In the Land of Sinners

A Journey Through the Heart of the Delta Blues.

by

As the sun set on Good Friday this year, a film conjuring visions of the Mississippi Delta went into wide release, destined to gross over $365 million worldwide by July. And pulsing at the heart of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners was the sound of the blues, presented not merely as the film’s soundtrack but as a potent supernatural force, one with the power to attract vampires and ancestors — not to mention inflaming passions in the earthly realm.

Part of the film’s power lay in its sensitivity to a Delta blues tradition that’s still very much alive. In fact, the music heard in the film was inspired by an epic ramble through the Delta that Coogler and composer Ludwig Göransson made with Grammy-winning Memphis producer Boo Mitchell during the film’s pre-production last year. The group’s itinerary even serves as a kind of roadmap for any prospective blues voyagers ready to make their own discoveries this fall, staying a while here and there in the Mississippi Delta as the sun sinks a little earlier each day, and summer’s heat fades away.

Their first stop was Clarksdale, where Sinners is set. Mitchell recounts the cast of characters: He and Hi Rhythm guitarist Lina Beach collected Coogler, Göransson, and Göransson’s father, Tomas, and drove south. “As soon as we got to Clarksdale, right where you go past that grove of beautiful pecan trees, Ryan was like, ‘Pull over, man!’” says Mitchell. “He started taking pictures and video. I thought, ‘Maybe they’re scouting a movie or something?’ And then we got into Clarksdale, and there was a festival — Super Chikan was playing!”

Perhaps there were supernatural forces at work: They immediately came upon James “Super Chikan” Johnson, one of the Delta’s most original blues artists, playing his local hits like “Tin Top Shak,” as perfect a solo, raw, contemporary blues hybrid as you could hope to hear. Just hearing him sing — “I’m only nine years old, dragging me a nine-foot sack” — could spark epiphanies. And, as filmmaker Mark Rankin (who just released the documentary, James ‘Super Chikan’ Johnson: A Life in Blues) told the Magnolia Tribune, when he first heard the bluesman, “He didn’t sound like anybody else. There was this mix of country with Delta and Chicago blues, and it came out as something totally his own.”

It was made to order for Mitchell’s guests, avowed fans of all those styles. “Ludwig’s father has had a blues band for 35 years in Sweden, and they play all this Albert King stuff,” recalls Mitchell. “So they got to see Super Chikan up there playing the diddley bow, and that was mind blowing.”

The diddley bow, if you were wondering, is a kind of one-string zither made with a length of bailing wire strung over a glass bottle, more common as a child’s instrument in years past, but still employed by players going for that eerie, fresh-out-of-the-field sound. It’s a do-it-yourself tradition — which some argue shares lineage with similar instruments of the Sahel desert — that speaks to humanity’s need for music, no matter the materials to make it. The persistence of the diddley bow resonates mythically with what’s depicted in one of Sinners’ pivotal magical-realist scenes, when a grooving blues duo playing in the film’s makeshift juke joint, Club Duke, conjures up the whirling spirits of diverse ancestors, from African griots to Funkadelic guitar heroes to today’s turntablists.

It’s easy to imagine them convening in Clarksdale. The fact that Super Chikan just happened to be in town when Mitchell and the Sinners team were passing through is telling: With a dozen or more festivals and multiple clubs offering live bands every night of the year, there are plenty of opportunities to see the bluesman and others like him in the town of fewer than 15,000, which has arguably embraced its blues heritage more than any other Mississippi community. Indeed, an exhibit at the town’s Delta Blues Museum is dedicated to one of Mississippi’s oldest music fests, Clarksdale’s Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival, presented every August for the past 37 years.

Roger Stolle, owner of Clarksdale’s Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Arts shop and president of the Clarksdale/Coahoma County Tourism Commission, calls it the “grandmother” of Mississippi festivals. “Now we have, like, 20 festival-type events per year,” he says, “but in the beginning there was just Sunflower. All of our festivals are like this, but Sunflower is a good example: They’re very approachable, they’re very intimate. They’re very personal.”

Now, with summer fading, there are still more Clarksdale events on the horizon, all of them intended to be very intimate, very personal — very welcoming. A certain regional inclusiveness permeates these festivals. While the Delta blues is a distinct flavor of the genre, Clarksdale and other fests also support the more drone-heavy Hill Country blues to the northeast, centered more on Holly Springs and Senatobia. That’s most apparent in the upcoming on September 27th, centered on artists inspired by the late Hemphill’s pioneering spirit. There’s an even broader range of styles to be experienced at the Mighty Roots Music Festival at Stovall Plantation, a stone’s throw from Clarksdale, on October 3rd and 4th. Far more eclectic and perhaps more commercial, Mighty Roots will be headlined this year by country stars American Blonde and will include Memphis country stalwarts Papa Top’s West Coast Turnaround in the lineup.

With its wealth of lodging choices, Clarksdale is also a hub for blues pilgrims exploring festivals in other towns nearby, and that’s especially true of the King Biscuit Blues Festival in nearby West Helena, Arkansas, happening this October 10th and 11th. “It’s the second biggest blues business week of the year,” says Stolle. “I would say Juke Joint Fest (every April in downtown Clarksdale) is the biggest. We’ve always been big on promoting King Biscuit. Because it benefits Clarksdale, we can connect from this side of the river to promote it, even through our tourism office. Particularly with international visitors, they’re not going to visit Clarksdale for just two days. There’s got to be more for them to justify an airline ticket and all these things.”

Already presented in tandem is the Cat Head Mini Blues/Super Blues Sunday, usually appended with “After the Biscuit,” as the West Helena gathering is known. And that in turn highlights the role of private clubs and eateries in all of Clarksdale’s festiveness, as with the breakfast at the Bluesberry Café, the Pinetop Perkins Celebration at the ever-popular Shack Up Inn, and the blues brunch at Ground Zero Blues Club. The town’s many clubs anchor its larger events, and, in the case of Ground Zero, co-owned by Morgan Freeman, help to promote Clarksdale on a global stage. That’s certainly happening with Morgan Freeman’s Symphonic Blues Experience, which pairs local blues artists with Vienna-based composer and conductor Martin Gellner and performs with orchestras internationally.

That was also the case when Ground Zero happened to attract Mitchell and his filmmaking cohort during their epic blues ramble. “After Super Chikan, we went to Ground Zero and saw Anthony ‘Big A’ Sherrod & the All Stars,” says Mitchell. “They’re kind of the staple Friday and Saturday night band at Ground Zero. It was cool, man!”

From there, they went even further south, to tiny Indianola. And this September, precisely a century since the birth of blues giant B.B. King, so should you. But it won’t be quite like Mitchell, Coogler, and company’s experience.

“We got up and drove to Indianola, and there was just a whole lot of cool topography,” says Mitchell. “Ryan had us pulling over where there was some kind of river or stream or something, and he’d start taking pictures.”

But it was Indianola’s B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center that was the real draw, where museum director Robert Terrell first gave them a personal tour, then asked, “Y’all want to go see Club Ebony? We just redid it.” That drew an immediate yes. “We were like, Club Ebony, where B.B. King cut his teeth as a performer? Hell yeah, we want to go see it!” explains Mitchell. “Then Robert was like, ‘I’m gonna grab one of B.B.’s guitars.’ And the guitar that he just happened to grab was Lucille 01!” That would be the tribute guitar Gibson first released in 1980, using the name King had given his original trusty axe.

Mitchell added, “So we hung out at empty Club Ebony, and it’s just a really cool place, because it looks almost exactly like it was back in the day. Then Robert said, ‘Somebody want to play it?’ And Lina was immediately, like, ‘Hell yeah!’ Then Ludwig’s father was playing it.”

Visitors not accompanied by the writer/director of a major studio film may not get to play one of King’s guitars, but there will be plenty going on this fall that even Ryan Coogler couldn’t have seen a year ago.

The celebration of 100 Years of B.B. King is reverberating far and wide this year. The countdown began in Memphis this June with the 100 Days of Blues Gospel Brunch at B.B. King’s Blues Club on Beale Street, and will culminate with a massive celebration there on September 16th, which would have been King’s birthday. (He died at 89, in 2015.)

Meanwhile, activities leading up to September 16th will also be cooking in Indianola. As Robert Terrell explains, it begins right after Labor Day. “We’re holding the 11th annual B.B. King Day on September 4th, at Mississippi Valley State University [in nearby Itta Bena]. The university is all about B.B.’s legacy and his influence. I’m also going to screen some film footage that I’m putting together showing B.B. early on, showing his connection to the workshops at Mississippi Valley. The only B.B. King recording studio in the world is at that particular university.” The day will also include panel discussions comprised of musicians who played with and were influenced by King.

The fun will ramp up after sunset. “That will roll into a jam session at Club Ebony that night, just to honor B.B.,” Terrell says. “And then, the next day, September 5th, we’ll get a Mississippi Blues Trail marker unveiled at the museum,” while a band plays inside the museum.

The next day, September 6th, will feature a B.B. King Centennial celebration. Terrell plans to erect a stage in the middle of the street in front of the museum for live performances; meanwhile, high school marching bands will march from B.B. King Road to the front of the museum — while playing B.B. King songs, of course.

As King’s birthday approaches, Indianola will boast the B.B. King Hologram Experience at Historic Club Ebony on September 13th. There will be two evening shows at the celebrated club, significant because “when he would visit back home, after he become famous, he would play a homecoming show at Club Ebony every year,” says Terrell. Now, for the first time since King’s passing in 2015, audiences can see and hear a hologram of the man himself, accompanied by a live band of blues virtuosos. Just as in Sinners, an ancestor shall appear.

Finally, only a few days later, “we’ll celebrate his birthday on the 16th at the museum,” says Terrell. “The community can come in and take photos with the exhibits that we have here, and we’ll do the balloons and the cake and all of that.”

Happily for any blues pilgrims seeking more festival and nightclub experiences, the music will keep rolling through the Delta after that. More festivals will be in swing this fall near Indianola, like the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival in Greenville on September 20th, headlined by the legendary Bobby Rush. As the nation’s oldest continuously running blues festival, it’s a must-see.

But in the case of Boo Mitchell and the visionaries behind Sinners, their travelogue ended with Coogler and Göransson more committed than ever to having contemporary Mississippi blues players featured in their soundtrack. And that task fell to Mitchell.

He already knew plenty of those players, having made such Hill Country and Delta rambles many times over, and having produced the Grammy-winning album, I Be Trying, by Cedric Burnside, grandson of the great R.L. Burnside. Mitchell has said that the greatest production tool his father Willie Mitchell had at his disposal was his Rolodex, allowing him to call just the right musicians for every job — and that principle also holds for Boo, although the Rolodex has gone digital.

While Göransson worked on much of his score in Los Angeles or New Orleans, the composer booked time at Royal for the bluesiest musical segments. “They wanted me to assemble the team,” says Mitchell. “I called Bobby Rush, Charles Hodges [of Hi Rhythm], Cedric Burnside, Tierinii Jackson [of Southern Avenue],” and others. “They were interested in writing new songs. People were pairing off: Cedric and Tierinii wrote a song; Reverend Hodges and Super Chikan wrote together. We did all these crazy pairings and people would go home, write some more, and come back. And out of that big writing session, Alvin Youngblood Hart wrote ‘Travelin’.’”

The song is pivotal in the film, seeming at once ancient, timeless, and immediate, and establishing the character Sammie Moore’s command of the blues. As it turned out, the actor playing Sammie, Miles Caton, internalized Hart’s composition with all his soul, and the stripped-down Delta guitar and keening vocals of the track are a highlight of the hit album that followed. More importantly, they make the supernatural reach of the blues palpable. A chill may go through you when Caton wails the first lines of the song with abandon: “Travelin’!/I don’t know why in the world I’m here.” From that moment on, you know that the blues can touch the soul — because they’ve touched yours — and perhaps even reach the dead.

Luckily for music fans, none of Mississippi’s blues fests have attracted any vampires as of this writing. That we know of.