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In
two ways a guide: Geographically, Steve Cheseborough will direct
you around the Mississippi Delta, and give you insider’s tips on
how to locate places you might otherwise miss. In two ways a
guide: “Looking for the Blues” is the title of chapter 1 and
the search continues throughout the text, the search to find
evidence for this musical phenomenon. Musicians all over the world
sing “I got the blues,” and all roads from there lead,
musically and biographically, back to the Mississippi Delta. And
so fans, aficionados, and serious students of music come looking,
driving from town to town. We may find a grave site. Some blues
legends have a grave site. At least one has two, or four grave
sites. We find a street corner where Big Joe Williams played his
nine-string guitar. The barbershop where Howlin’ Wolf went. A
jook joint, so dilapidated as to defy not only the county health
department but gravity and good sense both. What are we looking
for? Recently, two young men from England, graduate students
studying the American South, came to my office and asked, “How
do we visit the Delta? Where should we go?” What does one say?
Get Cheseborough’s book; read,
drive, and pay attention.
The Mississippi Delta,
perhaps the most Southern of all places on earth, despite its
rural nature resembles an urban area for the wide mix of peoples
drawn to it from different places, people who brought with them
diverse musical traditions. “In this environment, the famed
Delta Blues developed,” Cheseborough says. And outside the
Delta, specific styles emerged, some marked by geography (the
“droning, hypnotic variety” of the northern hills) and some by
trajectory (“after the young Mississippian Muddy Waters caught
the train north”). There isn’t any one place to go, and
touring Mississippi means driving across its various landscapes,
hundreds of miles on two-lane roads. Cheseborough explains how to
find something to eat in small towns, how to find a hotel room,
the difference between a jook joint and a club--and other
important information for outsiders. The book will give travelers
the confidence required for good touring.
Blues Traveling
is divided into nine tours: “Memphis,” “Down Highway 61,”
“The Clarksdale Area,” “The Mid-Delta,” “The Greenwood
Area,” “Greenville to Vicksburg,” “The Jackson Area,”
“East Mississippi,” and “North Mississippi Hill Country.”
The chapters are further divided by towns. In “The Mid-Delta,”
for example, there are individual headings for Tutwiler (where you
can find Sonny Boy Williamson’s grave), Parchman (which contains
a typically superb historical essay on the penitentiary), Merigold
(find Poor Monkey’s Jook Joint), Rosedale (with its claim to one
crossroads), Beulah (with its claim to another), and seven other
towns. If you were to find yourself in Cleveland, Mississippi, you
could open Blues Traveling and read about the Bolivar
County Courthouse, where W. C. Handy played in 1905. Material from
Handy’s autobiography is quoted, where he claims to have
discovered music indigenous to the Delta while performing jazz at
the courthouse and hearing local musicians play “those
over-and-over strains that seem to have no very clear beginning
and certainly no ending at all.” You’d also get directions to
the site and information abut Cleveland’s plans for a
Mississippi Delta Blues Hall of Fame, as well as a restaurant tip
for Airport Grocery, where Willie Foster recorded “Live at
Airport Grocery.”
Cheseborough sets up each
site or town with cultural, social, and historical information.
History, legend, and speculation inform the traveler, and the short
essays are designed to create a frame of mind to enhance the tourist
experience. But unlike most guidebooks, where objectivity is held in
such awe that the traveler receives no real guidance, Cheseborough
has useful opinions and shares his point of view readily. The entry
on Clarksdale is preceded by a remarkable essay on the controversy
over the exact location of the “crossroads” to which Robert
Johnson refers in “Cross Road Blues,” and on the significance of
crossroads to Southern towns and West African folklore. Seekers of
Robert Johnson’s grave are directed to one north of Greenwood, two
others in Quito, and a fourth in Morgan City. Cheseborough gives us
the latest on where Johnson might be interred, but returns to the
music for the last word, quoting from the song, “Me and the Devil
Blues,” where Johnson uttered, “Babe, I don't care where you
bury my body when I’m dead and gone.”
Mississippi is somewhat
famous, if that’s the word, for its indifference to outsiders. The
blues typifies the attitude. Where does one go to find blues sites?
Or, if one is passing through a town, how does one know where to
look? Few Mississippi towns have tourist information centers, or
signs pointing to where so-and-so passed through. Take Blues
Traveling to Holly Springs. It’ll tell you where to fix your
radio dial so you may hear some blues. You’ll get directions to a
record shop that some locals don’t even know about, and the
address of a nightclub
where national tours are booked. If you’re interested in recent
history and have already eaten, you'll get directed to Chewalla Rib
Shack, the original Junior Kimbrough’s jook joint, now defunct,
but the played rocked in the early 1990s before Junior Kimbrough
moved the operation up the road to Chulahoma. That joint burned down
in 2000, but Cheseborough includes a phone number for information on
plans to rebuild.
Blues Traveling
appends a bibliography for those who want to read more about
Mississippi Delta Blues, and a discography for those who want to
build a library of essential blues recordings. The book has a very
useful index, also. Look up “Festivals,” for example, and get
references to every outdoor blues celebration mentioned in the book.
There are also regional and city-street maps, and photographs. And
the book is small enough to fit in your coat pocket or purse.
There is no agricultural
area in the world as significant to a musical form as the
Mississippi Delta is to American blues. A popular, grassroots (or
shoe dust) phenomenon, one finds oneself traveling to street
corners, old groceries, shells of buildings that once housed clubs,
someplace where someone played something that somebody heard and
passed to someone else, down the road, who took it to town on
Saturday night where somebody else passing through chanced to listen
and take it, and played it, and by the time it got back it had
become something else again. The Delta is that kind of world. Blues
Traveling won’t nail it down, and by the time you get it, some
of what it describes may change. But it doesn’t matter. Blues
Traveling makes you want to start down the road, to move around
the countryside with the driving blues and carry some of that
influence into your own time. Joseph Urgo
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