We were taught a lot more about the blues at Delta State University than I learned, that I can say for sure.
In Mississippi itself, we heard a lot about the dolor and the dollar. Sharecroppers lived on and worked miles of cotton, with no outlet for their fatigue and loneliness, their pain and isolation, save blues on Saturday nights and church on Sundays, though it also sounds like both of these sites were gendered--not strictly, but in the locus and tone of authority. We learned about juke joints in improvised structures that dotted the plantations, and on the bus, every once in a while we were told that if we followed that bend in the river and turned left at that stand of trees and went on a ways, you'd get to a place with open doors on Saturday nights. At Dockery Plantation, we learned how one of the first bluesmen, Charley Patton, made a fortune playing at the Dockery store for free and then on Saturdays setting up at the "frolic" house on the other side of a narrow bridge over what was essentially a moat, guaranteeing money was collected from everyone.
A bunch of us went to a couple of the urban juke joints in Clarksdale--Ground Zero, owned by Morgan Freeman, and the much more dilapidated and intimate one owned by Red Paden. Dancing at Red's was so close, in fact, that I spent a bunch of the time dancing with my eyes on the ground, because I was dancing over the lead guitarist's mic stand. I also had a nice dance with his wife or girlfriend.
Probably the experience that kept coming back to us was Po' Monkey's joint. Po' Monkey died in 2016, but his "lounge" is still there, ugly and picturesque poverty porn for northerners, showing up on the cover of Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta and on a feature video of Good Morning America. Several of us went to Merigold to the third annual juke joint festival held in his honor. There we met his son, who would surely like to open the lounge again, but it's boarded up and belongs to someone else, and we met Larry Grimes, a character we heard about on the bus. He told me but mostly the three women I was with a lot of uncomfortable jokes, showed us some very rare coins he keeps on his person at all times, like a Booker T Washington silver dollar, did some magic, and spoke very fondly of his best friend, Po' Monkey, told us about his Vietnam war gut wound and military pension and his art--some of which is outside the juke joint but he fenced it in after someone drove over it. He told Caroline, I'm going to whisper something in your ear. Don't worry. It's nothing dirty. Here it is. I've got two baby dolls in my truck. They got penises. They're worth $300 each. And he told both Caroline and Lizandaa that he was kin to their husbands because now he was their husband-in-law. But he also spoke about Red with so much tenderness, how the first day he showed up, Red didn't let him pay, and he came every opening ever after, every single one, and Red never let him pay. He was always there.
I started with a text by white folklorist, William Ferris, in a book I later saw all over the gift shops in Mississippi and Tennessee--Give My Heart Ease. I appreciated what he gathered there, and I tried to listen to the accompanying CD of voices he recorded on people's porches or living rooms or churches and prison yards. I had forgotten the folklorists' method: they try to preserve the rhythm, the context of the conversation, the vitality and dirt. In this case, from the mouths of many people, the well-deserved distrust of white people and the disposable nature of Black work and bodies became very vivid. And the absolute theft in sharecropping became very clear in one description of sitting across from a white man at a table piled with money the man knew would stay there, even after harvesting 45 acres of cotton, all the while the white man was apologizing and saying if he had only picked one more acre, he could have had some of that money. Many people spoke to how singing the blues was the only thing that raised their spirits in an unjust world. Ferris also drew the several connections between gospel and blues, and some of his speakers made that connection even more unifying: One said there was no difference at all, and you just had to change the "Oh, baby" to "Oh, God!" and there it is.
Blues and gospel both give voice to unrelenting hardship, and both gather the strength of community in harmony with each other; but blues express the sorrow and sometimes humor, and gospel provides that sorrow but also witness and hope.
In Mississippi itself, we heard a lot about the dolor and the dollar. Sharecroppers lived on and worked miles of cotton, with no outlet for their fatigue and loneliness, their pain and isolation, save blues on Saturday nights and church on Sundays, though it also sounds like both of these sites were gendered--not strictly, but in the locus and tone of authority. We learned about juke joints in improvised structures that dotted the plantations, and on the bus, every once in a while we were told that if we followed that bend in the river and turned left at that stand of trees and went on a ways, you'd get to a place with open doors on Saturday nights. At Dockery Plantation, we learned how one of the first bluesmen, Charley Patton, made a fortune playing at the Dockery store for free and then on Saturdays setting up at the "frolic" house on the other side of a narrow bridge over what was essentially a moat, guaranteeing money was collected from everyone.
We went to what our program insisted was the real crossroads where Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil.
We heard Muddy Water's nephew, Keith, play on the first night.
We heard Muddy Water's nephew, Keith, play on the first night.
We learned how the Great Migration affected the sound of the blues, getting just as industrial and electrified as Muddy Waters and BB King did themselves, ascending Highway 61 to Chicago.
We crawled to a slow and got in trouble outside of Parchman Farms, the notorious prison where so many of the heroes we'd read about ended up, and where a haunting rhythmic music of work gangs were several times recorded.
We had a visit from Bill Able, who said several times that he was not a blues scholar, though he spoke with more knowledge than anyone else I'd ever heard, and he demonstrated how little is needed for the many forms of blues, twanging out on electric guitars he'd made from driftwood and cigar boxes and sliding on single-string broom handles, because blues themselves are improvised from porches and wire and dirt.
Probably the experience that kept coming back to us was Po' Monkey's joint. Po' Monkey died in 2016, but his "lounge" is still there, ugly and picturesque poverty porn for northerners, showing up on the cover of Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta and on a feature video of Good Morning America. Several of us went to Merigold to the third annual juke joint festival held in his honor. There we met his son, who would surely like to open the lounge again, but it's boarded up and belongs to someone else, and we met Larry Grimes, a character we heard about on the bus. He told me but mostly the three women I was with a lot of uncomfortable jokes, showed us some very rare coins he keeps on his person at all times, like a Booker T Washington silver dollar, did some magic, and spoke very fondly of his best friend, Po' Monkey, told us about his Vietnam war gut wound and military pension and his art--some of which is outside the juke joint but he fenced it in after someone drove over it. He told Caroline, I'm going to whisper something in your ear. Don't worry. It's nothing dirty. Here it is. I've got two baby dolls in my truck. They got penises. They're worth $300 each. And he told both Caroline and Lizandaa that he was kin to their husbands because now he was their husband-in-law. But he also spoke about Red with so much tenderness, how the first day he showed up, Red didn't let him pay, and he came every opening ever after, every single one, and Red never let him pay. He was always there. |
| Rebecca, Po' Monkey's son, John, Sophia |
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| Caroline and Larry |
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