photograph jarvis johnson / adobe stock
The modern Greenville Bridge, which opened in 2010, carries U.S. Highway 82 over the Mississippi River (in the distance) and the lowlands nearby.
The history and legacy of Greenville, Mississippi, echoes that of Memphis in many ways, right down to its penchant for producing musicians. Also a river town, Greenville has attracted a wide diversity of souls — key to its creative milieu — since its founding in 1870. At least that’s when the most enduring version of the town was established, after the first Greenville, closer to Natchez, was abandoned earlier in the nineteenth century and the second Greenville was destroyed by Union troops in the Civil War. For this bustling burg, the third time was the charm.
photograph by steveheap / dreamstime
Greenville’s a popular stop for the riverboats that cruise up and down the Mississippi River.
This final version of the town thrived in the cotton economy over which the wealthy white elites presided, and, like Beale Street in Memphis, by the 1940s and ’50s, all that commercial activity made Greenville a hub of Black culture in the Delta. It was uniquely situated in that long stretch of terrain between Vicksburg and Memphis, and the blues clubs lining Greenville’s Nelson Street drew on the musical genius of the surrounding lands.
Even today, the town remains the perfect base from which to explore that regional genius, still springing up in the many smaller towns, plantations, and roadside juke joints that dot the Delta’s landscape. It’s certainly manifest during Greenville’s two great annual festivals. The Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival, launched in 1977, is the oldest continuously running blues festival in the world, and hosts some stellar talents. (It’s scheduled for September 19th this year.) Yet other fests are just as well-curated, such as the Sam Chatmon Blues Festival (September 26th) and the Delta Hot Tamale Festival (October 15-17th).
In fact, the Delta is bursting with music festivals, mainly showcasing local talent. Not coincidentally, due to the depth of this regional musical bench, Greenville has always had a direct connection with Memphis, as the musicians here and there will attest.
Eden Brent and Bob Dowell
photograph by justin fox burks
When Eden Brent married Bob Dowell, he left London to live in her native Greenville.
Underscoring that point, it was in Memphis that I caught up with Greenville native Eden Brent while she was attending the Blues Music Awards. The pianist is no stranger to the BMAs or the Blues Foundation, having first gained recognition as a winner of its 2006 International Blues Challenge, later winning BMAs for Acoustic Artist of the Year and Acoustic Album of the Year in 2009, not to mention snagging the “Pinetop Perkins Piano Player” honor there last year. And right after we spoke, she garnered another BMA as this year’s Traditional Blues Female Artist (Koko Taylor Award).
More importantly, she’s carrying the torch of the older blues pianists she learned from, particularly Abie “Boogaloo” Ames, a Delta native who led bands in Detroit for years before opting for the quieter life back home, tuning pianos. Beginning in the ’70s, one could often hear his blues and boogie-woogie stylings at Delta music festivals. In 1980, he settled in Greenville and soon took Brent under his wing. Her apprenticeship led to an epic musical partnership, celebrated in the 1999 television documentary, Boogaloo & Eden: Sustaining the Sound, culminating in a national tour and an appearance at the Kennedy Center. That run was a great last hurrah before Ames died in 2002 at the age of 83.
Today, Brent is quick to point out the others she learned from back in the day. “There were quite a few people,” she says. “There was Eugene Powell, whose stage name was Sonny Boy Nelson, and Son Thomas, and a fellow named Little Bill Wallace, and T Model Ford. So quite a few of the Greenville acts — or from Leland, right there next to Greenville — were people that I knew personally. And I think that helped make me a little bit more of a cosmopolitan person, for somebody who lives in such a small town as this.”
Yet Brent appreciates that Greenville is itself cosmopolitan in its own way: “I proudly say that Greenville is the county seat of Washington County, Mississippi, which was the first county to go wet! Back when the state legislature finally voted in alcohol.” She notes that this was quite in keeping with the idiosyncratic figures her hometown tended to harbor. “There’s quite a few funny things about Greenville,” Brent adds. “A lot of colorful characters.”
“People here have a different groove, a different feel to people back home. So I’d say I kind of pick up things through osmosis.” — Bob Dowell
She made Greenville a bit more cosmopolitan when she married Bob Dowell from London, and he settled into Mississippi life with her in 2015. As anyone who’s seen him perform with Brent knows, he’s not just any bloke, but an A-list trombone virtuoso, bassist, session man, arranger, and composer who worked in and around London for years. Playing venues from the Royal Albert Hall to Jools Holland’s Later, he chiefly played ska, reggae, salsa, and African music.
But jazz was always his first love. In addition to accompanying his wife on bass, he released his own jazz album in 2017, Mississippi Slide!, using the cream of the Memphis crop: Tony Thomas on organ, Art Edmaiston on tenor sax, the late Tim Goodwin on bass, and Tom Lonardo on drums.
With songs like “Crawdaddy Blues” and “Southern Skies,” that album is a sure sign that Dowell had no trouble acclimating to Greenville. In fact, the local airwaves may have seeped into his very playing. “On the radio, I can always flick through and find some Southern soul and gospel,” he says. “I love the bass players. I check out the people in church playing their six-string basses. People here have a different groove, a different feel to people back home. So I’d say I kind of pick up things through osmosis.”
Sid Selvidge
photographs by justin fox burks
Sid Selvidge and his son, Steve, photographed before Sid’s passing in 2013. Greenville’s literary tradition profoundly affected Sid’s songwriting.
If Greenville has become more worldly or cosmopolitan over the years, that’s quite a change from when one of its most celebrated sons decided to leave for good. For that very reason, the name Sid Selvidge may mean more to Memphians than anyone in his hometown. To hear his son Steve tell it, you might say his late father’s relationship with Greenville was “complicated.”
“The thing is, my dad’s father passed when my dad was, like, 12 years old,” Selvidge explains. With the family’s plans thrown into chaos, Sid and his brother “both got sent to a military school. That dovetailed, or should I say ‘ducktailed,’ perfectly with the late 1950s sense of rebellion. And my dad, being the younger of Irish twins, had a lot to rebel against.”
Sid Selvidge eventually attended Southwestern (now Rhodes College) and blossomed musically in Memphis, befriending old-time bluesmen like Furry Lewis and going on to record many albums showcasing the otherworldly resonance of his voice. His son notes that it was another celebrated aspect of Greenville life, its literary tradition, that really made its mark on his father’s trajectory. “He talked quite fondly about his grandfather, who wrote a book,” says Steve.
And Selvidge was not alone. With a host of poets, journalists, historians, and novelists born there or growing up there, including Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, Greenville has long stood out as perhaps the most bookish city in the Delta. And, as Steve Selvidge points out, that’s part of what made his father a little different.
“I think that influenced my dad’s songwriting,” he says, “and it certainly bolstered his academic side. My dad loved academics. He loved school. If there’s a heaven, he’s in the stacks somewhere, with three different papers and a dissertation he’s working on.”
Indeed, Sid Selvidge may be the only Memphis music star to have an advanced degree in cultural anthropology and to have taught classes in the field on a regular basis. For that, we and all his former students have Greenville to thank.
Reverend Robert Mortimer
photograph courtesy rev. robert mortimer
Reverend Robert Mortimer learned guitar from the bluesmen who frequented Greenville’s Nelson Street in his youth.
At least one younger Greenville native musician, on the other hand, will never leave. “I grew up here, and I’ll be here until I die, I guess,” says Rev. Robert Mortimer, one of the city’s most dynamic performers. He may just be one of those vivid characters that Brent mentioned. For starters, his day job is running the family business, the Mortimer Funeral Home. And while that may give him a certain insight into the human condition as a songwriter, it’s really his onstage presence that sticks with you. With a horn section decked out in choir robes, he delivers a heady mix of blues, funk, and blue-eyed soul with some very James Brown-like moves.
But while his manner is carefree, Mortimer is dead serious about carrying on the music he picked up from older Greenville players as a kid. “I’ve been playing music since I was in my teens,” he says. “I used to take guitar lessons from blues musicians, and then I’d sneak backstage and watch them play. Eventually, in my late teens, they started letting me on stage with them. Willie Foster was one guy from back in the day. Walter Horn, aka Mississippi Slim. John Horton. Bill Wallace. And Roosevelt ‘Booba’ Barnes had a club on Nelson Street. All those guys eventually just started letting me get on stage with them.”
photograph by justin fox burks
Doe’s Eat Place is a prime purveyor of that Delta specialty, the tamale, also celebrated every year at the Delta Hot Tamale Festival.
Now, he finds that many of those greats have passed away. “Back in the ’90s,” Mortimer says, “there was a huge blues musician base here, with about 20 of them living here in town. And hell, I think all but four of them are dead now, but back then, they were everywhere and they played every night somewhere around town.”
Still, he sees much promise in Greenville. “The main thing is, we’ve got a lot of good restaurants, like Doe’s Eat Place and Sherman’s,” he says, “and we’ve got a lot of things that we can take advantage of.” Mortimer also points to Greenville’s many festivals, especially the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival. “That’s an authentic blues festival,” he says. “A lot of underground blues acts come to that. It’s as real as you can get. There’s nothing corporate about that. It’s just down home in the middle of the cotton fields.” He and his group play it every three years or so, but he’s also used to working the regional circuit.
“I spend most of my time between New Orleans and the Panhandle down there, Austin, and Memphis,” he continues. “I love playing in Memphis. I lived there for a little bit, and I’ve got a lot of friends up there in bands. I record in Memphis a lot, too.”
Steve Azar
photograph courtesy weebiehighway / creative commons
Steve Azar returned to Greenville after finding success in Nashville.
Even as Mortimer bemoans the dwindling of the ranks of local blues players, Greenville also boasts a bona-fide country star in its midst. In fact, in what was arguably the most moving show of hometown dedication one could imagine, Steve Azar, who had his first hit in the country charts 25 years ago with “I Don’t Have to Be Me (’Til Monday),” left Nashville to return home in 2011. He hasn’t looked back, nor has he felt too constrained by his “country” tag.
Azar first learned guitar from bluesman Sonny Boy Nelson, his breakthrough album featured blues guitarist Sonny Landreth, and he’s more recently collaborated with Cedric Burnside on a record cut at the Delta Music Institute at Delta State University in nearby Cleveland, where Azar works with students as an artist-in-residence. This is an artist deeply engaged with his native land, and that was made most clear in 2017, when Azar was named Music and Cultural Ambassador of Mississippi by then-governor Phil Bryant. Soon after, Azar’s song “One Mississippi” was named the official state song of Mississippi, a dramatic sign of progress for many. As an AP headline bluntly put it, “‘One Mississippi’ replaces the state song that had racist roots.”
But it may be on the local level of Greenville that Azar has had the most impact. Eden Brent, with her usual generosity of spirit, enthuses about what Azar has built in their hometown. “He has this engagement with the Viking cruise lines,” she says. “So whenever Viking does the Memphis to New Orleans river cruise, they stop in Greenville, and Steve Azar hosts this performance and lunch. They bring passengers in, serve them lunch, and there’s a series of entertainers. Then Steve comes on, and they have a series of guest speakers who tell a little bit about the history of Greenville.”
“All along the riverways, you find more open-minded people, because they’re more accustomed to commerce and different things, different people coming in.” — Eden Brent
That show, Steve Azar’s Mississippi, can then be augmented with further excursions into the Delta, visiting B.B. King’s Blues Museum in nearby Indianola, learning about Delta agriculture, or seeing the Greenville Cypress Preserve. For Brent, the arrival of the Viking River Tours and their collaboration with Azar has been one of the city’s greatest new opportunities, reveling in the diversity a port town can attract, built on the formidable musical legacy of the city.
“I believe they set an example that a lot of the rest of the citizens like myself have tried to follow: to make Greenville an interesting place, to be open-minded and welcoming,” she says. “I think people have the same thing in Memphis. All along the riverways, you find more open-minded people, because they’re more accustomed to commerce and different things, different people coming in. So that aspect of it has made it exceptional, I think, and far against the grain of the old stereotypes.”
photograph by rory doyle
Eden Brent says her time with local maestros helped take her music around the world.
While You’re in Greenville
STAY:
• The Belmont 1857 Bed & Breakfast
• Hotel 27
DINE:
DO:
• Museum of the Mississippi Delta
• Birthplace of Kermit the Frog (we’re serious!)
