Return to the Roots

A drive through the Mississippi Delta blues.

by

The land was perfectly flat and level but it shimmered like the wing of a lighted dragonfly. It seemed strummed, as though it were an instrument and something had touched it. — “Delta Wedding” by Eudora Welty

A vast expanse of fields, edged here and there with the odd line of trees, frames any journey into the Delta. But the real draw for many travelers is the sonic territory of the blues, a music born in this land.

As I drive south through northwestern Mississippi, listening to Howlin’ Wolf, it does indeed feel, as Eudora Welty suggested, like the land itself is an instrument. Or a sounding board, its vast, flat expanse seeming to cry out for a howl to fill the emptiness, to reverberate and lend relief to the horizon. If the music of Appalachia teems with the cascading, tumbling notes of bluegrass, then the blues of the Mississippi Delta generates drones, as when the Wolf’s harp rings out with a single note while the band churns out chords behind him like a tractor plowing furrows.

Legions of blues innovators have made their way north from Mississippi to the Bluff City. So, from Memphis, I follow the birth of the blues in reverse: heading south from Second and Beale, until Second becomes Third, then further on until Third becomes Highway 61. If you really have the blues, you don’t even need to drive yourself. As Mississippi Fred McDowell sang,

Well, there some folks said them / Greyhound buses don’t run,

Lordy, some folks said them / Greyhound buses don’t run,

Just go to West Memphis, baby / Look down Highway 61.

As you roll through the countryside and towns, by bus or car, you’ll likely notice the blue plaques of the Mississippi Blues Trail, which tell the history of the blues in detail by way of marking great musicians’ birthplaces, burial sites, and other locations of significance. Download the app or view the website (MSBLUESTRAIL.ORG) for detailed information on the plaque locations. That’s also where you can view the short documentaries created just for the trail by Memphis filmmakers Robert Gordon and David Julian Leonard. Heading south on Highway 61, the first such plaque is just west of Walls, where the pioneering guitarist and composer Memphis Minnie is buried (see the feature in our June/July, 2020 issue). Anyone traveling through the Delta will find these plaques enriching the experience of nearly every place they visit.

Clarksdale

Travelers encounter the first Greyhound station south of Beale Street in Clarksdale, and there’s no better place to start, whether driving or riding. This is one small town that knows its history and its value. Don’t be rattled by a bit of rust on the marquee of the New Roxy Cinema, now a multi-purpose arts and cultural center, or the other signs of age throughout town. Most of Clarksdale is well-loved and ready to present its weathered history with pride. Banners saluting musical heroes with a connection to the area — including Clarksdale natives Sam Cooke, John Lee Hooker, and Ike Turner — dot the city’s Arts and Culture District.

That’s where the city’s major clearinghouse for blues lovers, the Cat Head shop, can be found. Owner/operator Roger Stolle is a one-man encyclopedia of local blues events, and the curator of the fine records, books, and folk art for sale. He’s also the current president of the Clarksdale/Coahoma County Tourism Commission.

“We know people are concerned about traveling during the pandemic,” he says. “That’s why our website, VISITCLARKSDALE.COM, asks the question, ‘Ready for a road trip?’ It puts the question on you. Safety is the top concern. And really, this town has a lot of open space; the pace is slow. You won’t feel crowded or pushed around. That’s why we’re going ahead with the annual Juke Joint Festival this April 15-18. Most of it will be outside, and there will be limited attendance for some events.”

There’s certainly plenty of space when I wander down the street to the Delta Blues Museum, a spacious new building next to the train tracks. On this weekday afternoon, I have the place to myself, ideal for taking my time with all the displays, culminating in the exhibit on Muddy Waters. His former home, a cypress log cabin from the Stovall Plantation outside of town, has been moved and reassembled here. Next to it sits a green 1939 Ford Deluxe, complete with vintage recording gear in the trunk, just like the one John Works and Alan Lomax drove when they pulled up to the cabin and made the first recordings of the young bluesman. For a moment, I’m transported to a time when musical stardom was only a gleam in Waters’ eye after a hard day in the fields.

You can still walk those fields, northwest of town, where Stovall Farms can still be seen today; a Mississippi Blues Trail plaque marks where Waters’ cabin once stood. Thirteen acts from multiple genres can be heard ringing across the landscape this October 1-2, when the Mighty Roots Music Festival goes down.

Clarksdale is a hotbed of living music, not just memories, and that’s especially so in non-pandemic times, when clubs and more festivals light up the nights. For now, I content myself with the live blues available every day on VISITCLARKSDALE.COM, as I turn around and head southeast on Highway 49. Its entire route is described in the song of the same name, featured on the 1962 album Blues on Highway 49, “featuring Big Joe Williams and his Nine-String Guitar.

Greenwood

As it turns out, I don’t need Big Joe’s guidance: I head straight for Greenwood, which serves as my home base on this Delta pilgrimage. Searching for accommodations, it’s hard to resist the allure of The Alluvian, a boutique hotel and spa in the heart of Greenwood’s historic downtown. With sumptuous modernist decor offset with vintage photos along the halls, it feels like the past, present, and future all coexist comfortably here.

That’s also true of The Alluvian’s neighbor across the street, the Viking Cooking School. One of Greenwood’s success stories, Viking Range Corporation is known for its top-of-the-line ranges and refrigerators. Viking opened The Alluvian in 2003, leading to a symbiosis between the cooking school, the hotel, and its associated restaurant, Giardina’s.

For my repast, I opt for the fare at Fan and Johnny’s, a newer restaurant created by James Beard Award-nominated chef Taylor Bowen Ricketts. Her offerings, centered on specials that change daily, deftly blend the traditional and the innovative, as with the black-eyed pea cakes and remoulade appetizer, or the sublime Creole crawfish and cauliflower gnocchi entree.

As always, I am mostly hungry for more music history. Greenwood has many Blues Trail plaques, including one near the birthplace of the galvanizing Hubert Sumlin, erstwhile member of Howlin’ Wolf’s band, and named among the world’s 100 greatest guitarists by Rolling Stone. But the holy grail of blues sites is the grave of Robert Johnson, the brilliant and otherworldly songwriter, guitarist, and singer.

For decades, the location of his gravesite was disputed, until evidence accumulated (notably the eyewitness account of Johnson’s burial by Rose Eskridge, the gravedigger’s wife) indicating that Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church was the most likely place. It’s in the countryside near Greenwood, on the banks of the Tallahatchie River off County Road 518, where a lovingly crafted stone marks the spot near a pecan tree, surrounded by flowers, liquor bottles, and other offerings. One can contribute to the church’s upkeep of the grave in a small donation box nearby.

Out in the cemetery, alone, as the burning orange sun settled into the murky air of the Tallahatchie, those flat fields surrounding me seem to sing more than ever. The spare, haunting guitar lines from Johnson’s records come to me, and the space around the notes could have well been the landscape itself, an indelible part of the music. Words from Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues” came to me:

You may bury my body, down by the highway side.

(Baby, I don’t care where you bury my body when I’m dead and gone.)

You may bury my body, ooh, down by the highway side.

So my old evil spirit, can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.

Indianola

I could stay a long time in Greenwood, but the Museum of the Mississippi Delta is open by appointment only, and there is more musical history to discover. And so I head west the next day, down the B.B. King Memorial Highway to Sunflower County. “We Buy Pecans,” roadside signs announce. “Pecans Ahead.” Not far down the road is Indianola, where King spent many formative years before his career took off, and where his life story is honored at the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center.

Built in 2008, the museum nonetheless has some antique charm, thanks to the 100-year-old cotton gin that’s incorporated into the design. King worked here for a time, and later, would occasionally play the building’s grounds as a kind of homecoming, well before the museum came to be. Now the gin boasts a stage and can be rented for events; pre-covid-19, visitors could often experience live music here.

I begin my journey through the museum proper in the screening room, which lays out the story of King’s career. Moving on to the exhibits, that story comes vividly to life through artifacts from waypoints in the B.B. King story. One kiosk plays old jazz “soundies” — short musical films predating World War II — with the star noting that they “just made little Riley B. King go crazy!”

Naturally, a long section of the exhibit focuses on Memphis, including his early sponsor, Pep-ti-kon Tonic, which helped make him a local star on WDIA. And one can see many versions of “Lucille,” his name for the line of Gibson guitars he favored. Towards the end is a large display of his dozen Grammy Awards, though one is missing. A note on the pedestal notes that it’s temporarily housed at the Grammy Museum in Cleveland, just a few miles to the north.

Cleveland

And so, heading to Cleveland, I rejoin Highway 61 on the last leg of my journey through the Delta, which is circling back to Memphis in more ways than one. It is also expanding to encompass all recorded music. If you’re surprised that the only museum for the Grammy Awards outside of Los Angeles is in Mississippi, you shouldn’t be. According to the Jackson Free Press, Mississippi can claim more Grammy winners than any other state. And given the importance of the blues to all forms of popular music today, this location makes perfect sense.

The grand opening in 2016 was made all the more glorious by the building itself, looming over the crowd and bands that filled the greenspace spreading out before it. The architecture of the place strikes me first, with an open, sunlit lobby that seems as wide as the Delta itself. Walking past portraits of the most recent Grammy winners, I enter the more intimate space of the exhibits. As with all the museums I visit on this trip, I am the only one there, making for a rather safe pandemic excursion.

Being a member of the Recording Academy, the multi-chapter organization that created the Grammy Awards, I must admit to getting choked up at the sweep of history that the awards represent, even if they skew more to the commercial side of music than my own taste. Something about the Academy’s persistence through time, representing the power of music through generations, tugs at my sentimentality. It is positively gripping, then, to see the Grammy borrowed from the B.B. King Museum, for the Best R&B Vocal Performance of 1970, “The Thrill Is Gone.”

Then, turning a corner, I come face to face with Memphis in the museum’s current exhibit: “Willie Mitchell and the Music of Royal Studios.” There, nestled among the permanent displays of American music’s greatest artists, are the names that most Memphians hold dear. Here is a 45 on the Home of the Blues label from 1961, “Willie’s House Party,” an early indication of the greatness that Mississippi native Willie Mitchell, then a band leader, would represent as he later became a studio- and label-owner, and eventually a producer of global hits by Al Green, Ann Peebles, and others. The same label from the early ’60s, the caption notes, also featured Don Bryant, who, now enjoying a career renaissance, has been nominated for a 2020 Grammy.

There, further along, is the weathered mixing board that all of Green’s hits were mixed on, and the cherished “Microphone #9” through which he recorded his vocals (still used in projects today). Here are the bizarre “electronic bongos/congas” that supplied the disarming synthetic drum sound featured on Peebles’ 1973 hit, “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” written by Bryant.

The exhibit’s end celebrates the achievements of Lawrence “Boo” Mitchell, the studio’s current owner/operator, raised at Willie’s side in the studio — including a Record of the Year Grammy Award for his contribution to Bruno Mars’ Uptown Funk album, recorded at Royal.

In a video documentary accompanying the exhibit, Boo speaks of the importance of having a Grammy Museum in a region that’s so important to popular music, and of the museum’s “huge role in getting young people exposed to the music, with Delta State being right here on the campus.” Indeed, Delta State University’s tradition of music education was one reason Cleveland was selected to host the museum.

Further through the museum, another ongoing exhibit, “Stronger Together: The Power of Women in Country Music,” salutes that genre as a vehicle for women’s self-expression. An entire room is devoted to the musical greats of Mississippi, across all genres. It’s a fitting capstone to this journey through the Delta. Just as the blues was a foundation on which so much popular music was built, my deep dive into blues history culminates in a celebration of music’s full flowering from the Delta’s rich soil.

Back on Highway 61, driving into Memphis, I feel the same thrill as more than a century’s worth of musicians as they sought their fortune in the Bluff City, leaving the Delta’s countryside in the rearview mirror. And yet, having soaked up the magic of that landscape, I can also sense the ways that Mississippi stayed with them — the wind howling over the flattened fields, the incandescent sun sinking in the west, with a long, soulful note ringing out low.

Tunica

More than one plaque on the Mississippi Blues Trail is dedicated to Highway 61, the road that looms so large in the mythology of the Delta blues. The first you’ll encounter after leaving Memphis sits on the north edge of Tunica, a prime destination for every casino-hopper who’s feeling lucky. But this marker is special — it has a museum all to itself.

Housed in in a restored train depot that dates back to 1895, the Gateway to the Blues Museum and Visitors Center is an impressive portal to the musical world that awaits southbound travelers. The permanent exhibits include W.C. Handy’s first cornet and displays tracing the evolution of the guitar. Interactive stations teach you how to play the lap steel and the diddley bow. The visitors’ center offers detailed guidance to other attractions in Tunica, including the Blues Trail markers for Eddie James “Son” House and James Cotton.

And then there are the casinos. Yes, they are open, albeit with special measures to ensure the safety of all. For starters, they have “scrubbed every square inch of felt, leather, and neon.” The casinos are operating at 50 percent capacity, seating areas have been reconfigured for social distancing, and plexiglass barriers separate dealers and gamers. Masks are required except when drinking or eating.

Why not try your hand at the gaming tables? You know, just once ... or a few times. Clarksdale native John Lee Hooker once sang about “Jack o’ Diamonds,” and you can, too. Just repeat these words:

Put your Jack against the Queen,

It will turn your money green.

Jack of Diamonds is a hard card to play.

TUNICA CASINOS

1st Jackpot

1450 Jackpot Blvd.

Fitz

711 Lucky Lane

Gold Strike

1010 Casino Center Drive

Hollywood

1150 Casino Strip Resort Blvd.

Horseshoe

1021 Casino Center Drive

Sam’s Town

1477 Casino Strip Resort Blvd.