books after this guy that used to beat him up all the time," said O'Keefe. "He made him look inferior in the book."

Inside the dusty building first made famous by D. J. Early, a legendary black disc jockey, O'Keefe pointed to where a young Elvis Presley, then a delivery man, once sang into the walls. "He could have been standing right here," he said, looking at the dirty floor. Then he pointed to his forearm. "Look. It gives me chill bumps."

These days, O'Keefe is trying to raise the money to preserve the building by turning it into a museum. "It's like trying to make 10 dollars out of four," he said.

The plan is to replicate the old studio by using the original microphones, couches, desks, and lamps that once shined on Sam Cooke and Ike Turner, who was once a janitor at WROX.

Wading through piles of old newspapers, church pews, and chipped furniture, O'Keefe explained that although Clarksdale is suffering, its history can't be denied or forgotten. "You don't create this stuff, baby," he said. "It just happens."

Before promising to meet me for breakfast the next day, O'Keefe suggested I get a room at the Shack Up Inn in Hopson, four miles outside Clarksdale, with the instructions: "Just tell 'em Bubba sent ya."

In Hopson, on a 3,800-acre cotton plantation, six shotgun shacks (so called because a shotgun shell fired through the front door would go straight through the house and out the back door) were lined up next to one another. A dead hippie van took shelter beneath a sun-worn cotton gin. An iron chair and table waited in a field near a bottle tree.

In 1998, Bill Talbot, 52, and four other investors bought two shotgun shacks where sharecroppers used to live. Talbot then had the shacks set on the Hopson Plantation, home to the first mechanized cotton picker. "That's the epitome of Southern living," he told me.

Talbot suggested that when people come to the Delta, they "should just throw their watches away." He also said the shacks are popular with European visitors as well as with African-Americans.

I chose to stay in Pinetop, a shack named after the legendary blues piano player, Pinetop Perkins, who once picked cotton on that same land. Talbot charged me $65 for the 35-by-15-foot shack with copper ceilings, a creaky floor, running water, and a living area fit with a piano and TV. On one wall is a mural of a smiling Pinetop at his piano.

That night, from my front porch, I watched the sun sink below the cotton line. The scene was dreamlike. The wheels of a cotton machine churning in the heat filled my thoughts. Gangs of mosquitoes feasted on my legs.

The next morning, O'Keefe pulled up beside me downtown. "I couldn't wait all morning for ya," he shouted as if talking to an old friend. "I had to get me some breakfast."

Before long I was in the front seat of his pickup, heading out to meet Billy Strohm, a successful businessman in town also doing his part to save — I mean polish — Clarksdale.

Kneeling in a pile of wet concrete, Strohm, 64, spoke passionately of his project. "The public's mind is to say the government will save us," he said. "It's up to the individuals to save our past."

A year ago, Strohm and his wife, Lillie, had taken on the massive task of restoring a nearly collapsing mansion built in 1859. Because John Clark, the founder of Clarksdale, lived in the house all his life, Strohm decided to buy and rebuild the 5,200-square-foot mansion and turn it into a bed-and-breakfast.

"I'll never make the money back in my lifetime," said Strohm, dripping with sweat. "But that's not what's important."

That night, walking into a club named Ground Zero, I was frustrated. Not in what I had seen and learned over the past couple days, but that I had failed to visit a true juke joint.

In Leland, a town just north of Greenville, W. C. Hall, the owner of a juke joint named Boss Hall's, blamed the Mississippi River casino boats for the demise of juke joints. The casino boats, he said, "can afford to pay the musicians. I can't. They even feed 'em, too."

Hall then added, "Now the kids come here to listen to disco."

In Rosedale, which borders the levees of the Mississippi River, Jackson's Lounge was closed, as was Bug's Place. Both clubs stand a block away from where a group of black folks shared a blanket of shade under a tree. Paper and aluminum filled the gutters. A half-dozen men carried bottles of malt by their sides.

In terms of juke joints, Clarksdale did not fare much better. "Red's has some acts, but no one is gonna pay the $7 cover to see them," said a man named Marlin ("like the fish") who was drinking earlier at the commissary adjacent to the Shack Up Inn.

Downtown, Ground Zero was beginning to come to life. The club's patrons were all white, with the exception of the star. A young female lawyer named River put the scene in perspective: "Around here, you either have money or you don't." The club is co-owned by actor Morgan Freeman, a neighbor to Clarksdale.

As the crowd danced to country rock and took pictures with Freeman, I spotted a red, smoky light coming from across the street.

I followed the light, which led me to Blues Station, a pop-up juke joint inside an old train depot, next door to the Delta Blues Museum. A benefit concert was underway. Inside, a group of misfit bluesmen — some white, some black — surrounded instructor Johnnie Billington onstage. Dressed in wool suits and rayon tank tops, the musicians appeared waxed in the stage light.

Roger Stolle, the owner of the folk art store Cat Head, said Billington has taught nearly everyone in this town how to play the blues. "He's amazing," he said.

The small crowd flexed at every chord as Billington led his students through a series of numbers. The smell of heated amplifiers and hard liquor stole my breath away. A white-skinned, long-haired, barrel-hipped mama swung her dress wildly.

Rob Azevedo is a freelance writer who lives in Melrose.